In Atlanta on Saturday evening, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) hosted a “roundtable with Black women to discuss pressing issues impacting the Black community.” A day later, on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Kennedy defended his family’s surveillance of the civil rights icon, saying there was “good reason” to wiretap King.
Robert F. Kennedy served as the Attorney General while his brother, John F. Kennedy, presided in the White House. As AG, Robert Kennedy authorized J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to surveil King and other leaders of the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s.
“In the following months, Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King, and Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices in October 1963,” as Stanford University reports.
“There was good reason for them doing that at the time,” Kennedy, Jr. told POLITICO on Sunday, “because J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement and Hoover said to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist.”
Kennedy’s remarks to POLITICO followed an evening where the Independent candidate was joined by a group of Black women panelists– political spokesperson Angela Stanton King, WNBA forward Angel McCoughtry, reality star Alexia Adams, influencer Tatiana Davenport, and on-air personality Shay McCray– for a roundtable to court the Black vote. The roundtable was moderated by Christal Jordan, an Atlanta-based author and journalist, served as the moderator.
Another third party candidate in the race, Cornel West, condemned Kennedy’s comments.
As West told POLITICO, the authorization gave “an undeniable gangster like J. Edgar Hoover, who was trying to crush by any means the Black freedom struggle.”
“RKJ Jr. has to realize that this is not a question of some kind of institutional arrangement between his father and uncle and the FBI — no, no, they declared war on my people,” West continued.