A very interesting article appeared at the Atlantic about why the FBI was watching MLK’s step very closely: the civil rights leader had communist connections.

The author of the article, David J. Garrow, explains:

The crucial figure was Stanley David Levison, a white New York lawyer and businessman who first met Martin Luther King in 1956, just as the young minister was being catapulted to national fame as a result of his role in the remarkable bus boycott against racially segregated seating in Montgomery, Alabama. The FBI knew, in copious firsthand detail from the Childs brothers, that Levison had secretly served as one of the top two financiers for the Communist Party USA in the years just before he met King. The Childs brothers’ direct, personal contact with Levison from the mid-1940s to 1956 was sufficient to leave no doubt whatsoever that their reports about his role were accurate and truthful. Their proximity to Levison also gave them direct knowledge of his disappearance from CPUSA financial affairs in the years after 1956.

And then:

Stanley Levison was forty-four years old when he first met the twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., in 1956. Stanley and Roy had grown up in Far Rockaway; Stanley attended the University of Michigan before obtaining two law degrees from St. John’s University, in Queens, in 1938 and 1939. Medically deferred from military service, he spent the war years managing New York tool-and-die firms—Unique Specialties Corporation and Colonial Tool and Machine—before buying the New Jersey Ford dealership in 1945 and then overseeing a host of import-export, property-management, and industrial-production companies whose overlapping relationships and countless financial transfers proved so complicated as to preclude any complete FBI analysis of Levison’s little empire. Divorced from his first wife in 1942, after a three-year marriage, Levison soon remarried, and by the mid-1950s was the father of a young son.

When Ella Baker and her fellow African-American civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin introduced Levison to King, a special relationship quickly blossomed; from the late 1950s until King’s death, in 1968, it was without a doubt King’s closest friendship with a white person. In December of 1956 and January of 1957 Levison served as Rustin’s primary sounding board as Rustin drew up the founding-agenda documents for what came to be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Like Rustin, Levison, and Baker, King and a network of his southern African-American ministerial colleagues hoped that the SCLC could leverage the success of the Montgomery bus boycott into a South-wide attack on segregation and racial discrimination.

By April of 1957 Levison, like Rustin, was counseling King about the first major national address that King would deliver—from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on May 17. Over the ensuing months Levison negotiated a book contract for King’s own account of the Montgomery boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, and then offered King line-by-line criticism and assistance in editing and polishing the book’s text. Levison also took charge of other tasks, ranging from writing King’s fundraising letters to preparing his tax returns.

In other words, although Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a communist himself, he was very close with someone who was a communist.

The Kennedys were informed about the MLK - Levison connection and tried to warn the civil rights leader:

Kennedy and his aide Burke Marshall, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, regarded the FBI’s information as both dependable and dangerous. They were told nothing of Jack or Morris except that the FBI’s informants were very well placed. But the pressing questions were about Levison and King, not about the identity of the source. By early 1962 King was the leading symbol and spokesperson for the southern black freedom struggle. Levison, the FBI told Kennedy and Marshall, had recently installed as head of the SCLC’s small New York office a young African-American man named Jack O’Dell, whose publicly documented record of affiliation with the CPUSA had drawn the attention of hostile congressional committees just a few years earlier. Kennedy’s inner circle resolved that every Administration aide acquainted with King would warn him fervently but vaguely about the political danger of continuing his association with Levison and O’Dell. King politely accepted and then privately dismissed warning after warning.

Kennedy approved wiretapping Levison’s office; “the FBI added a bug on its own authority. At that moment the idea wasn’t that MLK was a communist, but that Levison might try to manipulate him… slowly. When Levison told MLK that Jack O’Dell (communist) would make a fine administrative assistant in Atlanta for Martin Luther King Jr., the suspicions grew.

In mid 1963 Kennedy again warned MLK. He told him to get rid of Levison and O’Dell. O’Dell was indeed let go, but MLK wasn’t willing to severe ties with Levison. The latter told him that they had to break, because the movement needed Kennedy, but MLK wasn’t willing to give in and they agreed to publicly break with each other, but stay in contact via a third person.

In the end MLK too was tapped, and the White House quickly found out that he wasn’t… as faithful to his wife as he should’ve been. More importantly, though, they realized that Levison remained a close adviser and that he and MLK continued to stay in contact.

And then, MLK was shot.

The sad conclusion: “If the Childs brothers had never signed on with the FBI, or if Jack had not heard about his old comrade Levison’s newfound friendship with Martin Luther King, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations would most likely have embraced both King and the entire southern black freedom struggle far more warmly than they did.”

And it would have been different if they would have done that.