Back in 1975, historians discovered a strange letter sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, in which the agency threatened to spread gossip about King's sex life in the media "There is but one way out for you," the letter said, which King took as a suggestion of suicide. In the mid '60s, when they took a poll, J. Edgar Hoover was more popular than Dr. King. He ordered agents to focus on subversives in the country, and Congress helped pass laws that gave the FBI more breadth to do so. I would question the veracity of an anonymous, handwritten note on an FBI report, said Yale historian Glenda Gilmore, who has worked extensively with FBI reports on civil rights activists. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. This was one year shy of the arrival of the infamous letter. He "always thought there were 10-12 other women," he told The Times. And there's got to be someplace in some archive, in some files, some tape, where we will learn the actual truth. The FBI's secret audiotapes of Martin Luther King Jr., revealing the civil rights leader's adulteries, are at the heart of much of the controversy surrounding best picture nominee Selma. Later that year, agents anonymously shipped King "a 'highlight' recording of bugged sex groans and party jokes" along with a letter warning him: "You are done. Since 1977, attempts have been made to release the recordings in the United States Congress. However, Garrow's 1986 biography of King won the Pulitzer Prize, so his new material will be difficult to ignore. Yale historian Beverly Gage published a copy of it in The New York Times in 2014. David Garrow, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his laudatory 1987 biography of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., Bearing the Cross, is now exposing the contents of some FBI surveillance tapes that . Filled with personal insults, barely-veiled threats, and oddly moralistic lecturing, it paints a dark picture of its sender who appears to be encouraging King to kill himself. Again, Dyson comes to the leaders
