Resource Center

Stories

The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast.

These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need.

Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:



Search results for "Martin Luther King" ...

  • Dial M for Martyr

    Investigation of the slaying of Edwin Pratt, 38; Edwin was considered to be the Martin Luther King of the Northwest by President Richard Nixon.

    Tags: Edwin Pratt; Civil Rights; Racism; Murder

    By Rick Anderson

    Village Voice Media/ Seattle Weekly

    2011

  • Double Exposure

    The author discovers that a celebrated civil rights photographer actually doubled as an FBI informant in the late 1960s. The author pieces together elements of his undercover work and finds that the informant's work included reporting on the activities of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike.

    Tags: spy; FBI; FBI informant; civil rights; confidential

    By Marc Perrusquia

    Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.)

    2010

  • "Housing Authority"

    Lewis Kamb investigates the financial troubles of a Tacoma non-profit housing development group. He reveals that the Martin Luther King Housing Development Association used public money to follow "questionable development deals" and that the association itself was in a serious financial mess.

    Tags: Martin Luther King Housing Development Association; Jeffery Bruce; MLK Way; Eric Anderson

    By Lewis Kamb

    News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.)

    2009

  • Coretta Scott King: Uncovering the FBI's Secret Spy Files

    The project reveals how law enforcement agents secretly spied on Coretta Scott King, the wife and widow of Martin Luther King, monitoring her activities and conversations for a minimum of four years after her husband's assassination. "The documents also open a historical window to the paranoid fever-dreams of government in the 60's that led to many rights abuses."

    Tags: Coretta Scott King; civil rights; law enforcement; spying; FBI; wire-tapping;

    By Mark Greenblatt; David Raziq; Keith Tomshe; Chris Henao

    KHOU-TV (Houston)

    2007

  • Marching On; Carbon Copies; Resisting the Dream; Block Buster; Passing the Torch; Tracing History

    Since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others of the Chicago Freedom Movement tried to help segregate th city back in 1966, little has changed since. The whites of Chicago are primarily living on the Northwest Side and African Americans are living on the city's South and West Sides.

    Tags: segregation; Martin Luther King; Loop neighborhood; Harold Washington; civil rights

    By Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

    Chicago Reporter

    2006

  • The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

    Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff examine the press coverage during the civil rights movement. The book is the story of how media members' coverage of the civil rights movement informed people of what was going on, and spurred them to action. It details how the national press picked up on the story, which had initially been reported mostly by black reporters and liberal Southern editors.

    Tags: Race relations; civil rights; media; press coverage; Martin Luther King; equal rights; national media

    By Gene Roberts; Hank Klibanoff

    Book

    2006

  • The Troubles at King/ Drew

    The reporters began with a basic analysis of all the hospitals in the Los Angeles County public hospital system. They found that the most severe problems and violations were happening at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, formed after the 1965 Watts riots to serve the poor of southern Los Angeles. The problems ranged from underfunding to staff misdiagnoses, accidental patient deaths, and racist politics on the hospital's Board of Supervisors. The reporters also interviewed healthcare experts and published six detailed possible solutions to the problems facing the hospital.

    Tags: healthcare; doctors; pathologist; Medical Board of California; American Medical Association; medical malpractice; civil rights

    By Steve Hymon;Mitchell Landsberg;Charles Ornstein;Tracy Weber;Julie Marquis;Robert Gauthier

    Los Angeles Times

    2004

  • Along Martin Luther King: A Passage to Black America

    Jonothan Tilove had been covering race for the Newhouse News Service for more than ten years when he approached an editor about this piece, one he had been envisioning for some time. Newhouse sent Tilove and a photographer across the country to visit the various Martin Luther King streets in different cities coast to coast. They found that if you map the nation's MLK streets, as Tilove writes, "you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six."

    Tags: race; African American; ethnicity

    By Jonothan Tilove

    Newhouse News Service

    2002

  • Dirty Pool; Firehouse Blues

    SF Weekly reports on a public works project gone down the drain. The Martin Luther King swimming pool, that was to be built in a largely poor and minority neighborhood, was one of the projects championed by the mayor. But mismanagement on the part of public works officials and the contractor selected to do the work, lead to over a year and $1.5 million in delays. The contractor won the bid by listing his wife's company as one of the minority sub-contractors. A local dentist was hired as public relations manager for the project -- for $100,000. The second story is about the renovation of a firehouse awarded to the same contractor.

    Tags: public works; city government; contracts; contractors; minority subcontractors

    By Peter Byrne

    SF Weekly

    2001

  • Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution

    The book tells a narrative history of the civil rights struggles in Birmingham, Alabama, focusing especially on the bombing of a church that killed four little girls. Using FOIA'd documents and interviews, McWhorter is able to show the FBI's complicity and involvement in racial violence and the Ku Klux Klan, police involvement in the bombing of Martin Luther King's hotel, and Commissioner Bull Connor's and church bomber Robert Chambliss.

    Tags: BOOK; civil rights; Ku Klux Klan; Birmingham; Alabama; Bull Connor; Martin Luther King; FBI

    By Diane McWhorter

    Simon & Schuster

    2001