Fighting Black Power-New Left coalitions: Covert FBI media campaigns and American cultural discourse, 19671971

Abstract

Between 1967 and 1971, the FBI launched covert action programs against Black Nationalist and New Left organisations. FBI agents used surreptitious entry, electronic surveillance, and informants to acquire and covertly distribute material to police, Congress, the media, elected officials and the Internal Revenue Service. These operations thwarted fund raising, recruiting, organising, and favourable publicity, prevented coalition building, and harassed movement leaders. To capitalise on ideological, organisational and personal conflicts, create factionalism, and provoke conflict between organisations, FBI agents made anonymous telephone calls and created counterfeit movement literature, cartoons and other notional communications. This caused activists to lose respectability among white liberals, Black moderates, and other movement activists. Since FBI agents were well schooled in the historical legacy of American racist discourse, the Bureau's covert operations drew upon deeply rooted countersubversive anxieties concerning miscegenation in American culture, in order to prevent stable or effective Black Nationalist-New Left coalitions from forming.