This image depicts a moment that is, on its surface, unremarkable. One FBI agent pauses with a soft smile as a Tennessee State Highway Patrol officer raises a phone to take his picture. Another FBI agent and a Homeland Security Investigations agent stand by and watch. Their tactical vests frame the scene. The moment feels quiet and unassuming. And yet, as you unpack its layers, it becomes unsettling.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 did not only end his life; it violently interrupted a growing movement that had begun to unify people and create a consciousness that many of our struggles and failures as a nation were interconnected. In his final years, King became increasingly explicit that racism, poverty and war were not separate issues, but interlocking systems sustained by state power. He was no longer simply asking for integration. He was challenging the moral legitimacy of the nation.
Get more stories like this in your inbox every Wednesday in The Weekly.
Subscribe to MLK50’s newsletter
and get Memphis-rooted news and insights
right-sized for your neighborhood.
Regardless of the intentions of the agents pictured here, the optics of their presence should not be read without considering the FBI’s relationship to King. It marks one of the darkest chapters in the agency’s history. For years, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, King was surveilled, harassed and targeted under COINTELPRO, a domestic counterintelligence program explicitly designed to disrupt, discredit and neutralize political movements that challenged America’s status quo.
King was wiretapped. His movements were tracked. His private life was monitored. FBI informants coordinated hotel assignments so that he would be placed in rooms wired with microphones, with agents positioned in adjacent rooms, listening through walls. Anonymous letters and tape recordings were sent to him and his family in an effort to intimidate and psychologically destabilize him. One such letter included the insinuation that he should take his own life. These are not speculative claims. They are documented facts preserved in declassified government records.
Seen through this lens, the photograph becomes more than an agent taking a souvenir photo; it becomes an image of institutional amnesia. The agent’s relaxed posture stands in stark contrast to the gravity of the site. The wreath above them, intended as a marker of mourning and remembrance, is overshadowed by the act unfolding beneath it. Memory recedes into the backdrop. History becomes scenery. Agents of an institution that once treated King as an enemy of the state now blissfully occupy his memorial space. This is how power often behaves: it absorbs history, flattens it, and renders it inert.
Images actively shape historical consciousness. Representation is never neutral. It determines whose experiences are granted legitimacy, whose histories are worth archiving and whose suffering is reduced to symbolism. The photograph also implicates the viewer. It presents a choice. We can experience the image with the same ease as the agents or we can pause, feel the discomfort and reflect.
Decades later, the conditions King so passionately spoke against still persist. Systemic racism prevails. Surveillance technologies have expanded. Policing has grown more militarized. Protest movements continue to be monitored, infiltrated and framed as threats. State propaganda sanitizes repression while criminalizing dissent. Members of our communities are being detained, deported and disappeared under the guise of safety. In this moment, we are witnessing federal agencies operate with brutal force, disregarding our laws and rights, and acting with cruelty and impunity.
King was not only a dreamer; he was a dissenter. Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to honor his legacy is not to perform reverence, but to accept responsibility. It is to continue the work he began: building solidarity amongst all oppressed peoples, committing to nonviolent direct action and confronting the systems of power he named and opposed. King’s legacy is not a closed chapter. It is an unfinished mandate.
Dylan Yarbrough is a documentary photographer and educator based in Chicago. His work focuses on social and political life in the United States, bearing witness to moments of state power and collective action.
This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.
