Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 156. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 11

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon talks about the rising popularity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how, with greater visibility comes greater threat. We follow Dr. King as he and his comrades persevere through bombings, arrests, scathing rumors, wiretaps, and assassination attempts. Who was one of Dr. King’s biggest adversaries? If you’ve been following along since the beginning of the series, it may not surprise you to know it was J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Dubbing him the most dangerous man in the country, they often used underhanded tactics to spy on King, discredit his authority, and sway public opinion. It didn’t work as well as they hoped, and King continued to organize, act, and inspire people to join the fight for Civil Rights. Through it all, King championed the redemptive power of nonviolence, a message that was a stark contrast to the brutality being inflicted upon Black Americans in the South. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the 11th installment of our special series called Momentum, where we explore the lives and actions of ordinary Americans during their struggle for freedom in the civil rights era. Before we dive in, I want to issue a content warning. Today's episode tackles topics that you may want to listen to outside the range of small children. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I mentioned in my last episode that in early 1956, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was bombed about a month into the ongoing bus boycott. At the time of the bombing, Dr. King's wife, Coretta, his seven-week-old daughter, Yolanda, and a neighbor, Mary Lucy Williams, were inside together. The front of the

home was damaged, but thankfully the women and baby Yolanda were not injured. The Kings were relatively new to Montgomery, having moved there just less than two years earlier. And I know we often carry this image of a refined, middle-aged Dr. King in our minds. But imagine for me, if you can, a younger Dr. King, at the very beginning of his role in Montgomery activism. King was 25 years old when he arrived there. And he was there to be a pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a block and a half away from the parsonage they took up residence in. The night of the bombing, Reverend King was speaking at a meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association. He was

speaking at the church of Reverend Ralph Abernathy when he was told what had happened. Can you imagine the immediate dread and fear he must have felt for his family, knowing that his home had just been bombed? He rushed home to find a gaping hole in his front porch, the windows blown out, and the floorboards in shreds. He also found that an angry crowd, many of them his church parishioners, had gathered outside. Some brought weapons. Many were prepared to take action in his defense. The crowd parted and cheered his arrival. After he confirmed that his family was safe, he addressed the crowd who waited to hear his plan, but he stressed the need for nonviolence.

If you have weapons, he told them, take them home. If you do not have them, please do not seek them. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Go home and don't worry. We are not hurt. And remember, if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place. The crowd, though perhaps they were shaken, frustrated, upset, angry, went home peacefully. Despite the mayor and the police commissioner's promise that the bombing would be fully investigated, ultimately, nobody was ever convicted. In fact, less than 48 hours later, another bomb exploded in the early Alabama morning. The home belonged to a man named Edgar Daniel Nixon. He often went by E.D. Nixon.

He was a longtime organizer and activist in Montgomery. He was president of the local chapter of the NAACP, the Montgomery Welfare League, and the Montgomery Voters League. Martin Luther King Jr. described Nixon as one of the chief voices of the Negro community in the area of civil rights and a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of the long-oppressed people of the state of Alabama. It was Nixon who shared his labor and civil rights contacts with the newly formed MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association. As the treasurer of the MIA, it was his job to organize all the financial resources that helped manage and support the Montgomery bus boycott, and his actions were crucial to the boycott's success. So on February 1st, a bomb exploded in Nixon's yard.

E.D. Nixon and his wife Arlette were uninjured. And this incident received much less attention than the bombing at Reverend King's home. No suspects were ever named in the crime. And bombings like this would persist throughout the duration of the boycott. Like in 1956, when sticks of dynamite were thrown into the yard of the boycott, like in 1956 when sticks of dynamite were thrown into the yard of Reverend Robert Graetz, who was a white minister, but he led a mostly black congregation at Trinity Lutheran Church, and he was a member of the MIA. After the bombing of Pastor Graetz's home, the mayor of Montgomery, William Gale, again failing

