A Study of the FBI's Surveillance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1941–1965)

This article points to previously undetected evidence demonstrating that Herbert Hill, labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the 1950s to the 1970s, informed for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on his former political associates in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). It shows that the FBI subsequently sought to use Hill in 1962 to obstruct a rumored fraternization between the NAACP and the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants (CAMD), an organization initiated by SWP members in support of the black militant advocate of armed self-defense Robert F. Williams and the movement he led in Monroe, North Carolina. The article concludes by posing a series of questions raised by the evidence and connecting the matter to recent scholarship on the Cold War and civil rights activism.

Established in 1908 as the investigative division of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon moved beyond law enforcement to include monitoring of radical activists and organizations and then after 1936 to conducting “intelligence” investigations. The purpose of the latter was not simply to anticipate planned espionage and sabotage threats but also to monitor those who could influence the political culture. The targets included Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors; German émigré writers and playwrights; prominent writers (including prominent sociologists); and liberal and radical journals of opinion (The Nation; I. F. Stone's Weekly). In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized a special index, the Reserve Index, to list for possible detention any individuals who “are in a position to influence others against the national interest or are likely to furnish financial or other material aid to subversive elements due to their subversive associations or ideology.” Hoover specified that the Index should include “writers, lecturers, news men and others in the mass media field,” and, as one example, he cited the author Norman Mailer. Two responses by senior FBI officials highlight the capriciousness of the FBI's surveillance operations. First, after Hoover learned that he himself was allegedly the model for one of the characters in Walt Kelley's comic strip Pogo, her ordered his aides to conduct a content analysis of the strip to ascertain whether the portrayal was positive or negative. Second, after learning that Hollywood actor Rock Hudson was gay, FBI officials worried that Hudson might play an FBI agent in a movie.In this vein, William Maxwell's recently published monograph F. B. Eyes offers the promise of expanding our understanding of FBI surveillance operations and the role that race played in determining the targets of FBI investigations. To research this issue, Maxwell filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking all FBI files on “Afro-modernist writers” (his characterization) listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He eventually obtained 51 files while discovering that the FBI had no records on 53 other writers and that the records on an additional six either had been destroyed or were “missing” when transferred to the National Archives. In the introduction, Maxwell posits that during the years 1919 through 1972 “a who's who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted by Hoover's FBI” (p. 3).As it turns out, Maxwell's principal contribution to FBI scholarship is his decision to post 49 of the accessible FBI files online at http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes. Unfortunately, his own analysis of these files is disappointingly thin. For one, his cursory account of the contents of the FBI files on these 51 African American writers resembles the contents of FBI files on other writers and political activists: namely, information on their personal conduct and political beliefs and associations and at times a close analysis of their published writing. Second, these files confirm that they were compiled because of FBI officials’ ideological conviction that “subversive” writers could possibly influence their readers and not because the writer violated federal laws (including espionage and sabotage). Maxwell, however, does not fully develop this theme, which is not the central focus of his at times rambling, impressionistic assessment of African-American literature and the FBI's response.

William Albertson, who was executive secretary of the New York Communist Party and a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was framed as an informant for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1964. Only in recent years have newly released FBI records enabled scholars to understand why the FBI undertook the operation and how much damage it did to the CPUSA. In 1964 two leaks from the FBI hinted that the bureau had a high-level informant in the CPUSA who was providing information about secret Soviet subsidies. The leaks were accurate and endangered one of the FBI's most successful intelligence operations, Operation Solo, which involved the use of two brothers, Morris Childs and Jack Childs, who were confidants of CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall, as key informants. The framing of Albertson was intended to deflect CPUSA and Soviet attention from the real FBI informants to a bogus one. The ploy succeeded. The forged documents the FBI planted convinced Hall and other senior CPUSA officials that Albertson was the FBI informant. Despite Albertson's vehement denials and energetic defense, he was expelled. The CPUSA thought it had eliminated the informant, and the Childs brothers were able to continue in their role until old age forced their retirement in 1977.

<i>F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature</i>. William J. Maxwell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. x+367.

