DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF KING?: A REVIEW ESSAY, THE

Branch's is a very good account of how corruption in the FBI undermined Johnson's initial intention to seek to fund the war on poverty at a level that was worthy of the cause and his early desire to be supportive of King's civil rights efforts.5 Hoover's systematic false reporting about King went a long way toward causing Johnson to hold King with utter contempt. Hoover essentially blinded the president and made it impossible for him to see what could have been accomplished for the entire nation had he continued to work with King and to take more seriously his advice.

A number of King scholars and close associates of King have written about Hoover's almost total obsession with trying to destroy him using extralegal means. One example is Stewart Burns's helpful discussion in To the Mountaintop (2004). Former U.S. ambassador Andrew Young provides a more personalized account of Hoover's callousness toward King in An Easy Burden (1996). Young observes that early in the civil rights movement, beginning in Montgomery, the FBI began its efforts to discredit King and the movement. The Bureau made unsubstantiated charges of communist infiltration, misappropriation of funds, and illicit sexual misconduct. It rightly angered Young that the FBI made these unsubstantiated charges and was never required "to justify its extraordinary incursion through pervasive wiretaps into the privacy of dozens of American citizens"6 (an all too familiar practice in today's United States). Despite this massive invasion of privacy, no formal charges were ever levied against any movement leader for any of the potentially damaging rumors generated by the Bureau. According to Branch, Hoover's hatred of King was such that he even refused to provide him with a briefing on specific threats against his life as he prepared to return to Memphis (752). Of course, King had already concluded that there was no way that law enforcement officials on any level could protect him (725).

Unfortunately, Branch does not consider why Hoover was retained as FBI director, and why Johnson believed so many of his lies about King. Andrew Young hints at a reason when he reflects deeper on why Hoover-with what can only be deemed as the support of administration officials-systematically sought to destroy King and the movement. Young believes that Hoover and others of his ilk were obsessed with trying to undermine King and other black male leaders because of a kind of psychosexual fear. The vendetta against King, he surmises, had little to do with accusations of his collaboration with communists, misappropriation of funds, and sexual impropriety. Fundamentally, Young argues, it had to do with a fear of sexuality:

Deeply buried but intense sexual fear of black males, illustrated by the sexual nature of attacks on black men by whites who seek to control or destroy black aggressiveness, has been a persistent pattern in the South since the advent of slavery. From the systematic destruction of the black family during slavery to contemporary barriers for black males attempting to protect and provide for their families via the imposition of strong societal and economic proscriptions, there is a recurrent theme: controlling black men. The theme was ever-present at lynchings of black men for allegations of rape or for flirtation with white women, and is always evident somewhere in the heavy punishment awaiting black men who assert or advocate the interests of their people. The FBI campaign was very much consistent with this neurotic white Southern racist tradition.7