to do anything at all about the violence, went so far as to accuse the MIA of being behind the bombings. He publicly alleged that it was an inside job and he said it was a publicity stunt to build up interest in their campaign. I mentioned to you before that 89 people were indicted for their roles in the Montgomery bus boycott, and only one was prosecuted, and that one person was Martin Luther King. was Martin Luther King. The county of Montgomery claimed that he violated a 1921 statute that outlawed boycotts against businesses. So after a four-day trial, he had eight lawyers representing him, including one of the attorneys I mentioned previously, Fred Gray. And one of the things his attorneys did was present the evils of bus segregation. They presented evidence of the abuse that Black citizens had suffered for years at the hands of Montgomery bus drivers. 31 separate witnesses testified about the harassment

that they had suffered riding the buses. One woman named Stella Brooks said that she had stopped riding buses in 1950 after her husband was killed by the Montgomery police. And according to her, her husband had been shot after demanding a refund from a bus driver with whom he was having a disagreement. On the final day of the trial, King was found guilty. They fined him $500 plus an additional $500 in court costs. The boycott persevered, and as we know, after its success, the MIA continued to serve the community of Montgomery by setting up voter registration drives and hosting workshops on effective nonviolent protest methods. And when Martin Luther King was arrested again in September of 1958, E.D. Nixon applauded him.

He said, because of your courage in face of known danger, I want to commend you for your stand for the people of color all over the world, and especially the people in Montgomery. Your action took the fear out of the Negroes and made the white man see himself as he is. And so what prompted King's arrest on that early fall afternoon? Loitering. It wasn't his first arrest, which had been made during the bus boycotts, nor would it be his last. But it was one arrest in an ongoing series of arrests on trumped-up charges. arrests on trumped-up charges. The Reverend Dr. King was being relentlessly watched, pursued, and discredited by the FBI. We now think of him as this unflappable icon of the civil rights movement, but during his lifetime, his reputation was much less stellar. We now have

t-shirts of his face and posters of him in our classrooms. We now hold him up as a bastion of freedom and peace. But that was not what many Americans thought of him at the time. He was not widely liked the way he is now. So rumors, many of which were started by the FBI, were relentlessly spread to damage his credibility as a leader. The FBI had initially began monitoring him under a program called the Racial Matters Program, which focused on individuals and organizations that were involved in racial politics. But it wasn't long before Martin Luther King, like many other well-known civil rights activists, was suspected of associating with members of the Communist Party. Remember, being labeled a communist was like the death knell of your career.

It was something that would make it so you could never be hired. You couldn't speak on stages. Having the word communist associated with your name was a very bad thing in 1950s America. And so you might be surprised to know that in fact, Martin Luther King did associate or consult with some members of the Communist Party. One of his closest advisors, who was a Jewish attorney named Stanley Levison, he maintained pretty close relationship to the Communist Party. In the early 1950s even, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI recognized Stanley Levison as a major financial coordinator for the Communist Party. Levison was very outspoken about many different causes. He raised funds to support the defense of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the FBI began to monitor Levison's activities.

And so in 1956, Levison turned his financial support to the Montgomery bus boycott. He and King became acquainted and they developed a close relationship and Levison advised him on legal issues. Levison was questioned by the FBI twice, once on February 9th and once again on March 4th of 1960, even though the FBI's own files reported that his ties with the Communist Party ended years prior. He was later subpoenaed and required to testify in front of Congress. His testimony is still mostly classified. is still mostly classified. Despite all of that, the FBI used his earlier communist history to justify placing wiretaps and bugs in both Levison's office and the offices and hotel rooms of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that Levison would use King to further the communist agenda in the United States and stir up political unrest. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me?

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to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. King's second charge with the crime came in February of 1960, when a grand jury issued a warrant for his arrest on two counts of felony perjury. The state of Alabama said that he had signed fraudulent tax returns in 1956 and 1958. They had audited his finances and found that he had not reported funds that he received on behalf of the MIA and also the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They said he owed them $1,700. And so in late February, a group of his supporters met at the home of a singer named Harry Belafonte. We will talk more about Harry Belafonte later, but they formed the committee to defend Martin Luther King.

