Harry Howard Wachtel (26 March 1917 – 3 February 1997) was a New York lawyer and businessman who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Benjamin Jones, and others within the Civil Rights Movement.

[1] Wachtel was aided by Jones and by New York Civil Rights attorneys Stanley Levison, Theodore W. Kheel and William Kunstler.

[2] Wachtel recruited William P. Rogers, who had been Eisenhower's second attorney general, to make oral arguments before the Supreme Court on King's behalf.

[3] Among King's close associates, Wachtel was often humorously compared to Levison, another Jewish lawyer from New York City who played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement.

[2] Wachtel formed an advisory group for King called the Research Committee, which included Jones, union activist Ralph Helstein, labor organizer Cleveland Robinson, historian Lawrence D. Reddick, and civil rights activist and socialist Bayard Rustin who placed the offending advertisement in the New York Times on behalf of but without the knowledge of the SCLC reverends who would ultimately become the defendants in the underlying suit; the civil rights issues in that suit were never addressed.

[6] In the face of opposition from governor Wallace and the police, Wachtel helped King plan the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

[8] The FBI, who were wiretapping Jones, attempted to disrupt the meeting by identifying Wachtel as a Communist Party member to the President.

[1] He served as vice president and legal counsel for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change from 1969 until 1982.

At different times he served as vice president for the American Foundation for Nonviolence, and as a trustee for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

[7] In preparation for the 1964 eighth annual SCLC conference in Savannah, the FBI increased its surveillance of Wachtel,[3] noting that he was reported to have been, in 1949, "an active member of the National Lawyers['] Guild," a left wing organization, and that his wife, according to one claim, "was listed as an officer of the Bath Beach Club of the King County Communist Party in 1944."