The FBI's Failure to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement

The story of how the FBI tried to destroy and fail to destroy the civil rights movement is more complicated than an allegory about a racist FBI director against a flawless civil rights pastor. Martin Luther King's confidant Stanley Levison was also a secret member of the American Communist Party. The plan was for Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, and Hoover's boss, to press King in a personal meeting to distance himself from Levison.