This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here .
A favorite movie of mine growing up was the 1999 cartoon Our Friend, Martin. It combines two of the subjects I love most: time travel and Martin Luther King Jr. The main character, Miles, a Black sixth grader, visits the childhood home of King and ends up traveling back in time to meet King at various stages of his life. Miles, who was largely unaware of King before time traveling, eventually learns that King was assassinated. In order to prevent this, Miles convinces his new friend Martin to come to the future with him. And while that decision spares King’s life, the movie makes it clear that Miles saving his friend’s life would prevent the racial equality we now enjoy in the U.S.
In the modern U.S., are we really enjoying a post-King racial equality? Is it not true that several of the voting rights safeguards have been removed from landmark legislation from the Civil Rights era? Do U.S. citizens have the ability to exercise their First Amendment rights without fear of reprisals or being put on the government’s enemies list? Are Black Americans any less threatened by prisons and the police? Is there any difference between former Alabama Gov. George Wallace saying in 1963, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and President Donald Trump promising to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border?
Instead of continually perpetuating the comforting lie that King’s life put the country on a path toward racial progress — or worse, that King’s death, similar to Jesus’ death, offered atonement for our (racist) sins — I think it is time to soberly acknowledge that much of what King fought for has either been ignored, undone, or is currently under attack.
To commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I spoke with Lerone A. Martin, the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. His book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, is a historical account about the FBI’s obsession with discrediting King and how those practices continue to influence the FBI today. In our interview, we spoke about where the FBI is headed under Trump, the differences between conspiracy theories and historical facts, and what our beliefs about King tell us about ourselves.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: What are your goals as director of the King Institute?
Lerone A. Martin: Coretta [Scott King, Martin Luther King’s widow] chose Stanford and my predecessor to be the caretaker of King’s archive: personal papers, report cards, unpublished manuscripts, unpublished sermons, letters, speeches. And so that project has been going on since 1986.
My aim is to move this entire enterprise online. So, instead of doing these books, I think the best way to do this work in the 21st century is to digitize everything that we have so we can use metadata, make it word searchable, so that everyday people of faith, scholars, casual observers can go online and say, “I want to see everything Martin Luther King Jr. said about war and poverty,” and that’ll pop up in letters, that’ll pop up in sermons, unpublished manuscripts, and so forth.
The other thing that I’ve brought to the King Institute, in addition to working on the digitization process, is this dual enrollment class for Title I high schools. Title I high schools are high schools where at least 40% of the student body is on free or reduced lunch. And I have a course that is administered by Stanford Digital Education that allows high school students to take a class with me on Martin Luther King Jr. If they pass the course, they receive Stanford University college credit. And all of this is free and it’s done remotely.
[Whether or not these students receive free or reduced-cost lunch, the qualification is specifically related to low-income status. Schools where “children from low-income families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment are eligible to use Title I funds.”]
Last year, we were with seven high schools in the state of California. We had over a hundred students and over 90% of our students passed the course and received college credit. So, I see this as one way to continue with the mission of promoting and preserving King’s work and its legacy. Both in terms of knowledge, so students know about King and read about him, but also in terms of keeping the tradition alive. I think, with the tremendous resources we have at Stanford University, it seems to me it is our responsibility to try to be a good neighbor and to share in that wealth.
Tell me about your book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover.
It’s the coming together of a personal moment and an academic moment.
The academic moment was meeting with a colleague of mine at Washington University in St. Louis when I was on the faculty. He had just finished a book on the FBI and African American literature called F.B. Eyes. It was April or May of 2014, and he asked me, “Hey, what are you going to write next?” I had finished this book on the buying and selling of African American sermons and I was thinking of something on radio preachers. He said, “The FBI might have been concerned about some of your radio preachers.”
