It was on this day in 1964 that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a personal meeting with J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI was convinced that the minister was a Communist and had financial ties to Russia, and therefore they had been conducting an investigation (including heavy use of wiretaps) against him for the past year. The previous month the agency had publicly criticized the civil rights leader (calling him the “most notorious liar in the country” during a press conference ) and MLK had requested that the director personally explain the comment. Hoover agreed to meet and the discussion was cordial with the two men agreeing to a “truce”. However, that same day a package…containing secretly recorded audiotapes of King committing adultery…was delivered to King’s hotel room. A note was also enclosed, urging him to commit suicide or face public embarrassment. Years later, during a Senate investigation into FBI domestic surveillance, it was discovered that the recordings had come from the Bureau.
The earliest event that Wiki says happened on this day is “800 – Charlemagne judges the accusations against Pope Leo III in the Vatican” and the most recent is “2009 – The Treaty of Lisbon, which amends the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, which together comprise the constitutional basis of European Union, comes into effect.”
A couple other things that also took place on this day are:
1878 – First telephone is installed in the White House.
1955 – Rosa Parks is arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white man.
Happy birthday to Jared Fogle, Sarah Silverman, Keith Thibodeaux, Bette Midler, John Densmore, Eric Bloom, Chuck Low, and Woody Allen.