By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — In his short lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. collected a cadre of loyal and fervent friends and colleagues. The majority of them, including Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Jesse Jackson, have been African Americans.
A notable exception to this list of King’s inner and most trusted circle was a white, Jewish attorney and businessman named Stanley David Levison. But a flurry of newly-released documents, some available through the Freedom of Information Act, is revealing not only Levison’s overwhelming influence on King, but the unrelenting and detrimental surveillance and wiretapping of both men by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Hoover’s obsession with Levison was driven by his conviction that Levison was an unrepentant communist; the resulting scrutiny of King and others close to him inadvertently also disclosed King’s lively sexual adventures, which only intensified the FBI’s loathing of and concentration on the preacher—and caused both President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to regard King with significant suspicion. (In time and grief, Bobby Kennedy became a compassionate advocate for the poor and neglected).
In the 2012 motion picture, J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, there is a key scene early on: Hoover, played by DiCaprio, confronts Robert Kennedy, played by Jeffrey Donovan: “Do you know about a man named Stanley Levison?” At long last, the critical and perilous role played by Levison in the King story is coming to light.
In spite of the fact that Levison was King’s pro bono accountant, counsel, editor, book agent, occasional ghostwriter, and constant fundraiser, the story of Levison has remained largely and strangely cryptic, unrecognized, and unacknowledged. Most Jews, though generally familiar with and proud of the Jewish role in the civil rights movement, remain unaware of Stanley Levison’s daring involvement—an exception being the renowned Rabbi Samuel Freedman, who described Levison as wearing “a spiritual yarmulke” via his social activism. (Ironically, Levison was at best a cultural Jew and essentially atheist).
When he died alone in his New York apartment at the age of 67 in 1979, Coretta Scott King declared that he was “one of my husband’s loyal and supportive friends whose contributions to the labor, civil rights, and peace movements are relatively unknown.” Clarence B. Jones, the Stanford professor and MLK’s longtime personal attorney, has repeatedly bemoaned to me the fact that “my beloved Stanley has never been properly exalted for his accomplishments. Without Stanley, Martin Luther King may have never succeeded.”
I have begun a new book to bring Levison’s unique story to light, even while explaining the reasons that the story has remain so muted. The predicament was that the draconian FBI director J. Edgar Hoover relentlessly harassed the Jewish attorney, adamant that Levison was the link between Dr. King and communism. An uncommon alliance between a Jew and an African-American thus became a dangerous friendship.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com