He suggested I file a Freedom of Information Act [request] on Black radio preachers. And then, that summer, Michael Brown — this is the personal story — was killed in Ferguson, Mo. I ended up meeting a number of pastors in the area. One of the pastors told me that the FBI had reached out to several African American pastors in the community saying, “We’re pretty sure that there’s going to be no indictment of officer Darren Wilson and we would love to work with you pastors to help us to make sure this city doesn’t explode.” That got me thinking, like, how long has the FBI been reaching out to clergy for assistance? That got me thinking not so much around surveillance in terms of, “Who does the FBI not like?” But it got me thinking, Does the FBI reach out to pastors that they like?
So, I started filing Freedom of Information Act requests, not on clergy I thought the FBI didn’t like, but on clergy I thought the FBI would like. I filed one on this African American preacher named Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, who I ended up getting FBI files for. That helped me see the way that he was working with the FBI to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.
Then I started making requests for preachers like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and also organizations I thought the FBI would like. Organizations and magazines like Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Religious Broadcasters, Campus Crusade for Christ and the list goes on. I started to see this network of all these ministers connecting and working with the FBI and lionizing the FBI as the arbiter of true faith and allegiance. I also started doing work on what kind of culture is in the FBI that would produce this kind of lionization and love in the general public.
I was able to make some FOIA requests about the religious practices that are happening within the FBI. I discovered the FBI had spiritual retreats for their agents which was to fasten them into the sort of a masculine soldier for Christ that was primarily predicated upon the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius — himself having been a soldier. Also, there were Protestant worship services and Catholic worship services that the FBI organized and structured for their agents and their families as a way to instill within them that part of your job is to be Christian and to defend America’s Christian endowment.
Anyone that the FBI suspects that is not in line with that then gets not only dubbed as an enemy of the state, but really as an enemy of God. Hoover says this as much, he says he taught Sunday school as a teenager and was very serious about it. He gave a quote in the ’40s where he said Sunday school had taught him to have a spirit of no compromise about those who were not interested in maintaining a Christian nation.
What was the gospel to J. Edgar Hoover?
It was one of white Christian nationalism. And I mean that in a couple of ways: Firstly, he really did believe that America was a Christian nation. He believed that America, while it has other faiths, is a Christian nation and that the Bible really is the bedrock of American democracy. Secondly, he really felt that the founding fathers were guided by God to found this country as a chosen nation. America needed to lead the world in that regard because America was chosen. There would be punishment if America did not take its proper place on the global stage and also if America failed to live up to this chosenness. For Hoover, living up to that chosenness meant that the Bible should be at the center of American governance and of American society.
For Hoover, that would involve male leadership across the board. For him, that was how society ought to be structured. He really did believe that white male leadership was the appropriate leadership. He believed that African Americans were just inferior, that there was no sociological explanation for African American inequality or African American lack of achievement, but that it was primarily biological. Therefore, God has ordered society in this particular way, and the way we remain faithful is to maintain that order in society.
For Hoover, any effort to alter these societal arrangements, whether we’re talking about women’s groups, whether we’re talking about Civil Rights, or we’re talking about a different economic model, he saw that as evil and as a departure from America’s chosenness. He saw it as his job, as the FBI director, to put a stop to any efforts that would undermine America as a Christian nation.
If Kash Patel — Trump’s pick to head the FBI — were to be confirmed as director, in what ways is he a continuation of J. Edgar Hoover and in what ways does he differ?
I feel as if some Hoover scholars — whom I respect — some of these scholars’ perspective is that Kash Patel would somehow be worse. I actually see him as having a great deal of continuity with Hoover.
If we look through the lens of Christian nationalism, it makes sense when Kash Patel says he wants to take the FBI back to its original purpose. It’s a commitment to a Christian nationalism that has race involved, that has gender involved, and even sexuality.
Now, it’s interesting to say that because Kash Patel is not white. But we also have to remember that Hoover fought vigorously against queerness in American life — and there’s questions about Hoover’s own sexuality. Psychologists would tell us that people who feel as if their status is precarious, or people who feel that their status in an in-group is precarious or at risk, they often police the boundaries of the in-group. We could possibly see that with Patel and Hoover.
