| The FBI was pressuring the Justice Department with memos about me every
other week. Then the Justice Department put pressure on SCLC. When John Kennedy was
getting ready to go to Europe in June, he took Martin out on the White House lawn for that
walk through the Rose Garden, telling him I was an agent of a foreign government. This
latest move was coming from a heavy source, the President of the United States. It was put
on his agenda to deal with Martin on this issue. Now, I was born and grew up in the ghetto
of Detroit. I lived in Louisiana and sat behind the screens on streetcars and buses,
couldn't eat in a Walgreens drugstore restaurant, couldn't go to a public park. That's why
I was in a movement to abolish segregation. Yet you read all those books and it's like the
only reason I'm there is to "infiltrate" the thing and pick up slips from the
desk, I guess, and pass them on as an agent of a foreign government. It's ridiculous. It's
ludicrous. But McCarthyism in the early 1960's was very much alive. |