He who attacks lynching attacks one of the oldest, one of the most deeply rooted of the institutions peculiarly American, one eminently respectable in origin, which is regarded by its adherents, not as in opposition to the established laws, but rather as a supplement to them – a species of common law which is as old as the country.– Roy Nash, 1916

Scientists under Surveillance: The FBI Files

This chapter sheds light on the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which launched a campaign in the mid-1930s against torture and forced confessions in the South. The NAACP led legal battles to combat discrimination against African American citizens in the areas of education, labor, voting rights, and the judicial system. Cases the NAACP financially supported and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court include Brown v. Mississippi, the Chambers v. Florida, the Lyons case, and the Groveland Four. The NAACP aimed to draw attention to lynching violence and characterizes the barbaric acts to American nation as a strategy to bring awareness of racial discrimination against African American.

<i>The First Counterspy: Larry Haas, Bell Aircraft, and the FBI’s Attempt to Capture a Soviet Mole</i> by Kay Haas and Walter W. Pickut

The FBI's Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau's Crusade against Smut. Douglas M. Charles. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. 200 pp. $24.95 hbk. plank: Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced. Indeed, in July of that year, the Daily Caller reported that a top adviser for Mitt Romney promised Patrick Trueman, current head of Morality in Media and former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, that if elected president, Romney would ramp up federal obscenity prosecutions after years of relaxed oversight.If Romney had prevailed and, in turn, made good on his promise, it certainly would not have been the first time that politicians, moralists, and federal law enforcement officials triangulated around sexually explicit expression during times of sociocultural shifts. Douglas M. Charles makes that abundantly clear in his fascinating and wellwritten new book, The FBI's Obscene File.Charles, assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who describes himself in the preface as an FBI scholar, charts, in chronological fashion, a century of involvement and intervention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with all varieties of sexual materials. These range from filthy images on playing cards to nudity in plays like Oh! Calcutta to sexual acts in movies like Deep Throat and even to the generally unintelligible lyrics of the Kingsman's song Louie Louie. Some of the more notable public figures who play prominent roles in The FBI's Obscene File include J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Charles Keating, the last of whom gained widespread attention in the 1980s not for his assault on sexual content, but for his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association scandal.The centerpiece of the documentation from which Charles draws much of his material is the administrative portion of the FBI's Obscene File, which Charles obtained in redacted form via a Freedom of Information Act request. The other portion of the Obscene File, which was created in 1942 and eventually abandoned during the administration of President Bill Clinton and FBI head Louis Freeh, consisted of a vast library of sexually explicit material housed in the FBI's vaunted crime laboratory. The fact that the FBI possessed its very own large collection of pornography-it was so large that, on several occasions, parts of it had to be incinerated to make way for newer material-was always a source of potential embarrassment for the Bureau. One of the primary purposes of this collection of content was as a reference point against which to compare new specimens of obscene material to identify their sources.But the Obscene File was often misused and abused over the years by the FBI, from cracking down on the of African Americans during the 1940s-so-called race music featuring suggestive lyrics-to ferreting out gays in government service. …

After World War II, South Africa, swimming against the tide of history, attempted to annex the adjacent international mandate of South West Africa (present-day Namibia). Pretoria was confi dent of UN approval for such an unprecedented move—too confident, as it turned out. Into the breach—and into the United Nations—stepped an unlikely duo, the Reverend Michael Scott and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to stop the absorption of 350,000 Africans into a white-supremacist state. This seemingly odd couple—a maverick, communist-leaning Anglican minister and a staid, staunchly anti-communist bureaucratic organization—launched a skillful assault in the UN to strip the veneer of legitimacy away from South Africa's annexationist scheme. Within the span of five years, the NAACP and Scott had carved out the political space and established the right of nongovernmental organizations and individual spokesmen to penetrate the boundaries of national sovereignty, speak before an international audience, and in the process reshape the UN, despite its founders' intentions, into an arena that could incorporate the voices of the stateless and the dispossessed.

