(CNN) -- Yale Historian Beverly Gage recently uncovered the first copy of an unredacted "anonymous" FBI letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. telling him to kill himself. Click here to see the blacked out version of the FBI threat letter There are dozens of such menacing memos and letters held in the U.S. archives that detail the FBI's systematic plot to "neutralize" the civil rights leader. In retrospect it may be horrifying to know that the government had such a plan, but historians say the plot did have an upside. FBI wiretaps have "given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was," as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar.FBI memo called King the "most dangerous ... effective Negro leader" in U.S.Hidden wiretaps turned up no Communist Party ties, just extramarital affairsJ. Edgar Hoover's contempt for MLK's private behavior shows in private memos
The almost fanatical zeal with which the FBI pursued King is disclosed in tens of thousands of _ memos from the 1960s. See _'s thoughts on MLK's success, in his own handwriting.