COINTELPRO—The FBI Targets the Black Freedom Struggle, 1956-1971
From 1956-1971, the FBI operated a covert, illegal program that targeted the system’s political opponents in the U.S. The program, COINTELPRO (for COunter INTELligence PROgram), was used to infiltrate, harass, disrupt, smear, and murder or destroy individuals and organizations. COINTELPRO targeted the Black civil rights and liberation movements, communists, socialists, nationalist independence movements, the New Left (student radicals, the antiwar movement), and gay rights and environmental activists.
The FBI was one arm of the U.S. government’s repressive apparatus used to crush opposition during the 1960s and early 1970s. COINTELPRO was the main way the agency went after dissidents and organized opposition. It had been developed by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, from several programs that contained secret databases of people Hoover believed were enemies of the U.S. By 1970 these databases contained 26,000 names that Ward Churchill said was anyone “who fight(s) for peace and social justice in the United States.”
This secret program was only discovered in the early 1970s after some activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and released the documents they had obtained.(3)
Read more about COINTELPRO from the American Crime Series here.
Notes:
1. We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America, Rhodri Jefferies-Jones, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 130.
2. The COINTELPRO Papers, Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, Boston, 1990, p. xiv.
3. On the night of March 8, 1971, when the nation was paying attention to the first heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, eight antiwar protesters burglarized an FBI office in Media, Pa., just outside Philadelphia, taking thousands of documents. The stolen material included the secret case histories of thousands of Americans. Much of it was malicious gossip about things like “sexual deviance and race-mixing,” two of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite subjects. Betty Medsger of the Washington Post received some of the files, and she was the first to break the story. She noticed a routing slip with the word “COINTELPRO” on it, but did not know what it meant. NBC reporter Carl Stern sought to find out what this word meant, and he obtained more documents under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed the full scope of COINTELPRO.