This article explains how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) partnered with African American minister Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux to discredit and neutralize Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The Elder, the nation's first minister (black or white) to have his own weekly television show, colluded with the Bureau to shape public opinion against King and cast doubt upon King's religious commitments and activities. Michaux was, what I call, a Bureau Clergyman: a minister who was an FBI “Special Service Contact” or on the Bureau's “Special Correspondents Lists.” Far from secret informants, black and white male clergy in these official Bureau programs enjoyed very public and cooperative relationships with the FBI and were occasionally “called into service” to work in concert with the FBI. The FBI called upon Michaux and he willingly used his status, popular media ministry, and cold war spirituality to publically scandalize King as a communist and defend the Bureau against King's criticisms. In the end, the Elder demonized King, contested calls for black equality under the law, and lionized the FBI as the keeper of Christian America. The story moves the field beyond the very well known narratives of the FBI's hostility towards religion and reveals how the Bureau publicly embraced religion and commissioned their clergymen to help maintain prevailing social arrangements. Michaux's relationship with the FBI also offers a window into the overlooked religious dimensions of the FBI's opposition to King, even as it highlights how black clergy articulated and followed competing ideologies of black liberation during the civil rights movement.

Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood and American Culture explores the relationship between mainstream media content and the construction of violent masculine norms within contemporary United States society. Anti-violence educator Jackson Katz expands upon the themes of the original film, Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, (Jhally et al. 1999) adding more in-depth analysis, updated exemplars, as well as new information to this second film. What has remained the same is that Katz asks the audience to challenge those aspects of media that he contends teach boys and men to use aggression and violent behavior as defining aspects of their identity. Also like the first film, Tough Guise 2 examines mass shootings, violence against women, homophobia, sexual violence, and redemptive violence to emphasize that violence is largely a taught behavior. According to Katz, boys andmen in the current U.S. culture must put up a front, a tough guise, which hides their vulnerabilities or those individual characteristics that are not considered masculine. Those who fall short of being considered masculine are at risk of being subjected to ridicule and shaming. The tough guise standard cuts across lines of race and class within the U.S. Gun violence, particularly male-initiated gun violence within in the U.S., is a major portion of both films. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provides evidence of not only an increase in firearm-related violence in the U.S, but a clear gender disparity in the perpetration of these acts (FBI 2013; 2014a, b). Males commit the vast majority of these acts. However, as Katz illustrates, the media tends to present the information in a gender-neutral manner. Headlines use words such as shooter, teenager, suspect, kid, murderer or phrases such as kids killing kids or youth violence to describe the identity of the person committing the shooting. When girls or women commit violent acts, Katz points out that their gender becomes the story. According to the FBI, the estimated homicide rate in the U.S. has declined from 5.0 per 100,000 population in 2009 to 4.5 per 100,000 population in 2013 (FBI 2014b). However, over this same period of time, the proportion of homicides committed by firearm has increased from 66.9 to 69.0 % (FBI 2014a). Although gender was unknown for 28.0 % of the offenders, the majority of homicides were committed by male offenders (64.3 %) (FBI 2014a). In addition, according to the FBI’s study on active shooter incidents, 160 active shooter incidents have occurred resulting in 1043 casualties (486 deaths and 557 wounded). The data show not only an increase in incidents, from an annual average of 6.4 incidents in 2000– 2006 to an average of 16.4 incidents in 2007–2013, but also an increase in casualties (annual average of 35.3 casualties in 2000–2006 compared to an annual average of 113.7 casualties in 2007–2013). An overwhelming majority of these active shooter incidents were committed by male perpetrators (154/160; 96.2 %) (FBI 2013). How can this gender disparity in homicide and active shooter incidents be explained? Katz argues that this gender disparity is typically explained by focusing on evolutionary and biological underpinnings of violence. From an evolutionary perspective males have been programmed to be violent due to their identification as hunters and protectors. The biological perspective focuses on examining the role of * Melissa Bell mbell@chatham.edu

