In the latest JFK files: The FBI’s ugly analysis on Martin Luther King Jr., filled with falsehoods

By Kristine Phillips November 4 at 3:23 PM

A newly released FBI analysis from 1968 paints this picture of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: A “whole-hearted” communist who followed a “Marxist-Leninist line.”

The 20-page document, dated March 12, three weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis, is included in the latest trove of government files about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which the National Archives released Friday. It alleges that King’s political ideologies and the creation of his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were heavily influenced by communists, specifically the Communist Party USA. The FBI document went into great detail about one of King’s most trusted advisers, Stanley Levison, a New York lawyer and businessman who served as a top financier for the Communist Party years before he met King in 1956.

The document, titled “MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., A CURRENT ANALYSIS,” alleged that Levison had a strong influence on many of King’s activities as the leader of the civil rights movement, from what he said in his speeches and what demonstrations he took part in, to where King’s group got its funding.

David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian who had written extensively about King, said much of the explosive allegations in the document are neither new nor true.

-snip-