Authored by Jeff Louderbeck via The Epoch Times,
Whereas in Atlanta for a voter rally on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked about his household’s relationship with the civil rights chief and stated that “there was good cause” for his father, Robert F. Kennedy, to authorize FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s to wiretap Dr. King when John F. Kennedy was president.
Earlier than delivering a speech on the occasion, the place he collected signatures to get on the Georgia presidential normal election poll, Mr. Kennedy advised Politico that his father, who was legal professional normal, granted permission for Mr. Hoover to electronically monitor Dr. King’s conversations “as a result of J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the civil rights motion and Hoover stated to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist.”
“My father gave permission to Hoover to wiretap them so he may show that his suspicions about King have been both proper or improper. I feel, politically, they needed to do it,” Mr. Kennedy stated.
Mr. Kennedy famous that his father and his uncle knew that Mr. Hoover was “a racist” and “left little question the place he stood on these points” concerning civil rights organizations.
If President Kennedy had been elected to a second time period, he would have fired Mr. Hoover, the 2024 unbiased presidential candidate stated, including that be believes his uncle alerted Dr. King of Mr. Hoover’s wiretaps in a non-public dialog.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Dr. King, who was born and raised in Atlanta, was shot and killed by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tenn. on April 4, 1968.
After talking at a marketing campaign occasion in Los Angeles throughout his bid to safe the Democrat Social gathering’s presidential nomination, Robert F. Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968. He died the subsequent day.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. Kennedy posted a video on X, previously Twitter, sharing tales in regards to the relationship between his father and Dr. King.
In 1967, Dr. King delivered a speech “during which he got here out in opposition to the Vietnam Warfare,” Mr. Kennedy stated within the video.
It was an unpopular stance amongst different civil rights leaders who thought Dr. King ought to focus solely on the civil rights motion, Mr. Kennedy defined.
Dr. King famous that black troopers represented “half of the paratrooper models in Vietnam” and black troopers have been dying for freedoms in Vietnam that they didn’t have in their very own nation,” Mr. Kennedy stated.
“He additionally stated that the poverty program which Lyndon Johnson and my uncle had launched was being impoverished itself due to the reason for the Vietnam Warfare.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes the hand of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the signing of the Civil Rights Act whereas officers look on in Washington on July 2, 1964. (Hulton Archive/Getty Photos)
A yr after delivering that handle, Dr. King was murdered, and Mr. Kennedy stated his father broke the information to a crowd in Indianapolis.
“My father was working in opposition to the Vietnam Warfare at the moment and was going right into a ghetto in Indianapolis, Indiana. The sheriff warned him that he shouldn’t go as a result of folks didn’t know that Martin Luther King Jr. was useless, and the sheriff and the native police believed they’d lose management of the town when the black inhabitants realized about his dying,” Mr. Kennedy stated.
Robert F. Kennedy ignored the sheriff’s warning and climbed on a flatbed truck to ship an impromptu speech that his son calls among the finest addresses he had delivered.
After telling the viewers that Dr. King was shot and killed, Mr. Kennedy “did one thing that he by no means had accomplished earlier than, which is he talked publicly about his brother’s dying.,” his son stated within the video.
“He reminded the group that his brother was killed by white males as properly. And he known as on the group to do one thing that was counterintuitive, which was to react peacefully. Quoting the Greek poet Aeschylus, he stated that our job now as People was to “tame the savageness of males and make mild the lifetime of this world.”
Greater than 100 cities have been ravaged by riots that night time, however not Indianapolis.
“It was the one main metropolis that prevented rioting that night time. Folks have attributed that to my dad’s speech,” Mr. Kennedy stated.
“When my dad died in 1968, two months later, after Dr. King, Coretta King was within the hospital with me and my siblings, [in] Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. And my father died. After which she was on the airplane with us, which took my father’s casket again to New York, and she was on the practice with us after we introduced his physique on a seven-and-a-half-hour practice trip with two and a half million folks on the observe to Washington DC.”
On the Atlanta voter rally on Jan. 14, Mr. Kennedy was joined by Angela Stanton-King, the goddaughter of Alveda King, who’s Dr. King’s niece.
Ms. Stanton-King, who works for Mr. Kennedy’s marketing campaign, was pardoned by President Donald Trump after a conviction in 2006 for conspiracy to defraud the federal government in reference to a luxurious automotive theft operation.
In 2020, she registered as a Republican and unsuccessfully ran in opposition to civil rights chief and incumbent Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.).
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