Black History Month, February has ended. After a hundred years of celebrating the good deeds and achievements of African Americans, moving from a week of celebrating to a full month, this year, felt different and even tracked differently. We saw special programming on television, with the two-part series on The Black Church by Professor Henry Gates, where he talked about the history of the Black Church from days of slavery to contemporary times and how the church was the hub of Black life. What was different about this Black History Month is we heard a variety of authentic voices. It is important that Black people tell their own story, with perspective and truth and not romance.
The streaming services did an excellent job in showcasing Black documentaries and movies with untold to little-known truths about Black historic figures. They were excellent and share a common thread connecting to FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover.
MLK and the FBI
MLK and The FBI, a documentary that reveals the extra-marital affairs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as told through the tapes and wire taping of King’s hotel rooms. The documentary was based on a book by David Garrow bearing the same title. Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 on his book, Bearing the Cross: MLK and The Southern Leadership Conference. He also authored The Making of Barack Obama in 2017.
Hoover was obsessed with “communism” and attempted to link King to communism via his friendship with Attorney Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin. He ran across King’s “flings” accidentally and became obsessed with King’s sex life. He said Dr. King was the “most dangerous Negro in America” because he had a leadership voice. Hoover said King would destroy American life, as we knew it, meaning white privilege and white superiority. By labeling King as communist he got permission from Robert Kennedy, the United States Attorney General to wiretap King. Given Hoover’s concerns and fears, it is clear that he had King killed.
Judas and the Black Messiah
Judas and the Black Messiah is the story of Black Panther, Fred Hampton. This documentary tells the personal story of a young man in Chicago from Maywood, IL, who headed the NAACP youth division, who rose in the Black Panther Party ranks to head the Illinois organization. Their ten-point program was about the improvement of the Black community with breakfast programs to feed kids before they went to school. Hampton’s voice was growing powerful and strong and a young following came with him at the young age of 21 years old. He was organizing the gangs and had become quite a political organizer. Hoover said, “The Black Panthers are the single greatest threat to our national security”. He linked the Panthers to Communism.
Hoover was nervous about putting Hampton in jail and making him a martyr, he decided he should be killed. He set him up through the office of then Edward Hanrahan (deceased) who was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois from l964 to 1968. He won the election as Cook County States Attorney where he served from 1968 to 1972; it was thought he would succeed Mayor Daley. He lost every election after the Panther’s murder. He ran twice for Mayor and once for Alderman. Hanrahan’s name and the politics that followed were not revealed in the movie. Hampton was considered a “radical threat.” They were killed in a raid with 14 police officers in their West Side apartment at predawn on December 4. 1969 while they slept. It was suggested they were killed because they shot first. They lied. At a press conference the next day, Hanrahan said they were “extremely dangerous.” The police raid produced 91 to 99 gunshots. Mark Clark, the on-duty security the evening of the raid, fired one shot in the ceiling in a reflex motion.
The assassination of Hampton and Mark Clark changed the politics of Chicago. The Black Panther organization was infiltrated by Mr. William O’Neal who was positioned as the Panthers Chief of Security. He was guided by a white hand in the agency and for pay to provide information on Hampton. He provided the agency with a map of Hampton’s apartment that lead to his death. The Panther’s Chief of Security was an FBI agent. Attorney James Montgomery after a long landmark trial of 18 months won a settlement of $1.8 million for the Hampton family.
The United States vs. Billie Holiday…
And finally the movie. The United States vs. Billie Holiday was another Hoover scare. Billie Holiday was growing popular as a “jazz singer.” She was a drug addict, addicted to heroin and cocaine. Sadly, her habit was her demise. She was told NOT to sing what would become her most popular song “Strange Fruit,” about the lynching of southern Black men. The song was originally written as a poem entitled “Bitter Fruit” by Mr. Abel Meeropol, a Jewish American teacher and anti-racist who was a registered Communist Party member. It would later be set to music by Meeropol himself and was recorded by Holiday in 1939 as “Strange Fruit.”
In the movie, Holiday was arrested for singing “Strange Fruit” which she deemed appropriate given the height of lynching in the south. J. Edgar Hoover called the song “unamerican.” She was set up for a drug arrest and was carried off stage as she began to sing. She might have been left alone if she discontinued singing “Strange Fruit” but she refused. The song was presented in her act very dramatically. The room went to black, the waiters ceased serving, and the room was perfectly still. As the spotlight hits Billie, she begins to sing “Strange Fruit.” It is the last song of the show and she leaves the stage. The effect stings a mixed-raced cabaret-type audience.
This is another case of the FBI setting a victim up with informants to “catch” the “crime”. She was sent to jail and betrayed by an FBI agent, Jimmy Fletcher, who later became her lover. She was arrested on her deathbed in the hospital. Holiday’s men and trusted associates planted dope on her person and set her up for arrest. Billie Holiday was the subject and target of jazz music, but this was not a piece of acceptable music at the time. The FBI had a war on jazz music and those who played it. The war was lead by Harry Anslinger, then head of the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He despised jazz and its icons. He often had his men even “shoot up” with the entertainers and plant drugs on them for the purpose of arrest and jail.
Brother Malcolm
And then there was the revelation of the murder of Malcolm X in 1965. New information has come out that his bodyguards were removed from his detail and sent to jail. They were charged with a plan to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Malcolm was vulnerable with his bodyguards removed and set up for murder. He was shot 15 times in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, as his pregnant wife watched.
All of these Black revelations are truths untold. The FBI informants were Black and lived to tell their stories that they claimed they were ashamed of. The informant for the Panthers, O’Neil, committed suicide after “Eye of the Prize” was shown. He was interviewed for this important history, his name and face shown. He jumped onto a Chicago expressway committing his demise.
The point here is that all of these very different stories reveal that J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with “Black voices.” Be it the voice of the minister, the young panther, the singer, or activist Malcolm. He was afraid of Black leadership. As he saw the followings develop, he took notice. His pattern was to say that they were all guilty of being “communist” or “radicals” and that became the justification for his investigations and wiretapping. But at the end of the day, he set them up for murder, a government murder. He sent informers into their environments for entrapment. He killed those with loud voices for social injustices with the assistant of Black informers.
J. Edgar Hoover was a murderer and got away with it in the name of the FBI investigation. He was deathly afraid of “Black voices” speaking to social justice and America’s inequities and racism. He said repeatedly that they were threats to American life, meaning white privilege and white superiority.
Hoover helped to found the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was the director for 37 years from 1935 to his death. He served eight presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. Truth be told, as Hoover was calling out Black leadership as “the most dangerous” he was the most “powerful” and the most “dangerous” government official, often exceeding Presidential powers because he had investigation power as he threatened and engaged in harassment. It is rumored that he was a homosexual, living with his assistant Clyde Tolson who he claimed to be his “alter ego”. He was a cross-dresser at male parties. He was sexist, racist, homophobic, and a killer. Some think of him as a model law enforcement officer and will defend him by saying he protected the United States. The FBI building in Washington, DC bears his name.
J. Edgar Hoover was a murderer. He murdered Black voices. He should be charged with these crimes.
