alt Hacker News‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
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Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true. He caused a great change to take place in the nation, but he was not an upstanding individual outside of that.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments. Wild. I guess the tactics have always been the same then.
At least now we have LLMs that can produce this kind of stuff at human-overwhelming rates, so that is progress.
As much as I actually really love MLK's speeches, sermons, movement. I am afraid there appears to be some unfortunate truths about the man. None are perfect except God. That doesn't make the positives he did any less great, it just reminds us of the nature of humanity.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
I love my country but omg do we have so many shameful episodes. These things need to be brought out to the light of day so we can confront, admit and heal. The letter is the 2nd crime. The first crime is the tolerance of the hate behind the letter. The 3rd crime is concealing the facts till those responsible are out of the reach of justice.
And failing that the government assassinated him.
> I repeat - no person can argue successfully against facts.
In some aspects, times have changed..
This is very similar to Suchir Balaji and passive surveillance counterterrorism technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterterrorism
"Kill Yourself" is very similar in verse to "You Are Done."
What is even more crazy is that people believe we are now more "civilized" than this. That nobody would do such a thing in our time.
The article title seems to have changed from the earlier version, which importantly emphasised that the FBI pressured King to commit suicide.
I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
It’s a very silly poorly written letter.
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
Interesting angle of posing as a black man so Martin is being attacked by the in group. This is usually very effective and is essentially exactly what you see on racist forums/boards like 4chan and other more explicit supremacist boards.
Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.
I feel that how Epstein was suicided; they convinced him his life from now will be nightmare then just left him an opening to do it
Was there any hard proof he was a communist sympathizer or was the CIA painting him that way because he didn't support the Vietnam war?
Almost every adjective in that letter is a projection by the author. He/they must have been a real piece of work.
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One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:
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House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
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U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.