White America came to embrace King in the same way that most white South Africans came to accept Nelson Mandela—grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace but with considerable guile. By the time they realised that their dislike of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which admiring him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice.
—Gary Younge1
IN SCHOOLS AND NATIONAL TRIBUTES, the March on Washington is now pictured as one of the most American events of the twentieth century—the power of US democracy made real in the quarter of a million people who gathered on the National Mall that day. In 1963, however, most Americans disapproved of it, many congressmen saw it as potentially “seditious,” and law enforcement from local police to the FBI monitored it intensively.
The popular fable of the movement makes it seem like most decent people were in favor of the movement. They were not. The civil rights movement was deeply unpopular and most Americans did not support it. They thought it was going too far, that movement activists were being too extreme. Some thought its goals were wrong; others, that activists were going about it the wrong way—and most white Americans were content with the status quo. And so they criticized, monitored, demonized, and at times criminalized those who challenged it, making dissent very costly.
Most contemporary tributes to the movement, however, paper over the decades when activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and Rosa Parks, along with scores of their comrades, were criticized by fellow citizens and targeted as “un-American,” not just by Southern politicians but by the federal government. And when they do acknowledge it, they make it seem like the targeting and surveillance of activists by the federal government was the result of one terrible man, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, not the work of a legion of people who red-baited, collaborated, and looked the other way to make the widespread repression of the civil rights movement possible.
Most popular renderings of the movement miss how the very people we celebrate today were viewed as scary or crazy or unwelcome in their own day. And they sidestep the kinds of reckoning this history demands: how people who questioned the racial practices of the status quo and refused to live by them were treated as “radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers, to name just a few terms given them,” as Rosa Parks put it.2 This meant the civil rights movement was built painstakingly and often at great cost to people’s mental health and community relationships. By portraying these activists as consummate Americans, contemporary memorials gloss over the role local, state, and federal officials, as well as their fellow citizens, played in demonizing them as threats to the nation. Looking closely at this history, then, shines a different light on criticisms of “reckless” and “dangerous” activists today—and how fears of national security and public safety have long been used to rationalize political repression and justify the monitoring of “extremists.”
Though the righteousness of Rosa Parks’s actions may seem self-evident today, at the time, those who challenged segregation were often treated as unstable, unruly, and potentially dangerous by many white people and some Black people. Parks spent decades grappling with how hard it was to be a “troublemaker” and with the pressure on Black people to conform—“we perform to their satisfaction or suffer the consequence if we get out of line.” She found it demoralizing, if understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, “the masses seemed not to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo.”3 This climate took its toll. Describing the “dark closet of my mind,” her personal writings reveal how she struggled with feeling “alone and desolate as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”4
It is striking how much Rosa Parks wrote about the difficulty of dissent—how much she pinpointed the effort and ostracism of being a rebel and the ways the system was designed to prevent it. “Such a good job of brain washing was done on the Negro,” Parks observed, “that a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to them, many times ridiculed by others of his own group.”5 Struggling with this hostile environment for more than a decade before the bus boycott began, she despaired, along with comrades like E. D. Nixon, that despite their efforts, no mass movement was emerging. Repeatedly, she underscored the difficulties in mobilizing people in the years before her bus stand: “People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did not support it and give strength enough.”6 Her writings show how hard it was to be a person who couldn’t conform to societal norms: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take. . . . The line between reason and madness grows thinner.” Those who thought and acted outside the norms of society were made to feel crazy.
