Came across this article a while back, and its a really interesting read. Since today is MLK day it seems like an appropriate day to share this. It’s an especially important moment in history to remember and honor an American patriot who refused to be silent even when he became the target of a man who abused his powerful position in the federal government while hiding behind lies about protecting liberty and justice.
Acknowledging the ugly reality behind the myth of a man like J. Edgar Hoover also shouldn’t be used to erase the truth about the good that was accomplished because a federal government used its powers to right injustices for all Americans, following the civil rights act. It should simply remind us that downplaying the difficult truths of our history only leaves us at risk of repeating our worst mistakes again in the future.
The legend is crumbling: the squat, bulldog features, set fiercely in tenacious pursuit of the TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS. The gangbuster nemesis of “Baby Face” Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma Barker. The scourge of would-be spies and saboteurs. The alert sentinel and fearless fighter holding back the tide of the Red Menace. The stubbornly independent guardian of evenhanded law enforcement, highmindedly fending off Congressmen and Presidents who sought to use his agency for political purposes.
J. Edgar Hoover deserved some of that billing, although it was overblown from the start. Now, just three years after his death, a sharply different portrait is emerging of the man who built the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the world’s most reputable police organization through 48 years as its famed Director. To be sure, there had always been a few blemishes—some from scattered revelations through the decades, some from his own reckless conduct as he grew older and fought to retain the power he felt slipping away. But now, under congressional and journalistic scrutiny, as well as in the writings of his once fearful agents, a darker picture is coming into view.
In these new shades Hoover is seen as a shrewd bureaucratic genius who cared less about crime than about perpetuating his crime-busting image. With his acute public relations sense, he managed to obscure his bureau’s failings while magnifying its sometime successes. Even his fervent anti-Communism has been cast into doubt; some former aides insist that he knew the party was never a genuine internal threat to the nation but a useful, popular target to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.
Even more serious flaws in the Hoover character and official performance have come to light:
Instead of insulating his bureau from politically sensitive Presidents, Hoover eagerly complied with improper requests from the men in the White House for information on potential opponents. If a President failed to ask for such information, the Director often volunteered it. He tapped the telephones of Government officials on request, perused files of politicians unasked, volunteered tidbits of gossip.
He was a petty man of towering personal hates. There was more than a tinge of racism in his vicious vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. He had to be pushed into hiring black agents for the bureau.
His informers, infiltrators and wiretappers delved into the activities of even the most innocuous and nonviolent civil rights and antiwar groups, trampling on the rights of citizens to express grievances against their Government. His spies within potentially dangerous extremist groups sometimes provoked more violence than they prevented.
As an administrator, he was an erratic, unchallengeable czar, banishing agents to Siberian posts on whimsy, terrorizing them with torrents of implausible rules, insisting on conformity of thought as well as dress.
The fact that such a man could acquire and keep that kind of power raises disturbing questions not merely about the role of a national police in a democracy, but also about the political system that tolerated him for so long. The revelations show too that those political dissidents in years past who complained they were being harassed and spied upon were not so paranoid after all.
As the pendulum of public esteem swings away from the old Hoover reputation, the correction seems necessary, though it could also go too far. The Director’s defenders, at least, are outraged. “When the lion dies, the rats come out,” sneers Efrem Zimbalist Jr., longtime star of the once top-rated television series The FBI. Insists William Ruckelshaus, one of the victims of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre: “Really, the man had only one motive. That was to make the FBI the finest investigative agency in the world.”
Certainly the post-Watergate morality casts a harsher light on official conduct that once was not questioned. In the cold war period, the Communist threat from abroad, if not at home, did look—and was—dangerous. Such FBI-infiltrated groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Weatherman did proclaim violence.
Mainly by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI was able to act swiftly in the early 1960s to solve several murders of civil rights workers in the South. But, as King charged, the bureau did little about enforcing civil rights laws that did not involve such sensational crimes. One reason: the FBI was concentrating on catching auto thieves and fugitives so as to keep its Southern bureaus’ arrest and recovery statistics on Hoover’s mandated upward curves.
It was King’s criticism that led Hoover to call him “the most notorious liar in the U.S.” and to launch an ugly vendetta against him. Hoover ordered one tape from a bugged Miami hotel room where King had been staying sent anonymously to King’s wife. The FBI sent word of King’s reported sexual activities to the Pope, trying to convince the Pontiff not to receive him.
One of Hoover’s men recalls discussing with the Director and another aide the FBI’s crusade against King. The aide claimed that the black leader had not only associated with Communists but that there was “a sexual matter.” King was homosexual? “No, no,” said the aide. “King isn’t queer.” “Then what’s the big problem?” the man asked. “King isn’t the only married guy who sleeps with other women.” Replied the aide as Hoover nodded agreement: “He sleeps with white women.”
