Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover
He knew he was going to die. Before Martin Luther King was shot and killed on the balcony of a Memphis motel forty years ago tomorrow, he went to see his parents to prepare them.
“The reports are that they are out to get me,” he told them. “I have to go on with my work, I’m too deeply involved now to get out, it’s all too important. Sometimes I want to stop. Just go away somewhere and have some quiet days, finally, a quiet life with Coretta and the children. But it’s too late for that now. I have my path before me. I know what I have to do.”
The hatred came from many directions, not only from white racists but, as we now know from FBI files, from J. Edgar Hoover, the Director, who had agents bug his hotel rooms and send him anonymous threatening letters, urging him to commit suicide.
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