Parks’s writings about her loneliness also reveal what being a longtime freedom fighter entailed: the ability to act and persevere, even amidst her fears and sense of desolation. She continued to act, holding tight to a larger vision of justice and deep Christian faith but having no indication change would occur in her lifetime. Highlighting the untenability of negotiating this racial system, she observed that it was “not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting.”7 Her personal notes reveal she had reached her limit that December evening on the bus: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more.”8
Parks well understood the impact that years of pressing for change with little result can have on a person. Like many young radicals, she had grown impatient with the pace of change and vehemence of white resistance by the mid-1960s. “Dr. King was criticized because he tried to bring about change through the nonviolent movement. It didn’t accomplish what it should have because the white establishment would not accept his philosophy of nonviolence and respond to it positively. When the resistance grew, it created a hostility and bitterness among younger people.”9 She was insistent that people not comment from the sidelines but take “a critical honest look at ourselves in regards to the contribution we are making.”10 Critiquing the idea that people can possess endless forbearance, she noted the effect years of white intransigence had on young people: “The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard-core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. Time is running out for a peaceful solution.”11
As Rosa Parks’s writings poignantly reveal, being an activist was lonely, and the Black community was not unified around rebellion. Punishment, both physical and economic, against those who challenged the system was all too real—as were people’s fears of the costs of disrupting the status quo. Many civil rights activists, such as Septima Clark, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland, faced criticism from their own families.12 Clark had been a teacher in South Carolina for nearly forty years when, in the wake of the Brown decision, the state legislature passed a law that no city or state employee could be a member of the NAACP, asserting it was a “foreign” (read, Communist-linked) organization. Clark refused to give up her membership in the NAACP, which “bothered my family. . . . They weren’t fighters. They didn’t feel as if they could fight for freedom or for justice.”13 Clark also ended up feeling like her attempts to get other teachers to resist were largely futile: “I don’t know why I felt that the black teachers would stand up for their rights. . . . Most of them were afraid and became hostile.”14 When the members of Clark’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, gave her a testimonial, her sorority sisters still wouldn’t have their picture taken with her, out of fear of being seen consorting together.15 They admired her but didn’t want to risk being associated with her in a photograph.
Many SNCC students, such as Simmons, faced discipline from their colleges for their activism, including from Black colleges, and disapproval from their parents. Simmons grew increasingly interested in the struggle as a student at Spelman College. At first, she tried to hide her activities from her family, who was extremely proud she was attending Spelman and didn’t want her to do anything to mess up her scholarship. Her mother wouldn’t let her attend the March on Washington. When she was arrested at a sit-in and the school called her mother, her mother then scolded her. “I had disgraced the family and [she] reminded me that I was the first person in our family ever to be arrested,” Simmons recalled. “She told me that if the school didn’t kick me out and send me home in disgrace, I had better mend my ways and stay clear of those marches.”16 Simmons continued with the sit-ins and was arrested again. Spelman accused her of being a Communist and suspended her scholarship. Only because of student protest was she reinstated.
Many local families told their kids to stay away from SNCC organizers. Endesha Ida Mae Holland was forbidden by her mother from associating with SNCC activists who had come to Greenwood, Mississippi, where they lived. She went anyway and became deeply involved with SNCC’s efforts in Greenwood; local backlash was severe, and her home was firebombed, killing her mother.17 Holland’s activism continued, and she was jailed repeatedly for her civil rights work. But the costs of activism were significant. Indeed, there was much disagreement within the Black community about appropriate tactics and the best way forward, given the fearsome climate. Black clergy aligned with the movement were in the minority of Black ministers. As the Reverend Osagyefo Sekou notes, “in Montgomery there are about a hundred or so Black churches—less than a dozen participated in the bus boycott. In Birmingham, there are upward of 500, and less than a dozen participated in the marches.”18 The young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did not just face pressure from their own families or schools but also from other civil rights activists who saw them as too “confrontational.” Young people with SNCC criticized King’s approach for not developing local leadership and not being bold enough—but so did the NAACP, which saw King’s belief in mass protest as ineffective and inefficient. So, there was not a single “unified” approach in the movement.
