“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader. The Church Committee, a 1975 investigation by the U.S. Congress, found that “From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader.”
The Bureau placed wiretaps on the home and office phone lines of both Levison and King, and bugged King’s rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. In 1967, Hoover listed the SCLC as a black nationalist hate group, with the instructions: “No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups … to insure [sic] the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
Op-ed: What if MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” had been on Facebook?
Under current Alabama law, it would have been a crime. Other states feel similar.
“Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Letter from Birmingham City Jail”
April 16, 1963