Edward Snowden on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1368
SUBJECT: HISTORY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
The FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself before the Nobel Prize was going to be awarded. In fact, after MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech, two days later, the FBI classified him as the greatest national security threat in the United States.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Declassified FBI records and the documentary 'MLK/FBI' confirm the Bureau conducted extensive surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., including wiretaps and bugged hotel rooms, as part of a campaign to discredit and destroy him. Two days after King's August 28, 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech, FBI official William Sullivan sent an urgent internal memo (dated August 30, 1963) declaring King 'the most dangerous Negro in America' and calling for using every resource to destroy him; this two-day timing is accurate, though Snowden's specific phrase 'greatest national security threat' is a paraphrase rather than a verbatim quote of that memo. Separately, the FBI is documented to have anonymously sent King a package with a letter and surveillance tapes suggesting he kill himself, an episode tied by reporting on the documentary to the broader campaign against King during the period spanning his 1963 speech and his December 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. The cited sources do not pin down the exact date of the suicide letter, so the claim that it arrived specifically 'before the Nobel Prize' cannot be verified as precisely as stated, though it is consistent with the documented timeline of escalating FBI harassment during that window. Overall, the surveillance campaign, the 'most dangerous' designation two days after the speech, and the existence of a suicide-suggesting letter are all well documented; only the precise dating of the letter relative to the Nobel Prize goes beyond what these sources confirm.