If Black people were not of one mind in terms of the best strategy forward, the vast majority of white people, South and North, were against the movement. White religious leaders, beginning with the Montgomery boycott, criticized King’s actions as unbiblical and morally indefensible. King was repeatedly called “anti-Christian,” “pro-Communist,” and “extremist” by white ministers, who questioned his sincerity and his intentions.19 Civil rights activists received scores of hate calls, death threats, and public heckling for years. And while most Americans did not make hate calls to activists’ homes, the majority of the American public did not support the civil rights movement while it was happening. In a May 1961 Gallup survey, only 22 percent of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57 percent of Americans said that the sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses, and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurting the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South. Just before the March on Washington, Gallup found only 23 percent of Americans had favorable opinions of the proposed civil rights rally.20
Lest we see this as Southerners skewing the national sample, in 1964 (a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act), a New York Times poll found a majority (57 percent) of New Yorkers said the civil rights movement had gone too far. “While denying any deep-seated prejudice,” the Times reported, “a large number of those questioned used the same terms to express their feelings. They spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites.” Fifty-four percent of those surveyed felt the movement was going “too fast.”21 Nearly half said that picketing and demonstrations hurt the Negro cause, and 80 percent opposed school pairings to promote school desegregation in New York City public schools.
Nationally, white people’s support of the civil rights movement continued to be low across the 1960s. In 1966, a year after Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, only 36 percent of white people said King was helping the cause. Eighty-five percent of white people said that demonstrations by Negroes on civil rights hurt the advancement of civil rights, while 30 percent of Black people felt they hurt.22 Seventy-two percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of King.23 In a 1968 Gallup poll taken shortly after King’s assassination, 73 percent of whites said that Blacks in their community were treated the same as whites. While many people of all races admired King and Parks in the 1960s, the majority of Americans did not and found the civil rights movement both wrong and unnecessary.
Today, many people tell current activists to be more like King and Parks, but King and Parks were reviled, red-baited, and called extremists at the time. On the Selma-to-Montgomery march, in 1965, White Citizens’ Councils had plastered huge billboards along the route with King and Parks pictured attending a “Communist training school” (actually Highlander Folk School). When newly elected congressman John Conyers decided to hire Rosa Parks to work in his Detroit office in 1965, the office was deluged with hate mail, threatening calls, watermelons, voodoo dolls, and other racist trinkets, informing Parks and Conyers that she was not wanted in the North. The last time King and Parks saw each other was at a speech King gave in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a month before he was assassinated. King said it was the most disruption he had ever faced in an indoor meeting.24 He was called a traitor so many times that night he finally interjected, “We’re going to have a question and answer period, and . . . if you think I’m a traitor, then you’ll have an opportunity to ask me about my traitorness.”25 But in the national fable of the civil rights movement, this relentless opposition prevalent across the country is often left out.
The national fable also erases how much and how long federal and state governments targeted the Black freedom struggle as dangerous. Rampant government harassment and the FBI’s monitoring of now-beloved figures are treated as unfortunate mistakes, rather than as a systematic strategy. Former president Jimmy Carter drew some controversy when at Coretta Scott King’s funeral he mentioned the FBI’s massive surveillance of the King family: “The efforts of Martin and Coretta to change America were not appreciated even at the highest level of our government . . . they became the targets of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and, as you know, harassment from the FBI.”26
The history of the March on Washington reveals how the federal government approached the civil rights movement. Numerous congressmen condemned the August demonstration as decidedly “un-American.” Extensive FBI surveillance in the months leading up to the March on Washington and the outsized police presence there dovetailed with public fears of civil rights activism. The Kennedy administration had rigged the microphone so it could be turned off if it was deemed necessary.27 Every cop was on duty that day—and 150 FBI agents were on hand to monitor the crowd.28
King’s influence and eloquent power alarmed the federal government. In the wake of the march and King’s growing national stature, the FBI described him as “demagogic” and “the most dangerous . . . to the Nation . . . from the standpoint . . . of national security” and pursued greater surveillance of him.29 Worried about King’s growing reach and possible ties to Communists, Attorney General Robert Kennedy signed off on intrusive surveillance of his living quarters, offices, phones, and hotel rooms and those of his associates. FBI surveillance of King thus expanded after the march and further under the Johnson administration, particularly after King denounced US policy in Vietnam, and it continued until King’s assassination in 1968.
