As published in the Chicago Daily News, sister publication of the Chicago Sun-Times:
The FBI had it in for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The federal law enforcement agency began monitoring him in December 1955 during the Montgomery bus boycott, according to Standford University’s The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover hated the civil rights leader, believing him a communist. From 1955 until the leader’s death, the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) attempted to discredit him and even encouraged him to commit suicide.
