FBI Kept Tabs on Coretta Scott King, Documents Show

Aug 30, 10:40 PM

Current Headlines: HOUSTON _ FBI agents secretly monitored Coretta Scott King's activities and conversations for at least four years after her husband's assassination in 1968, according to hundreds of pages of documents released this week.

The records, obtained by Houston television station KHOU and made available for The Dallas Morning News to review Thursday, reveal government anxiety about Mrs. King's anti-war activism and her relationship with the 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-winning civil rights history Bearing the Cross, said the government kept a listening device on Levison's phone until 1972.

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.

Most of the documents regarding Mrs. King were unclassified in the early 1980s, with others made public in 2006 and 2007.

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, the Black Panthers and war critics.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter said Thursday that the documents reflect an era when "different concerns drove the government, the news media and public sentiment."

He added that under today's laws and guidelines, many investigations conducted in the past would not be initiated.

The Rev. Peter Johnson of Dallas, who marched with Dr. King through the South and worked with Mrs. King after her husband's death, said spying was an everyday reality for civil rights organizers. He said Mrs. King would often joke about the FBI eavesdropping on her phone conversations. Other times, Johnson said, civil rights leaders would plant rumors knowing the government was listening.

"She was constantly under surveillance. Most of us were during those years," Johnson said. "Everybody was under very serious surveillance. They had secret undercover people who followed us everywhere we went."

The newly released records indicate government agents, under leadership of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, tracked Mrs. King's domestic and international travel into the early 1970s, focusing on her association with left-leaning people and organizations.

One document, written only weeks after MLK was killed in April 1968, shows the government's concern about Mrs. King's relationship with Levison and says that a "discreet investigation" was being opened by the FBI's Atlanta office "to fulfill our responsibilities relative to the subversive influence in racial matters."

The FBI discontinued its investigation into Mrs. King's activities at the end of 1972, finding she had no affiliations with "extremist or subversive individuals or organizations."

In addition to concerns about possible influences on the civil rights movement, the government showed interest in Mrs. King's private life after rumors of her husband's infidelities in the early 1960s. One document 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."

Atlanta agents later advised that "they had received no indication" of any affair Mrs. King was having.

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 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.

D. Louise Cook, a former director of the King Center archives and museum that Mrs. King founded in 1968, said the civil rights leader had reviewed many of the FBI surveillance reports years ago.

Cook said that Mrs. King "felt the FBI was creating documents" and "that they were trying to discredit King in any way they could."

"She dismissed the veracity of some of the files," Cook recalled.

The files also contain later reports of FBI investigations into death threats made against Mrs. King, including threats by the Ku Klux Klan.

Isaac Newton Farris Jr., the Kings' nephew and current president and CEO of the King Center in Atlanta, said the surveillance his family endured resonates today as the nation debates warrantless wiretapping and counterterrorism intelligence measures.

"I think the lesson is for us to never go back to that," Mr. Farris said. "The lesson is that we do need Congressional oversight, that we do need to keep a sense of our civil liberties."

KHOU, which obtained the King files, is owned by The News' parent company, Belo Corp.

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