Where they differ, I think, is that Hoover dressed up his Christian nationalism and dressed up some of the evil things that he did in a veneer of respectability that many politicians and elected officials and civil servants now don’t feel the need to have. Patel differs in the sense that I don’t think he really cares about that kind of veneer of respectability — being seen as a racist or being uneducated — I don’t think he cares about that. Even the way that he talks about enemies. Hoover often talked about enemies in terms of communists. But we now know that Hoover had an enemies list for people who weren’t communists. They were just people he thought were liberal or bleeding hearts or journalists he didn’t want to speak to. We’re seeing this again with Kash Patel.
[The Trump] administration has been very clear. Instead of saying we are going after communists, they’re saying the “deep state,” which is basically a label they can use to slap on anyone they don’t like. And they’re saying, We’re going to go after journalists. “We’re going after people who stood up against the Trump administration.” If that ain’t J. Edgar Hoover, I don’t know what is.
I wonder how you navigate exposing the misconduct and the biases of the FBI while avoiding the trap of conspiracy theories. In other words, you believe and provide evidence to support that there is bias and misconduct in the FBI. But how does your criticism of the FBI avoid the pitfalls of right-wing conspiracy theories?
I’ll quote the January 6 lead investigator who was just recently on NPR, Tim Heaphy: “There was plenty of warning to the planners in Charlottesville and to the folks at the Capitol prior to January 6 that there was real violence potential. Nonetheless, they just did not adequately prepare for that. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, one of which is race.”
The FBI has really struggled in terms of its domestic terrorism work to really get a hold on the role that white nationalism and violence play in this country. Part of that is because a number of agents are Christian, and some of them are conservative Christian. So, they have a very difficult time recognizing the dangers that are involved in some conservative, Christian circles.
The FBI has a tradition of always going harder against citizens of color in this country who they perceive to be involved in violence. There’s a long history of the FBI seeing people of color as being more prone to violence than white brothers and sisters.
If we just look at the history of the Bureau, the way that Hoover treated the Klan — yes, Hoover did do some work to infiltrate the Klan and to make them less violent, but he didn’t completely try to tear apart the Klan in terms of its existence. So I don’t think we need to lean towards conspiracy theory. I think we can lean towards history to see that.
The critical Black studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly argues in her book, Black Scare / Red Scare, that the U.S. has typically conflated anticommunism and anti-Blackness. Does that prove to be the case when it comes to the FBI’s philosophy on King and the Civil Rights movement? What are some of the modern FBI’s biases and conflations in terms of identity and ideology?
Hoover used the term “communist” very loosely, and he often would say a communist is an atheist. They can’t believe in God and atheists, therefore, can’t be moral. Anyone that he thought didn’t have a certain morality or anyone he thought was working to alter America’s structural arrangements — whether racial, gender, or economic — he would throw them into the hat of being a communist. If they weren’t “communist,” they’re “fellow travelers,” or if they’re not fellow travelers, they’re “useful idiots.”
That’s how the bureau thought about Martin Luther King Jr. At worst, they thought he was a communist pretending to be a minister. At best, they thought he was a useful idiot being used by communists. When the bureau did an investigation into King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, they came back saying, “Look, Mr. Hoover, there is no substantial communist influence on Martin King.” But that wasn’t good enough for Hoover, and Hoover kept pressing. There was a conflation there. And oftentimes, it was any activist who was trying to say America’s structural arrangements are flawed. Hoover would say, “See, that’s what communists say.”
In 2017, there was an intelligence assessment that was leaked from the bureau that showed that the bureau was conflating African American protest of police brutality with something they invented called “black identity extremist.” Individuals who were either Black nationalist or individuals who made intellectual or cultural connections to Africa or ideas around African American identity or the global diaspora, these individuals were then linked to being terrorists.
