Revealed: FBI spied on Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin was tracked by the FBI for years over her involvement in the civil rights movement, newly unsealed documents have revealed.
The US security agency has declassified its file on the late “Queen of Soul” who died in 2018 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 76.
The 270-page document, which includes reports from over a dozen states, shows the bureau extensively monitored the singer’s campaigning and her longstanding friendships with civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr and Angela Davis.
The dossier contains notes about Franklin’s performances for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of which King was president.
The FBI described these shows, held in Memphis and Atlanta in 1967 and 1968, as “communist infiltration” events.
The FBI also tracked a performance by Franklin at a 1972 fundraiser for Davis in Los Angeles.
The file noted that the concert’s sponsors, the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, was “an organisation founded by the Communist party, United States of America”.
The file also logs several credible death threats against Franklin including one from a jail inmate in Chicago who posed as an FBI agent to threaten and extort her for $1 million.