The Targeting Of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Below is an excerpt from "The Awful Grace of God" from Counterpoint Press:

On April 3, 1968, an American Airlines flight from Atlanta to Memphis was stuck at the departure gate. The pilot made a general passenger announcement that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on board and that the airline had received a bomb threat. For everyone's safety, they would have to delay their takeoff until all the baggage had been examined.

The More Than Nine Lives of Martin Luther King Jr.

For Dr. King, the April 3 bomb threat was just one more warning. In the thousands of pages of files the FBI collected on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. there are dozens, if not hundreds, of reported threats against Dr. King's life. Almost all were similar to the plane threat: menacing but harmless. They came mostly by phone, often to newspapers, often anonymously. When law enforcement could trace these threats to their source, they often led to drunks and mentally disturbed individuals. Yet in some cases, such as the January 1956 bombing of Dr. King's home in the midst of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, the attempts were far from innocuous. Indeed, from the time of that first bombing until his assassination in 1968, law enforcement investigated serious threats against King, some foiled only by the vagaries of chance. In one sense, these ongoing public threats simply constituted a constant level of "noise"; Dr. King had no choice but to live with them if he wanted to continue his mission.

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