By Lloyd Williams

Among the many vital jobs to be done, the nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past.  Our society has been AGAINST the Negro for hundreds of years.  How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special FOR him now.
The Negro is not struggling for some abstract vague rights, but for concrete improvement in his way of life. Special measures for the deprived have always been accepted in principle by the US.  It was the principle behind land grants to farmers who fought in the Revolutionary Army and other measures that the nation accepted as logical and moral.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963)

When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, white America exhaled a collective sigh of relief, for it no longer had to deal with the most eloquent advocate for its millions of descendants of slaves. Today, everyone conveniently forgets that the Civil Rights leader had been targeted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and that at the time of his murder, King was the victim of an ongoing government campaign designed to eliminate him and his equality movement.
After the Freedom of Information Act was passed, we learned from the FBI’s very own files that it had labeled King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) “a black hate group.” And that Hoover had ordered his agents “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of its leadership.”
By the end of his first year of FBI scrutiny, King’s file indicates that the Bureau had already infiltrated his organizational meetings. Actual counter-intelligence operations against him began after a Jan.8, 1962 written request from Hoover to then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. 
Kennedy, as the top lawyer in the land, authorized 24 hour, seven days a week, round the clock surveillance and telephone taps of Dr. King, his offices, and even his home. We now know that King’s name was placed in Section A of the FBI Reserve Index, the security list of those to be detained in the event of a national emergency.
From 1956 until his death, Martin was the victim of an unrelenting attack as an enemy of the United States. The FBI’s tactics included planting false news stories in the media and concocting propaganda which branded him a Communist, among many other lies. After his historic "I Have a Dream" speech at The March on Washington in 1963, the government activities only intensified.

An 11 page FBI document, written that September states, “We must mark King now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation. It may be unrealistic to limit our actions against King.” Then, when Martin won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Bureau ominously ordered him to commit suicide “or else.”
He bravely accepted the Nobel anyway, and the FBI dramatically escalated its efforts against him right up to the moment of his assassination.
When Martin Luther King died, white America experienced a collective climax, a relief that the America he envisioned would wait.  Black America, by contrast, was crushed by the loss of the most important leader in its history.   
The same government whose prime motive had been to eliminate Martin, has since moved to canonize him, strategically reducing his message to “Free At Last!”, as if his mission had been accomplished. Tragically, Martin King’s legacy has been unfairly misinterpreted as little more than an annual holiday, a postage stamp and his “I Have a Dream” speech.
But the night before he died, when Dr. King ruefully rhapsodized that “I might not get there with you,” he knew the country still had a long way to go.  Although he never wavered in his philosophy of non-violence, he also never backed away from maintaining an unpopular stance explaining, “When you are right, you cannot be too radical.”
When we study the writings of Dr. King, it is clear that he was an unequivocal advocate of reparations for African and Native Americans.  If this country truly considers Dr. King worthy of a national holiday, then his ideals, too, ought to be worthy of serious consideration and implementation.

Editor’s note: Lloyd Williams is an attorney and a member of the bar in NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.