Tldr: J Edgar Hoover was a real pizza shit and he bore a striking similarity to several modern day pizza shits who seem to have modeled themselves after him.
Such FBI-infiltrated groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Weatherman did proclaim violence.
God can you imagine how terrifying it would be to go from a world where the groups that were infiltrated by the FBI in the 1960s, then infiltrated the FBI by 2025 in an attempt to destroy any trust the American people have in the federal government. 😅
I mean jfc, imagine growing up hearing your own mom talk about her traumatic childhood in Meridian, MS. Like how she had a friend who’s father was working as a lawyer for the SPLC and was attacked while he was getting out of his car in his own driveway after work one day. Or how she can still remember being on the school bus and smelling burning wood from a cross that had been lit the night before on the lawn of one of her 8 year old classmates. Or how the day MLK was assassinated she and her siblings were walking to see a movie when her mother and father suddenly drove up and demanded they get in the car and come home because they were worried about riots.
Honestly try to imagine all of that just being your childhood growing up in America, and keep in mind that’s still a childhood of white privilege. Imagine all of this happening around you before you even hit puberty, and not even fully understanding what is happening in the broader context of your country, but just knowing that some people in your town have decided that if they couldn’t control the lives of others, if black people and other people of color in your little town can’t be forced to live in the separate world unequal and parallel from the one you live in, then this is just the way life will have to be for everybody.
Imagine learning that a local school teacher who had been missing was then found murdered and had been acting as an informant for the FBI, or remembering one summer when her small town suddenly got national attention during a search for 3 men who had gone missing after being pulled over by local police. One man was a local and the other two had traveled to Meridian to help go around reaching out to the community, making sure people were registered to vote.
Did that teacher deserve to die for trying to help law enforcement? Did those men deserve to die for trying to protect people’s rights? Can you imagine a world where people argued that they were somehow in the wrong for simply standing up for they believed in was right, and that what happened to them was something they brought on themselves?
She also remembered that (despite her very understandable hesitation to just blindly trust any authority figure simply because they had been granted a title of authority,) it was only when the FBI came to her town to find the men who had gone missing, and enforce the laws that were being ignored locally, that things actually started to change.
She was never a very political person and definitely couldn’t be described as anything like a sjw or leftist, but she did make sure that even when I was growing up, I understood that the FBI was supposed to step in when corruption at local levels interfered with the rights and justice people were entitled to.
Idk if her childhood days are supposed to be the days that people are referring to when they talk about making America great again, but I do know when I think about those stories, I pray to God that those aren’t the kind of terrible things my child experiences.during her lifetime.
Imagine how it would feel if you grew up hearing those kind of stories, and then one day you realized that the terrorists you grew up being warned about, had successfully infiltrated the federal government and law enforcement in order to help tear down the protections that so many died for. That even though some of the terrorists had only joined recently as part of a new administration, others had probably been there for quite a while getting things ready to welcome them aboard.
Imagine a scenario where making it difficult, if not impossible, to tell who were the terrorists and who were the ones really fighting for liberty and justice, was part of the terrorist’s plan all along.
When you know about men like the police in Meridian or read the truth about J. Edgar Hoover, you can’t just pretend that men like that haven’t always existed in positions of authority alongside the ones who were doing the right thing. Even if J. Edgar Hoover didn’t wear a robe and burn a cross, he was still a white supremacist, and he still used his position of authority to abuse his power, not to protect Americans. MLK pointed out Hoover only seemed to be interested in solving civil rights related murders that ensured he would receive positive press, rather than actually protecting civil rights. Like any good leader, Hoover responded to MLK by directing the FBI to focus on enforcing civil rights protections. Just kidding, rather than proving MLK wrong,.Hoover began using FBI resources to target and spy on him, eventually using the surveillance he collected in an attempt to bad mouth him to the pope.
Decades of normalizing and excusing abuse of authority has only helped make it easier for literal terrorists to get their foot in the door and infiltrate all levels of government and law enforcement to do what has been normalized and excused so many times before. It’s been over 50 years since those 3 men were pulled over outside of Meridian, but could you honestly tell me or anyone else in America right now that it would be in their best interest to blindly trust any authority figure simply because they have been given authority?
It seems more than a little obvious in 2026 that taking advantage of America’s hesitancy to hold authority figures accountable, and dividing Americans by downplaying reasonable concerns about unconstitutional policing, excessive force, and militarization of police departments, with accusations that acknowledging or expressing those concerns somehow automatically makes you opposed to all law enforcement, was also part of the larger plan to normalize what people were absolutely right to be concerned about. The normalization of corruption and military force against Americans civilians in the name of safety has intentionally made it more difficult to tell the difference between those who truly want to use their authority to protect and defend all Americans vs the terrorists who intentionally seek to turn back the progress of the Civil rights act as well as those who enable them (intentionally or not) by normalizing their abuse of authority.