Hey, everyone. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Except to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It’s a whole thing, but people haven’t forgotten the agency’s ugly history with the civil rights icon. They won’t forget anytime soon.
The bureau once sent King an anonymous letter. The letter, meant to appear written by a black person, told King to die by suicide.
“King, there is only one thing left for you to do,” the letter-writer stated. “You know what it is.”
Federal investigators later found that the FBI engaged in a campaign to discredit King even after his death because then-Director J. Edgar Hoover loathed the civil rights figure.
“Evidence obtained by the committee indicated that the allegation that Dr. King posed a threat to national security was merely a convenient rationalization used by the Director to justify his personal vendetta against the civil rights leader,” they wrote.
With all that in mind, the FBI is a popular target for on Twitter. That pattern continued Monday.
Poet and former BuzzFeed editor Saeed Jones literally had no words.
James Comey, one of Hoover’s successors, has called the the agency’s surveillance of King “shameful.”
[Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images]