King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

But if the march had been too tame for Malcolm X, it was still too militant for J. Edgar Hoover and others at the FBI. A week before the march, the bureau’s domestic intelligence division had produced a sixty-eight-page report stating that the Communist Party of America—a tiny organization with only about four thousand members by that time—exerted little or no influence on the civil rights movement. Hoover did not take it well. “This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” the director scrawled on the report’s cover letter. “You contended then that Castro & his cohorts were not Communists & not influenced by Communists … I for one can’t ignore the memos re King, O’Dell, Levison … et al as having only infinitesimal effect on the efforts to exploit the American Negro by the Communists.”