When King was a target

Biographer David Garrow tells the story in his book "The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr." FBI staffers debated the extent to which Communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement. Initially the FBI focused on Stanley Levison, a lawyer and an adviser to King who had been a financial patron of the Communist Party. Concerns flared despite indications that Levison had few ties to the party by the time he was associated with King.

In memos, the FBI's director, J. Edgar Hoover, argued that Communists were out to exploit the "American Negro." William C. Sullivan, the FBI's assistant director, wrote a few days after the 1963 march on Washington that King was "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security."

To Garrow's eye, the FBI's interest in King took a sharp turn at the end of 1963. Wiretaps in offices and hotel rooms opened up more of King's life. The FBI's focus on communism was eclipsed by a desire to discredit King. By 1964 Sullivan wrote a memo saying King had to be revealed to the country and "his Negro followers" as "a fraud, demagogue, and moral scoundrel" in order to "take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence so that he will no longer be a security problem and no longer will be deceiving and misleading the Negro people."

Garrow argues that over time the FBI investigation of King lost even the thinnest veil of a national security rationale. Mostly the FBI's goal became to expose and destroy King. Personal animus took over.

It is a cautionary tale that is painfully relevant at a time when the FBI has been telling local police to report illegal acts at antiwar protests to the FBI's antiterrorism squad. International terrorists are a real and murderous threat, but the government must not be allowed to exploit that threat to deprive Americans of their rights.

Despite the pernicious scrutiny he was under, King wrote in his book "Why We Can't Wait" that among many partners, the civil rights movement could form an alliance with the federal government.

"It is the obligation of government to move resolutely to the side of the freedom movement. There is a right and a wrong side in this conflict, and the government does not belong in the middle."

Such partnerships could lead to a democratic mix of values, to alliances that would create an intolerance of injustice.