COINTELPRO: The FBI's War On The Black Freedom Movement

COINTELPRO: the FBI’s War on the BlackFreedom MovementIn the last few years, public and classroom discussions have periodically been dominated by names that have piled up withalarming frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland.Some Americans, especially those that live in societies that have mostly positive relationships with police, often struggleto empathize with those that do not have the same positive relationship, and also struggle to understand a society thatcontinues to allow black lives to die at the hands of law enforcement.For the purposes of learning about COINTELPRO, we may benefit from mentioning a November 2015 Oregonian article,“Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags.” The article detailed the department’sdigital surveillance of people solely based on their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. While it is highly questionableto attach #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program), what was not noted inthe Oregonian article was the historical resonance of this story, which recalls the ugly, often illegal, treatment of blackactivists by the U.S. justice system during an earlier era of our history.Students have little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignoreCOINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program of the 1960s and ’70s that targeted a wide range of activists,including the Black freedom movement. COINTELPRO offers a treasure trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts,including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, yet it is completely absent from virtually all highschool textbooks. In your textbook – Give Me Liberty, Foner mentions it indirectly on one single page. This is the onlything Foner mentions:[Nixon’s] departure from office was followed by Senate hearings headed by Frank Churchof Idaho that laid bare a history of abusive actions that involved every administration sincethe beginning of the Cold War. In violation of the law, the FBI had spied on millions ofAmericans and had tried to disrupt the civil rights movement. The CIA had conductedsecret operations to overthrow foreign governments and had tried to assassinate foreignleaders. It had even recruited a secret army to fight in Laos, a neighbor of Vietnam. Abusesof power, in other words, went far beyond the misdeeds of a single president. Along withWatergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Vietnam War itself, the Church Committeerevelations seriously undermined Americans’ confidence in their own government. They ledCongress to enact new restrictions on the power of the FBI and CIA to spy on Americancitizens or conduct operations abroad without the knowledge of lawmakers.Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues fromthe FBI itself. According to the FBI website:The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of theCommunist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, suchas the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were endedin 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period),COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rightsand for other reasons.Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted—hook, line, and sinker—the FBI’s whitewash of COINTELPRO as“limited in scope” and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither “limited in scope” nor1

applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI’sdescription. Under then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,COINTELPRO included legal harassment, intimidation,wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail,and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case ofBlack Panther Fred Hampton and others, murder. This scopeof operations can hardly be described as “limited.” Moreover,these tactics were employed against every national civil rightsorganization, the antiwar movement (particularly on collegecampuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the AmericanIndian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.A better way to understand the wide net cast byCOINTELPRO is the final report of the Church Committee.In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in thepress about overreaching government intelligence operations,a Senate committee, chaired by Democrat Frank Church ofIdaho, began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies.Their 1976 report states: “The unexpressed major premise ofmuch of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role inmaintaining the existing social order, and that its effortsshould be aimed toward combating those who threaten thatorder.” In other words, anyone who challenged the status quoof racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society wasfair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than“limited,” the FBI’s scope potentially included all social andpolitical activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in acountry purportedly governed by the protections of free speech and assembly in the First Amendment.It may be instructive to now look at a USA Today headline from August 2014, called ““Top Officer in Iraq: ‘We mustneutralize this enemy.’” (located at enemy/13751531/). Let’s discuss: So what does the word neutralize mean in this headline?In this lesson we are going to look at a bunch of old documents from the FBI. These documents were classified top secretand not meant to be seen by everyday folks like us. Indeed, we only found out about them because a group of peaceactivists broke into an FBI office in 1971 in Media, Pennsylvania, and stuffed suitcases full of documents—selecting thenight of a much-anticipated Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight so the security guard would be distracted.Let’s analyze the first document together. It’s a memo sent by Hoover in 1967 to FBI field offices throughout thecountry. In it, Hoover instructs his agency “to assign responsibility for following and coordinating this newcounterintelligence program to an experienced and imaginative Special Agent well versed in investigations relating toblack nationalist, hate-type organizations.” As we read, let’s discuss:1. (pre-read) predict -- who are the ‘hate-type organizations’ referred to in this document?”2. (after first paragraph) were the Black Panthers a threat to American security? Did the FBI have a justifiablereason to be tracking them?” Did the Black Panthers pose a security threat or a political threat to the USgovernment?3. (after paragraphs 2-4) We must remain mindful that the Black Panthers were not the only ones targeted. Let’stake a look at the other groups on the FBI’s list. Let’s turn to the second page. Why would the FBI target activistorganizations, including those that were explicitly nonviolent, like SCLC and CORE?”2

