Sullivan’s memo may have been intended primarily to appease his angry boss, who hated to see King gain greater fame as a moral leader, but it also served as a reminder, as the historian David J. Garrow has written, that the FBI was guided by both paternalism and racism in its assumption that Black Americans were especially vulnerable to communist manipulation. Hoover and the FBI did not treat Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, or A. Philip Randolph the way they treated King. Among the leading civil rights activists, King, with his ties to Stanley Levison and his ability to move masses of people, was
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