The committee used press releases denouncing the charges, saying that this is a gross misrepresentation of the facts because his income had never even approached the amount that the Alabama officials claimed he received. He was still put on trial and his attorneys were very effective at poking holes in the prosecution's case. Martin Luther King testified in his own defense. He said that the tax examiner had revealed that he was put under pressure by supervisors to find faults with King's returns. And so after a four-hour deliberation, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty. And King said afterward, this represents to my mind great hope. And it reveals that on so many occasions, there are hundreds and thousands of people,

white people of goodwill in the South. In 1963, two days after King delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech during the March on Washington, William Sullivan, who was the FBI's Director of Intelligence, responded to King's speech by writing, We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation. Negro of the future in this nation. From the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security, the FBI believed he was dangerous and they wanted to mark him as such. In December of that same year, the FBI's domestic intelligence division had a major planning session. The purpose, had a major planning session. The purpose, according to the memo written the next day, was to neutralize King's work. And it read in part, recognizing the delicacy of this entire situation because of the prominence of King. The primary purpose of the conference was to explore how to best carry on our investigation to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the

Bureau. So notice that they set out with an investigation to produce the desired results. A week later, King was on the cover of Time magazine as man of the year. And J. Edgar Hoover wrote a note on the memo that said they had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one. But this wasn't the first time that King had been featured on the cover of Time. The first one was in 1957, immediately after the Montgomery bus boycott, at a time when he and other activists like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker began planting the seeds for a new organization. I referenced them earlier, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We have a whole episode coming up devoted to the role of religion in the civil rights movement.

In January of 57, on the heels of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker invited several dozen black ministers to meet at the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta. They wanted to form an organization of church leaders that would coordinate nonviolent initiatives to desegregate bus systems across southern states. After a series of meetings in Atlanta and New Orleans, the group came up with their name, the was to focus beyond desegregating public transportation and supporting the end of all forms of segregation. The SCLC elected Dr. King as its first president and set up a little office in Atlanta. Ella Baker became their first paid staff member. Ella Baker became their first paid staff member.

She was not a novice. She graduated from a university in 1930, and she had been heavily influenced by the stories that her grandmother, who was enslaved, had told her. She began a 50-year career in grassroots activism. began a 50-year career in grassroots activism. She joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, which was designed to grow Black economic power through collective community-oriented planning. She was involved in many women's organizations, committed herself to working for economic justice. And one of the things she was famous for saying was, people cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job. She became a member of the NAACP in 1940, and she worked her way up from field secretary to the director of several branches. And so when the

NAACP wanted to expand upon its success in Montgomery, Alabama, she was well poised to run that recording the goings-on of the organization would provide evidence of communism in the civil rights movement. That proved fruitless. But instead, it did provide the FBI with something else they considered extremely valuable. Evidence of King's extramarital affairs. And with this evidence of his affairs, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI immediately shifted their campaign against King from trying to portray him as a communist to trying to demonstrate his moral failings. The FBI already had a long and sordid history of persecuting Black Americans and others considered by Hoover to be subversives under dubious charges. For decades, they had been

dubious charges. For decades, they had been selectively enforcing the Mann Act, which is M-A-N-N, and that's a 1910 law that aimed to stop the interstate transportation of a woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or other immoral purposes. And they often abused this law by prosecuting Black men for traveling across state lines with white women. Like one example of that is when the FBI accused a boxer named Jack Johnson, who was African American. He was very successful. He held the world heavyweight title. They accused him of violating the Mann Act. This crime was allegedly kidnapping a white woman, but they were actually in a relationship and got married very shortly after that FBI encounter. One of the things the FBI agents regularly collected were what they considered to be obscene materials. And these materials were then deposited in an obscene

file that contained thousands of books, photographs, letters, and films. And they were used to blackmail people. And we know that J. Edgar Hoover was regularly updating his personal and confidential files of prominent public figures and leaders and presidents and members of Congress and Supreme Court justices. However, the FBI wasn't sure how to go about circulating the information they had about King's affairs without also raising questions about why they were bugging his hotel rooms in the first place. Remember, they did not want to embarrass the Bureau. One of the assistant directors thought that the tapes should be destroyed, but J. Edgar Hoover overruled him. He was determined to use the tapes to smear King's credibility as a moral leader of the

civil rights movement. Because on November 21st, 1964, a package with a letter and a tape recording, allegedly of King's sexual indiscretions, was delivered to King's wife, Coretta Scott King. And a second copy was sent to King himself. The letter was anonymously written, but the Kings immediately suspected the FBI. Coretta dismissed the tapes. She said, I couldn't make much out of it. It was just a lot of mumbo jumbo. And the letter was vague, but King interpreted it as advocating that he commit suicide. Parts of the letter read things like, King, like all frauds, your end is approaching. You, even at an early age, have turned out to not be a leader, but a dissolute, abnormal, moral imbecile. And there is only one thing left for you to do, and you know what it is.

