‘Your Concern About Communism is Understandable’: Letters to the FBI About MLK, 50 Years Later
Civil rights demonstrators, led by Dr Martin Luther King (5th R), civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy (5th L), John Lewis (3rd L) and other civil and religious leaders, make their way from Selma to Montgomery on March 22, 1965 in Alabama, on the third leg of the Selma to Montgomery marches.
AFP/Getty ImagesAva DuVernay's Selma uses a fitting and clever trick to escape the biopic's problem of getting bogged down in exposition. Whenever the scene changes, or the date moves ahead, quotes from the FBI's monitoring of Martin Luther King Jr. are typed out on the screen. It's a subtle reminder that before King was martyred and memorialized, he was under constant surveillance. The movie's less subtle reminders of this–a scene in which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tells President Lyndon B. Johnson about his monitoring of King, and a scene in which a harassing phone caller plays a tape of one of King's affairs–have come under fire from the people who viewed the movie as unfair to Johnson.
That's distracted from the point of the FBI scenes. Luckily, anyone who clicks over to Archive.org can download troves of FOIA'd FBI documents about King, everything from internal memos to letters sent to Hoover to letters Hoover sent back. Reason's Jesse Walker, who writes that it's "important to recall how dangerous many people considered the civil rights leader when he was alive," linked to a few of the correspondences on Monday, noting that the FBI gave polite pro forma responses.