Read the unredacted letter from the time the government tried to get MLK to kill himself

(Image credit: National Archive/Newsmakers)

published 19 January 2015

In 1964, as Martin Luther King, Jr. was preparing to travel to Europe to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, he received an anonymous letter urging him to commit suicide. The note, which has long been available in a significantly redacted version, threatens to expose King's marital infidelities using information derived from FBI surveillance and is presumed to be sent by (or at least with the approval of) the FBI.

It was not until last year that the full, unredacted version of the letter was discovered:

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(Reason)

"You are done," the letter concludes. "There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation." King disagreed, continuing his civil rights activism for four more years before his assassination in 1968.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.