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Newly Unveiled Photos of MLK Jr. Show Depth of NYPD’s Surveillance

Joshua Clark Davis is a historian at the University of Baltimore.

At first glance, the photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage outside New York’s City Hall suggest nothing other than a joyous public celebration. Taken on December 17, 1964, just one week after the civil rights leader had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. is seen formally receiving King as though he were a visiting head of state. Later that day, Wagner awarded the city’s Medallion of Honor to King, praising him as “a great American who has returned home after a great triumph abroad.”

But a few details about the photographs — published here for the first time — make clear that the person behind the camera harbored a far less flattering impression of King. That’s because the prints are held in the New York City Municipal Archives files of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, the New York Police Department’s former political intelligence unit, where I found them while researching for my new book, “Police Against the Movement.”

On their face, the images are mundane. King emerges from a car, greeted by two men in suits. In another, King stands with family and confidants, including his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King; his mother, Alberta Williams King; and his friend and adviser Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington. In a third shot, Coretta shakes hands with Wagner.

One thing unites the images: None of the 14 individuals who appear at close range betray the slightest hint of recognition that their picture is being taken; no one looks directly at the camera. Their lack of acknowledgment suggests that they may not have realized they were being photographed — certainly not by police. But their placement in the Bureau of Special Services “Red Squad” files make the NYPD’s sentiments clear. (These files were first discovered by city archivists in a Queens warehouse in 2016, more than three decades after the landmark Handschu federal court settlement mandated they be made available to the activist subjects of NYPD surveillance, and two years after a lawsuit by historian Johanna Fernandez called for their release. Today, the NYPD “Red Squad” files represent the most significant collection of publicly accessible police intelligence records in the United States.)

For the NYPD, Wagner’s public flattery of King mattered much less than the unfavorable comments made just one month earlier by the nation’s premier law enforcement official, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Speaking to a group of reporters in November 1964, Hoover condemned Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country,” skewering the civil rights leader for his suggestion that the Bureau only reluctantly investigated segregationist attacks on civil rights activists. Hoover’s comments may seem quaint in our current era — in which politicians launch profanity-laced fusillades at their opponents and the president of the United States posts AI-generated videos depicting him as a fighter pilot bombarding No Kings protesters with raw sewage — but that insult succeeded in further delegitimizing King and the civil rights movement in the eyes of law enforcement officials. Wagner might have overtly praised King, but police in New York covertly surveilled him. They could care less what their mayor thought, because they worshipped the FBI director as the nation’s top cop.

Just as Donald Trump demonizes leftist organizers today as domestic terrorists, both federal officials and local police in the South and North condemned civil rights activists as rioters and insurrectionists. Just as Trump falsely disparaged Zohran Mamdani as a communist in recent months (before opting not to repeat the charges in a surprisingly friendly meeting with the mayor-elect in the Oval Office), Southern officials slandered King as a communist. And just as Trump’s Justice Department is indicting his political enemies on legally specious mortgage fraud charges, state officials in Alabama unsuccessfully indicted King on felony criminal charges for income tax perjury in 1960.

But the NYPD — nor any other local police department — did not need to wait for encouragement from the feds to spy on King and his allies. A common misperception is that local police were content with physically assaulting protesters while leaving the sophisticated work of surveillance and slander to Hoover’s FBI. But police were far more experienced in spying on and sabotaging activists than we have acknowledged — so much so that the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program against “Black extremists,” launched in August 1967, should be recognized for federalizing efforts that local police departments had already undertaken to disrupt the civil rights movement.

Long before Hoover denounced King as a liar, the NYPD issued a surveillance report on the civil rights leader’s visit to Harlem in 1958, with other memos to follow in the early 1960s. Rank-and-file organizers supporting King received unwanted attention as well. As they prepared for the March on Washington — now widely celebrated across the political spectrum as a shining moment for democracy thanks to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — attendees were monitored by the NYPD, as they were by the police departments of Birmingham, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Police agencies did not limit themselves to surveilling civil rights activists. They also deployed the weaponry of deception and disruption in hopes of crippling the movement. When Herb Callender, a Congress of Racial Equality chapter leader, confronted police violence with street protests in New York in 1964, BOSS dispatched the undercover spy Ray Wood to infiltrate the Bronx organizer’s inner circle. Wood ultimately coaxed his newfound activist friends into a ludicrous scheme to perform a citizens’ arrest on Wagner, the mayor, at City Hall — which got Callendar arrested and landed him in the Bellevue psych ward.

Then, in December 1964, just three days before BOSS photographed King, Wood made contact with associates of the tiny Black Liberation Front collective. In short order, he encouraged three activists loosely connected with the group to join him in an outlandish plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Wood prodded the men for weeks and talked one of them into taking into his possession a box of dynamite purchased with department funds, which triggered the activists’ swift arrest. Glowing headlines detailing Wood’s efforts appeared on front pages across the country, and coverage included a photograph of Wood receiving a promotion for the work, his face carefully turned away to protect his identity. At that point, the FBI assumed control of the case, and federal prosecutors indicted the men on felony charges. All three were convicted on the basis of nothing more than Wood’s word and the box of dynamite, and each served time in federal prison.

The prosecution of these activists was a watershed moment where the feds and NYPD recast the broadly tolerated liberal civil rights movement that they secretly spied on into the dangerous radical extremist movement they publicly indicted on felony charges — all of which clearly anticipated not only COINTELPRO, but also today’s coordinated local–federal attacks on so-called antifa activists and domestic terrorists.

These surveillance tactics are of more than just historical significance. Local police continue to deploy weapons of political espionage against movements for justice to this day. In Trump’s first term, police in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago surveilled the same racial justice activists disparaged by the president.

There’s little reason to think that such investigations will cease. Protesters against ICE and Israel’s war on Gaza draw continued law enforcement monitoring — not least of all in New York, where the outgoing mayor has echoed the president’s criticisms of protests against ICE as attacks on law enforcement, and local organizers have increased their calls for the NYPD to disband its Strategic Response Group, a secretive unit that continues the work of BOSS by attending protests and conducting surveillance.

Words matter. Federal authorities who vocally attack protesters telegraph to law enforcement agents that they would be mistaken to not monitor and probe activists. Insults and slander give way to surveillance and invasions of privacy, which in turn lay the foundation for harassment by public officials, and in some cases result in criminal proceedings.

Time will tell which actions the federal government will take against the activists that they have recently branded as terrorists. But we can’t lose sight of the actions of the local law enforcement agencies that look to the feds for guidance — and we must recognize that the untruthful words of a president, no matter how far-fetched, have real-life consequences for the activists on the receiving end.