Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself (2014)

After Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, FBI intelligence chief William Sullivan labeled him a serious national-security threat. The bureau launched extensive surveillance, while FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pursued evidence of communist connections and sought to undermine King. The investigation did not establish that King was a communist, but it produced recordings of his extramarital sexual encounters. In 1964, Sullivan sent an anonymous letter to King’s home, accompanied by recordings prepared by FBI technicians; King’s wife opened the package.

The letter used the recordings to threaten public humiliation, portraying King as a fraud and warning that his honors, including the Nobel Prize, could not protect him. It adopted the voice of a fellow Black person to make the intimidation appear to come from within the Black community, but King and his advisers quickly suspected the FBI. Its most chilling demand gave King 34 days and implied that he should end his life. King did not yield. The episode exposes how surveillance was turned into a weapon of personal coercion: rather than simply monitoring a prominent civil-rights leader, the FBI tried to destroy his reputation and pressure him into suicide.