Remember Dr. King—and What He Endured

Annual celebrations of the life and work of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often lionize the civil rights era, rightfully focusing on its achievements. 

But celebrations often overlook the federal government’s attempts to “neutralize” the movement. While we remember Dr. King’s many achievements today, we also must remember the documented and unfounded vilification by U.S. intelligence agencies that he, and others in the civil rights movement, endured.

As our nation approaches a new administration, led by a president-elect whose rhetoric has shown little respect for constitutional limits on executive power and armed with an entrenched surveillance state, that experience offers a prescient warning.

A movement in Memoriam

The emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, its triumph over hate to establish desegregation and secure procedural voting rights, and the narrative of interracial struggle for justice—all reflect an inspiring legacy of a grassroots movement that aspired to hold America true to our founding values. As Dr. King succinctly exhorted, the movement called on America to "Be true to what you said on paper." 

The movement was subjected to brutal violence, both by the assassination of its leaders and by the daily brutality of police and vigilantes reacting to the desegregation of public institutions. Dozens of civil rights activists from various backgrounds were murdered during this era, alongside hundreds—if not thousands—of African-Americans as young as 14 year-old Emmitt Till and 11 year-old Denise McNair, whose church in Alabama was bombed by extremists using violent terror to oppose racial integration.

The risks confronting supporters of civil rights grew so acute that the Supreme Court in 1958, in NAACP v. Alabama, granted members of organizations the right to anonymity under the association clause of the First Amendment. EFF cited that decision 55 years later, when we filed First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA to challenge the contemporary mass surveillance regime (which we have fought in court since 2008) that turned the right to anonymity on its head.

Violent state suppression of speech

Throughout Dr. King's life, and for a decade (if not longer) beyond it, the FBI pursued what members of the U.S. Senate in 1976 described as "a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at suppressing…First Amendment rights of speech and association." Those operations, described in internal FBI files as COINTELPRO, have been forgotten by many Americans, but represent a key to understanding why the specter of mass surveillance threatens not only privacy, but also democracy.

For 40 years, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover presided over a reign of intimidation and terror across Washington. Under his tenure, the FBI blackmailed members of Congress, and infiltrated organizations seeking everything from international peace to equal rights for women.

The Bureau’s aim was not to guard national security from any external threat, but instead to “neutralize” constitutionally protected domestic dissent and people using their rights—including Dr. King. In ad