and you know what it is. You have just 34 days. You're done. There is but one way out for you. King later said at the package that there was no question in our minds that this material was coming from the FBI because few people had the capability of bugging hotel rooms, except for them. The FBI persisted and continued to bug his hotel rooms for three more years. They periodically sent memos to the Attorney General about the results of their recordings, including both political and sexual topics. But they never released the tapes to anyone outside of the Kings. Not to the public, not to the Attorney General, because doing so may have generated the same suspicions raised by the ones sent to King, that the tapes were doctored or manufactured by the FBI. The tapes still exist, by the FBI. The tapes still exist, by the way. When J. Edgar Hoover died, his secretary destroyed all of his personal and confidential files that he kept on public officials and celebrities.

The acting director of the Bureau incorporated their official and confidential files into the FBI's central record system. And some of King's files were part of the official records, so they were not destroyed and they were transferred to the National Archives in 2005. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference went to court to try to get the files and the transcripts destroyed. The judge in the case rejected the request and instead ordered them sealed for 50 years until 2027. In 1975, a copy of the suicide letter was discovered in the work files of William Sullivan, the same one who proclaimed in 1963 that the FBI had to mark him as the most dangerous Negro in the nation. Let's return for a moment to the 1950s, when the FBI's bugging tactics had not yet been used, and law enforcement relied on things like arrests to disrupt the work of King

and other civil rights leaders. On September 3rd of 1958, Martin Luther King arrived at the courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama to attend the arraignment of a man who had been accused of assaulting King's friend, Reverend Abernathy. But King was barred from entering the courtroom by two policemen. When he told them that he would wait outside instead, the officers, who may or may not have known who he was, arrested him and pulled his arms back behind his back and roughly escorted him to a police booking station. A photojournalist by the name of Charles Moore was there with his camera, and he captured the arrest in a series of photos that went on to run in Life magazine and newspapers across the country. Years later, Moore said of that afternoon, I didn't know at the time that my pictures might make a difference, but I knew this man would make a difference.

Moore himself did make a difference through his photojournalism. The photo he took of King's arrest that day became a catalyst for his many years of involvement in documenting the civil rights movement. In his younger years, he had been raised in Alabama. He'd been in the military. He was a boxer. But in a 2005 documentary, he said of his preference for taking photographs, I don't want to fight with my fists. I want to fight with my camera. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Moore and his partner, who was a Life magazine staff writer, his name was Michael Durham, documented the struggles and successes, the name was Michael Durham, documented the struggles

and successes, the violence, the tear gas, the speeches, the demonstrations, and the passion of the civil rights movement. After King had been arrested for loitering, he was detained for 15 minutes before being released on a $100 bond. Two weeks later, he went on a tour to promote his first book, which was called Stride Toward Freedom, that had recently been published. During a book signing at a department store in New York, someone attempted to assassinate him. Izola Curry, who was a woman who worked much of her life as a housekeeper in New York City approached him in a Harlem department store and said, are you Martin Luther King Jr.? And when he replied that he was, she stabbed him in the chest with a steel letter opener. She was immediately restrained by an onlooker while another one of them attended to Dr. King looking to pull the letter opener out

of his chest, but two other police officers who were nearby knew it would be bad to pull the letter opener out of his chest, but two other police officers who were nearby knew it would be bad to remove the blade. So they called the hospital to coordinate with doctors how to get him out of there without risking bumping or removing the letter opener. King was eventually required to have surgery to have the blade removed, and he later wrote in his autobiography that the razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta, and my whole chest had to be opened to extract it. If you had sneezed at all during those hours of waiting, his doctor said, your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood. While he was recovering in the hospital, he issued a press release that peaceful responses to brutality was in stark contrast to the violence that ravaged Black communities in Southern states. Join me next time when we return to 1955 and a lynching that King mourned in a sermon to his Dexter Avenue parishioners

The king mourned in a sermon to his Dexter Avenue parishioners as one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century. I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and

Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.