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO LEARN THAT THROUGH THE 1920S AND 1930s, national government insisted it had no jurisdiction to investigate lynching and instead waged a campaign against black militancy. greater surprise to historians comes from period between 1940 and 1952, when Department of Justice (DOJ) abruptly reversed itself and sent agents of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into South to investigate reported lynchings. (1) For good reason, history has not been kind to FBI. While some Americans had cast a wary eye at FBI since its inception 1908, most serious blow to FBI's image came 1960s when civil rights workers complained bitterly agents would not protect activists from racist vigilantes but preferred to investigate civil rights advocates' communist connections instead. Congressional investigation subsequently confirmed FBI misconduct and did so at a time when state generally became unloved, to use Martin J. Wiener's term. Many observers concluded FBI, suffused with a political conservatism controlled its performance, had always been disinclined to investigate lynchings. Such concerns led one writer to roughly dismiss FBI as that crook-, commie-, and coon-fighting bureaucracy and to say when Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded FBI's jurisdiction to include civil rights violations, change came in theory if rarely practice. No doubt federal government compiled a shameful record during 1960s, but scholars have too often allowed formulations derived from decade and later to color their understanding of FBI's entire history. (2) It is not purpose of this article merely to argue 1940s national government fought lynching more than theoretically and investigated reported incidents invariably rather than rarely. Instead, this article looks at one feature rise of administrative state, an incident at beginning of dramatic enlargement of national government's power to police crime. In particular, this article examines distinct theme proposed by Robert Post: the growth of belief nation, and not states, was a natural unit of democratic self-determination. Prohibition represented a false start at making nation into unit, a failed attempt by U.S. government to articulate a supposed agreement by most Americans, across state lines and regional divisions, liquor had to be banned. Seven years after effort collapsed, U.S. government tried again, this time promoting opposition to mob violence based on constitutional rights came to be more real than evangelical moralism supposedly underlay Prohibition and thereby contributed to a more enduring nationalization of crime control. To explain how this happened requires looking at why Department of Justice first found it constitutionally impossible to investigate lynching, how department then discovered its constitutional authority to combat lynching, and how promoting national rights expanded administrative state. (3) Americans' ideas about law enforcement have stemmed from three sources evolved as nation broadened its conception of popular sovereignty. In nineteenth century authority to control crime lay neighborhoods and communities. In this highly localized world where local jurisdictions struggled to maintain order with little outside help, Americans sometimes rationalized lynching as so-called lynch law, a constitutionally legitimate expression of popular sovereignty outside statutory law. Owen Wister explained concept his novel Virginian, a dialogue between characters named Molly Wood and Judge Henry. Wood begins by defining lynching as when [o]rdinary citizens take law their own hands. judge responds, Out of whose hands do they take law? Wood answers, The court's. In response to further questioning, she says Constitution made courts and then concedes people made Constitution. …

The article explores current issues in the foreign experience of legal regulation of corporate ethics, using the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a case study. It outlines that the need to reform the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) is driven by the necessity to enhance corporate culture, employee ethics, and public trust in the agency. It is emphasized that the regulatory framework governing corporate ethics within the FBI is classified and available exclusively to its personnel. The study finds that the FBI’s corporate ethics are grounded in values such as strict adherence to the U.S. Constitution, compassion, leadership, respect for the dignity of all citizens the Bureau is tasked to protect, justice, personal integrity, institutional integrity, personal accountability, and answerability to senior leadership. It is established that the norms governing corporate ethics at the FBI are set out in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Act and its internal code of conduct. The formation of corporate culture is shown to begin as early as training at the FBI Academy. The article describes the FBI’s corporate culture as a closed, coherent structure that shapes relationships among employees, their values, mission, and responsibilities in the performance of their professional duties. The FBI’s corporate ethics constitute a set of rules and norms based on a unified value system defined by the FBI Act, which laid the foundation for the Bureau’s high professional prestige. The article concludes that a positive step toward adopting the U.S. experience would be the creation of an Ethics Code for the Security Service of Ukraine (Corporate Ethics Code of the SSU), which would establish the groundwork for the development of a modern, high-quality law enforcement agency tasked with ensuring national security.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States Department of Justice is one of the United States' principal investigative and law enforcement agencies. Its assigned missions and responsibilities in counterintelligence and counterterrorism makes it a member of the U.S. intelligence community. Its number one priority is to protect the Nation from terrorist attacks. The FBI is the lead agency for assessing and investigating weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threats and incidents, coordinating investigations among agencies, and managing the law enforcement and investigative response to an incident. The FBI's capabilities to combat the threat of WMD include: the FBI Laboratory Division with increasing forensic capabilities and its extensive network of Federal and State laboratories for analysis of WMD materials; the WMD Directorate within the National Security Branch, which coordinates all FBI responses to WMD threats; the FBI's Directorate of Intelligence, whose intelligence analysts within the WMD Directorate collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence related to the WMD threat; and the FBI's partnerships with domestic and international law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The FBI plays a critical role in the U.S.'s prevention and response to biodefense, a critical component of WMD.