In 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized Hoover’s FBI for refusing to prosecute white supremacists who had burned down black churches in Albany, Georgia. Hoover took King’s criticisms in the press as a personal insult. It was an offense that Hoover would never forget and led to him calling King “the most notorious liar in the country.” J. Edgar Hoover was not a man to let things go. He ordered “his bureau” to investigate King and soon discovered that the civil rights activist was associated with something he–at the height of the Cold War–considered far more dangerous to the security of the nation than peaceful protests: Communism.