In the Richmond, Virginia area? Join MuckRock, the Community Justice Network, and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for a public records workshop, book reading, and other events to celebrate the life of Lillie A. Estes.

On the 48th anniversary of the break-in at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Media, Pennsylvania field office, reporter Betty Medsger reflects on the role of whistleblowers in the pursuit of truth and government transparency.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s approach to Black History Month could charitably be described as somewhat cynical, often using it as an opportunity to recruit minorities and expand the Agency’s contacts.

While a not-insignificant percentage of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities under Director J. Edgar Hoover were driven by personal vendettas, few were as well-known – or as publicly vicious – as Hoover’s feud with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. That clash quite literally came to a head on December 1, 1964, when, at the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, Hoover invited King to FBI headquarters for their first - and only - face to face meeting, captured in a ten-page memo in King’s file.

We’re celebrating the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s birthday with a look at five different ways MuckRock users have used FOIA to bring shed light on the Bureau’s 11 decades of skulking around in America’s shadows.

Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Five years prior, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been killed by a rifle in Dallas, Texas. The deaths of both men generated conspiracies of government complicity, which in 1976 led to the establishment of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. A copy of its final report is preserved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives.

As the third highest ranking official in the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach worked some of the Bureau’s biggest cases, including the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. However, you wouldn’t know that if you were just going off DeLoach’s own FBI file, which has more about his cholesterol levels in 1968 than leads on the civil rights leader’s murder.

From defending the man who had blackmailed him out of the Southern Christian Leadership Council to serving as a character witness for Ariel Sharon, records from the Central Intelligence Agency and his Federal Bureau of Investigation file show civil rights icon Bayard Rustin was a man who couldn’t easily be categorized.

A little known but extremely important part of the history of domestic surveillance by intelligence agencies is the CACTUS program. CACTUS was a highly classified channel used by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to transmit information about “the New Left, Black Militants and related matters.” This channel was never disclosed in the Church Committee reports, even when the reports discuss information that was transmitted through CACTUS.

Bayard Rustin was many things: He was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, an advocate for Soviet Jewry, and, “a convicted homosexual,” according to his Federal Bureau of Investigation file. Despite being what many would consider a textbook lefty, Rustin also moonlighted for the Central Intelligence Agency. While that might seem like an irreconcilable contradiction for a man who sat in prison for two years because he refused to serve in World War II, but contradictions aren’t there to be reconciled, they’re there to confound.