Documents: FBI Kept Tabs on Coretta Scott King

Aug 30, 07:04 PM

Current Headlines: By Paul Meyer, The Dallas Morning News

Aug. 30--FBI agents secretly monitored Coretta Scott King's activities and conversations for years after her husband's assassination in 1968, according to hundreds of pages of newly released documents.

The records, obtained by Houston television station KHOU and made available for review Thursday by The Dallas Morning News, reveal ongoing government anxiety about Mrs. King's anti-war activism and her relationship with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s former friends and advisers.

After Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, Tenn., the widow spent decades as a symbol of the civil rights movement before her death last year at age 78. Her activities included lobbying for nonviolent social change and speaking out against the Vietnam War, gun violence and capital punishment.

The intelligence reports, including documents unclassified only after Mrs. King's death, focus in large part on her relationship with Stanley Levison, a close adviser to Dr. King and a person the government long suspected was a communist.

David Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history Bearing the Cross, said the government kept a listening device on Mr. Levison's phone until 1972.

Mr. Garrow said he believes officials had only a minor interest in Mrs. King's independent activities and that monitoring of her was largely an extension of the well-publicized spying on her husband.

"The electronic surveillance of Dr. King is probably without a doubt the most infamous electronic surveillance in American history because of how it came to be targeted on his private life," the historian said Thursday.

Rules to curtail domestic spying were put in place in the 1970s after news that the FBI had looked in on a number of high-profile Americans, including Dr. King, members of the Black Panthers and war critics.

The newly released records indicate that government agents tracked Mrs. King's domestic and international travel into the early 1970s, focusing on her association with left-leaning people and organizations.

But the reports also shed light on government interest in Mrs. King's private life after rumors of her husband's infidelities in the early 1960s.

One report cites a 1964 letter "that there was some indication that Coretta King might have been carrying on an illicit affair, thus accounting for her apparent condoning of the acts of her husband, Martin Luther King, Jr."

In 1970, government intelligence suggested that Mrs. King was romantically involved with Harry Wachtel, her lawyer, according to documents declassified last year.

"I would think there's no chance of that," Mr. Garrow said.

The 485 pages released this week also highlight Mrs. King's concern about her image and the preservation of her husband's legacy. In one recorded conversation, Mrs. King is reported to have told Mr. Levison about how she perceived her new role.

"Comparing her situation with that of Jackie Kennedy, Coretta commented that she believes many people see that her life was not the same, that people understand how she was 'in the picture' and have now given her a mandate that she must remain 'in the picture,' " according to the report.

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