Why does the FBI headquarters still bear J. Edgar Hoover’s name?

When the FBI headquarters was being built, and named after the recently-deceased director, Hoover was still generally held in high esteem by most of the public. That has long-ago ceased being the case; indeed just two years after it opened in 1975, basic truths of Hoover’s illegal, highly-intrusive surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. were being exposed. In a rare case of an article in the MSM — in this case the Chicago Sun-Times — that asserted Hoover’s FBI being involved in the murder of two Black Panthers, on Monday of this week a reader wrote the following “letter to the editor” that posed the question I’ve used in the headline above:

“In the current, ongoing era of racial reckoning, many symbols of America’s racist past, including statues of slave-holding Confederates, are being taken down. Government buildings named after slave owners are being re-named. In Washington D.C., the FBI’s headquarters bears the name of J. Edgar Hoover. As more and more is revealed about his racist motivations, it is clear that Hoover was at least as noxious as Confederate General Robert E. Lee, whose statues have recently been removed. That being so, why does the FBI headquarters still bear Hoover’s name?”  ~ Ted Z. Manuel, Hyde Park, Illinois, in a “letter to the editor” of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, February 1, 2021.

Mr. Manuel’s complete letter (here) was in response to an article in the Sun-Times January 24th edition, titled “The killing of two Black Panthers, the secrets of the FBI — and our nation’s long fight for police reform,” within which it is asserted that ” . . . the newly released FBI documents shed new light on a scandalous raid on a Black Panthers apartment on Chicago’s West Side on Dec. 4, 1969 . . . The new records reveal that complicity in the raid ran higher up the ladder at the FBI than previously confirmed, though even now the full truth remains a secret. The released records are full of blacked-out redactions.”

The focal point of the article related to how the FBI, acting through local authorities and police, led a vicious raid on the apartment of two Black Panthers members, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, in a brutally vicious 1969 raid that resulted in their deaths.

The article points out that the FBI-induced attack by Chicago police involved their firing a barrage of more than 90 bullets into the apartment, then falsely claiming that they had been fired on themselves. The article continues, noting that the recently released file of FBI memos and reports:

• ” . . . provides the first direct documentation that William C. Sullivan, director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, and George Moore, head of the Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, played key roles in planning the raid, as well as in covering it up.
• “All we had was the Chicago FBI office’s involvement and unnamed faces in Washington, rather than the actual participants — highest-level guys,” said Chicago lawyer Flint Taylor, one of the lawyers, along with Jeff Haas and members of the People’s Law Office, who led a 13-year federal civil rights lawsuit after the raid. “It is a remarkable difference.”
• We now know that Sullivan and Moore knew the informant, William O’Neal, who provided a diagram of the Black Panther apartment, and O’Neal’s FBI control agent, Roy Martin Mitchell. [Assistant Directors] Sullivan and Moore were involved in the entire lethal debacle. (Emphasis added by author).”

Axiomatically, it may be presumed that all of it was merely one of many such incidents emanating from Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, clearly aimed at charismatic black leaders like Fred Hampton. The goal was to “neutralize” them before they became as popular as Martin Luther King Jr. had become by the time he had finally been “neutralized” just 19 months before Hampton’s murder.

It is lamentable that a number of books were written by high-level FBI officials — like the aforementioned William C. Sullivan, as well as Cartha DeLoach — which were plainly their attempts to hide their own criminality. But in the case of Sullivan, his mysterious death (supposedly by a hunter who mistook him for a deer) might have been a case of Karma, many researchers believe that he was among the many witnesses (including five other FBI officials) murdered by people who suspected that he might “sing like a canary” at the 1977 House Select Committee on Asassinations (HSCA). Those “people” could only be others who held high level positions within the same “law enforcement” organizations who feared their own exposure, and the inevitable recriminations that would certainly follow.

Recently, the topic of building a new FBI headquarters has been raised anew — after President Trump, who had taken that issue off the priority list, left office. If that should be put back onto the agenda, it may finally solve the problem, though indirectly and without an official acknowledgement of what should be a public atonement.