One of the things you point out in the book is how Black clergy partnered with the FBI to discredit King. I think there’s some naivete among progressive Christians that Black and brown people would never partner with institutions that would go against their racial interests. But, as you document in the book, there are examples of Black clergy working against King at the direction of the FBI.
I think that there’s diversity within African American political thought. There always has been. If we look at the exit poll data, which seems to be consistent, there were many African American men who voted for Donald Trump.
In the same way, there were people who agreed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s goals but thought his strategy was wrong. Malcolm X, for example, for a good part of his public career, thought King was going about it wrong and never had a problem criticizing King, calling him an “Uncle Tom.” There were others who thought that King was just completely wrong, that African Americans should just continue to work hard and, eventually, they would gain the right to their equality. This was Hoover’s idea.
There were other clergy who agreed with it, one of which was Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, who thought that African Americans should continue working hard, preach the gospel, and eventually they would earn equality. It’s not something they were given at birth like white brothers and sisters, they had to earn it.
And I think today, we see Trump has ministers such as Darrell Scott, [or other] Black evangelical ministers who even spoke at the Republican convention, who felt like Donald Trump was the Christian candidate.
I think it’s certainly wrong to just simply dismiss people who vote differently, to call them Uncle Toms, call them stupid, or whatever derogatory term. We have to engage our brothers and sisters and figure out, “Okay, what leads you to this decision?” Maybe there are economic reasons, maybe there are cultural reasons.
All of the diverging opinions about King make me wonder if it’s possible to ever really understand “the real” Martin Luther King Jr.?
I hope that the King papers project can help with this, and I think reading everything that King wrote, everything that he said, I think can help us to understand who he was.
I think the way that we define King probably says a great deal about us. I’m sure for Tim LaHaye, it all boils down to the fact that King was theologically “liberal.”
But then you have to ask yourself if you’re Tim LaHaye: Do you have the same rubric for segregationists? It’s fascinating the type of rubric one will use to define Christianity. I think it’s interesting that they would say King’s a theological liberal and slap that label on him.
I do think there’s a way that we can know King’s principles and what he stood for. And the very fact that you could arguably say, not only was he a Christian, he’s one of the few true Americans. He actually believed in the founding documents and actually tried to push America, as he would say, to be true to what it said on paper.
People will be reading this the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is also the inauguration. What might you suggest they listen to or read from King to give them hope?
King came to Stanford in April of 1967 and Stanford libraries has his speech on YouTube. The speech is called “The Other America.”
This is where King really outlines what he calls the triple evils: racism, poverty, and war. That speech is powerful for two reasons: The first is that it helps us realize the fact that King cared about more than just racism, but he saw that racism was intertwined with war, violence, and poverty. The other reason I think it’s important is because this particular King holiday can be very seductive. There’s going to be propaganda out there. The FBI tweets every King Day about Martin Luther King Jr. I’m sure that Trump is going to use Martin Luther King Jr. If we’re not careful, King simply becomes a kind of mascot for post-racial America.
Listening to “The Other America” can help us push back and say, “No, King actually cared about more than racism. And in this country, we are still waging opposition to continual poverty and war.” King is not just some dead mascot who wanted the Jim Crow signs to be taken down.
For those of us on the other side, quote-unquote progressive Christians or liberal Christians, we also have to keep in mind a certain kind of humility that if Kamala Harris would have been inaugurated, we would have been susceptible to being seduced: “Oh, look, the first woman president. The dream has been fulfilled.”
If we listen to “The Other America,” we’ll hear King saying, “No, I’m also concerned about war, violence, and I’m concerned about poverty.” We need to have a sense of humility about this moment. Yes, Trump is going to try to use King as a mascot, we know that. But we have to be humble about it because if Harris would have won, some of us would have been doing the same thing for her. We just got to keep King’s words clear, recognizing that he’s not a mascot for Democrats; he’s not a mascot for Republicans. King is actually trying to be a prophet of justice and equality. If we read his words, I think he’ll lead us in that direction.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