4. Is there a similarity between the stated purpose of COINTELPRO, and the word “neutralize” that we discussedearlier?Procedures:1. You are to split into groups and analyze each document and fill out the notes chart. Tackle the documentstogether, read aloud, talk, decipher, and questioning as you go. These documents can be tough and the copyquality, with lots of redacting, is not always great. We will stop and discuss once your groups seem to begetting to the document about the FBI harassment of Martin Luther King Jr.2. We’ve clarified the goals of COINTELPRO and learned about the actual strategies, methods, and targets ofthe program, but COINTELPRO has been revealed only on paper. Now it is time to show you how theprogram damaged and destroyed people’s lives. We will view an excerpt of the documentary Eyes on thePrize—part of the episode “A Nation of Law?” that details the story of Fred Hampton. Hampton was a formerNAACP youth organizer who became the chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.Hampton embodied what was powerful and promising about the Panthers. At just 20 years of age, he helpedthe Panthers establish a breakfast for children program and a free medical clinic on the South Side of Chicago.He taught political education classes and was working to create a multiracial “rainbow coalition” of Chicagoyouth groups that included the Blackstone Rangers (a street gang), the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots,an organization of working-class white youth, often migrants from Appalachia. Like most of the leaders ofthe Black freedom movement, Hampton drew the interest of the FBI and COINTELPRO. In 1969, followingmonths of harassment, Hampton was shot and killed as he slept in his bed, his pregnant partner beside him,during a police raid on his home. He was 21 years old.3

Indicting COINTELPROThe Church Committee report concludes, in part: “The findings which have emerged from our investigation convince usthat the government’s domestic intelligence policies and practices require fundamental reform.” The Committee’sfundamental conclusion is that intelligence activities have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens. Whichconstitutional rights might the report might be referring to? Can you recall examples from our investigation of theCOINTELPRO documents that demonstrate the government infringing on these rights?Final Assessment:Prompt:Based on the documents you read and the film you watched, write at least two supporting paragraphs for the excerpt fromthe Church Committee’s conclusions. In order to do this you will need to:1.2.3.Identify protections in the Bill of Rights that were denied or abused by COINTELPRO.Identify examples from the COINTELPRO documents or the film that prove that the rights of activistswere abused.Explain and analyze how the evidence in the documents proves that a constitutional injustice occurred.Admittedly, this is a rather dry academic exercise, but it requires you to formalize your thinking about COINTELPRO asyou craft what amounts to an indictment. The task requires you to show, unequivocally and unambiguously, thatCOINTELPRO was not just unethical and unjust, but illegal too.Final ThoughtsThere are multiple connections between COINTELPR and our current lives. We could connect this with the post-9/11Patriot Act, and then-President George W. Bush’s NSA surveillance program (and every subsequent President), which hasrecently been exposed explicitly by the Edward Snowden revelations. We could also connect government tracking ofBlack Lives Matter activists and the use of social media platforms to gather intelligence on protest movements and protestleaders. It seems that the questions of surveillance and government overreach are never out of date. COINTELPRO is notjust a surveillance story. It is a story about a duplicitous and destructive government-sponsored war against Black andother activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been made public, it is a story history textbookscontinue to ignore. When activists use social media to show the nation the brutal strangulation of Eric Garner or themowing down of Tamir Rice or the deadly harassment of Sandra Bland, it becomes very difficult to fail to recognize theinjustice and racism of the criminal justice system. Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince adisbelieving wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, we can use our classroomsto shine a light on history that has been available, but systematically ignored, by our textbooks and in our curricula, ahistory that emphatically communicates: Black history matters and Black Lives Matter.4