NPR: Developing: Inside Coretta Scott King's FBI File

Developing: Inside Coretta Scott King's FBI File

Coretta Scott King photographed in February 1970.

Keystone/Getty Images

KHOU-TV, Houston's CBS affiliate, has an exclusive report on the FBI's surveillance of Coretta Scott King under then director J. Edgar Hoover. According to the article, "the FBI very closely spied and did surveillance on Scott King for years, keeping close track of her public appearances, speeches and especially anytime she traveled."

Some highlights:

-- "Even after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the FBI's Scott King file shows the Bureau actually intensified their spying and surveillance of the new widow."

-- "Far more invasive was the Bureau's interception of private letters she had written."

-- "Government officials were afraid that she might try to complete what her husband had been doing when he died: 'attempt to tie the anti-Vietnam war movement to the civil rights movement,' as one FBI agent put it."

-- "Other reports also show the White House being in the loop on this surveillance."

-- "But perhaps the most disturbing single document in the Scott King file is a March 1969 report from the FBI's Atlanta office to Hoover. The subject was the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, MLK's No. 2 man, and the then-new president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the spearhead organization for the civil rights movement."

We'll address this story on tomorrow's reporters' roundtable.

In the meantime, read the full article and select FBI documents, and share your thoughts below. Are you surprised by this report? What strikes you most about the nature of the government's surveillance?

Geoffrey Bennett

7:28 PM ET | 08-30-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

This is an old story, and still going on during this current disaster of a war in Iraq. You don't have to be a 'criminal' to be an enemy of the state.

Sent by John Oliver Mason | 9:42 PM ET | 08-30-2007

I'm not too surprised. I mean, this is the same country that gave us COINTELPRO. But it is sad ... and confounding ... that the government would go to such great lengths to keep tabs on King's wife. Makes me wonder who they are surveilling these days.

Sent by Bob Kingston | 11:00 AM ET | 08-31-2007

I'll keep it short, because they may be watching me too, but I'm not surprised either. I don't put anything past our government, just look at how they are destroying the Constitution now with all of their illegal wiretapping, undercover surveillance of citizens' phone calls and the "Patriot" Act.
James
www.at33.blogspot.com

Sent by James | 12:33 PM ET | 08-31-2007

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