Editor’s note: Andrew Perzo is on vacation. The following questions and answers first ran in January.

 

Is Martin Luther King’s FBI file available to the public?

Some of the material the agency collected on King is available online, but secretly recorded tapes and their transcripts won’t be available until 2027.

Bernard Lee, King’s former assistant, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King led until his assassination in 1968, filed suit over the recordings, saying the FBI violated their rights under the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

A U.S. district court judge in 1977 ordered the FBI to turn over the records to the National Archives “to be maintained by the Archivist of the United States under seal for a period of fifty (50) years.”

“The Archivist of the United States shall take such actions as are necessary to the preservation of said tapes and documents but shall not disclose the tapes or documents, or their contents, except pursuant to a specific Order from a court of competent jurisdiction requiring disclosure,” the judge, James Lewis Smith Jr., wrote in his decision.

The surveillance was ordered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the behest of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who believed King had ties to the communist party.

The agency never linked King to the party, but it did try to use details it learned about King’s personal life to intimidate him and urge him to commit suicide.

“In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavior I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast. …,” reads a letter that the FBI sent King in November 1964, about a month after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.

“King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

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For more info: https://archive.org/details/MLKFBI.

 

Post-flash formula helps figure distance

Is there a formula or something so you can tell how close a lightning strike is to you? I heard that you can do it by seeing the lightning and counting seconds or something.

“Sound travels 1 kilometer in roughly 3 seconds and 1 mile in roughly 5 seconds,” reads a How Stuff Works page.

“When you see the flash of a lightning bolt, you can start counting seconds and then divide to see how far away the lightning struck.”

For example, with a 10-second delay between the lightning flash and the thunder, divide 10 by one of the two time spans: 10 ÷ 3 = 3 kilometers; 10 ÷ 5 = 2 miles.

For more info: http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/storms.

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The Informer answers questions from readers each Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. It is researched and written by Andrew Perzo, an American Press staff writer. To ask a question, call 494-4098 and leave voice mail, or email informer@americanpress.com.