WILLIAM C. SULLIVAN
(William Cornelius Sullivan)
Hoover and the FBI were supposed to be enforcing Federal law. However, they could not find any criminal activity on the part of Martin Luther King Jr. They regarded the Civil Rights Movement as a revolutionary threat to the nation. See {620621} and {74219} . So the FBI in an incredible abuse of power, had a meeting of its top officials to plan a strategy for destroying King as a Negro leader in America. We look back on this era where officials who were never elected by anyone, and having no authority from an elected official, took it upon themselves to decide who leaders in America would be.
This memo is yet another example of the racism and paranoia about Civil Rights within the FBI. The Director himself was a racist {620620} . Sullivan was reacting to the Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream” speech during the march on Washington just before. What made King so dangerous was that he was demanding equal rights for Black and he was very influential with the Black community. Therefore, in FBI logic at the time, King was a great danger to the United States. See {74219} for another example.
William Cornelius Sullivan was a Federal Bureau of Investigation official who directed the agency's domestic intelligence operations from 1961 to 1971. Sullivan was forced out of the FBI at the end of September 1971 due to disagreements with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The following year, Sullivan was appointed as the head of the Justice Department's new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which he led from June 1972 to July 1973. Sullivan died in a hunting accident in 1977. His memoir of his thirty-year career in the FBI, written with journalist Bill Brown, was published posthumously by commercial publisher W. W. Norton & Company in 1979.