The FBI monitored many other civil rights activists and nonviolent protests as well. Historian Barbara Ransby explains that longtime organizer Ella Baker “was under FBI surveillance off and on from the 1940s through the 1970s. . . . Even though at certain points agents reported her to be a ‘non-threat’ her files were repeatedly closed only to be reopened.”30 Also monitored were the Harlem Nine in their challenge to New York City school segregation in the late 1950s. And so was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which SNCC built to challenge the regular Democratic Party’s systematic disfranchisement of Black people.
In 1964, following three years of voter registration efforts met with much violence, harassment, and economic reprisals, but few actual registrations, SNCC turned its attention to taking the MFDP challenge to the 1964 Democratic National Convention to contest the seating of the regular Mississippi delegation and press for the seating of the MFDP. President Johnson found this threatening. According to historian John Dittmer, Johnson “turned to J. Edgar Hoover to provide his own ‘coverage’ of the convention.”31 Johnson ordered the bureau to spy on the MFDP and on Martin Luther King’s hotel room at the Atlantic City convention, and he asked for background checks on all the participants. The 1976 Church Committee would later reveal the full extent of the spying on the MFDP: “Approximately 30 Special Agents . . . ‘were able to keep the White House fully apprised of all major developments during the Convention’s course’ by means of ‘information coverage, by use of various confidential techniques, by infiltration of key groups through use of undercover agents, and through utilization of agents using appropriate cover as reporters.’”32
FBI agents posed as NBC reporters (with full support of the network) to solicit information from the MFDP delegates, including the identities of those who supported their efforts on the credentials committee. Bill Moyers, who was a special assistant to Johnson at the time, served as a key player, and the president’s ledger notes a number of calls from Johnson to Moyers at the convention to provide the FBI’s information to be used by Johnson’s operatives on the floor to pressure delegates to withhold support from the MFDP challenge.33 Four years later, when Humphrey wanted the FBI’s assistance at the Chicago Democratic Convention, Humphrey said Johnson told him that “the FBI had been of great service to him and he had been given considerable information on a timely basis throughout the entire [Atlantic City] convention.”34 Many critics slammed Ava Duvernay’s movie Selma for portraying Johnson in league with J. Edgar Hoover, markedly overlooking the tremendous collusion between Johnson and Hoover over the MFDP. The idea that the FBI was completely rogue, or that Johnson’s work on behalf of civil rights meant that he didn’t also consider the movement a threat and endorse FBI surveillance at certain points, are convenient fictions.
The FBI’s actions perpetuated twin harms. The agency surveilled, monitored, and at times tried to disrupt the civil rights movement, particularly through its COINTELPRO (short for Counterintelligence Program), which was begun in the 1950s to disrupt Communist-related groups and reformulated in 1967 to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations.”35 Equally important, it stood aside amidst escalating violence on Black people, and Black activists in particular. The FBI regularly cast white racist violence as outside its jurisdiction, even when agents witnessed it or had inside information about it. It monitored the Montgomery bus boycott but was unconcerned with the bombing of boycott leaders’ homes.36 It had early knowledge of incoming violence against the Freedom Rides but stood aside and let it happen. It had an informant in the car used in the attack on Viola Liuzzo, the white Detroit woman killed following the 1965 Selmato-Montgomery march; rather than risk bad publicity, the agency scuttled investigations of her murder.37 In many ways, FBI inaction sanctioned violence against civil rights workers.
The agency considered the movement’s growing power a threat. From ordering the intrusive wall-to-wall surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. beginning in 1963 to the surveillance of Coretta Scott King for years after her husband’s assassination, the bureau targeted the King family relentlessly. It sent Martin a letter urging him to commit suicide and mailed to Coretta a tape of Martin’s sexual indiscretions. Two days before King’s assassination, Hoover leaked a story that King was planning to stay at the Holiday Inn, at the time considered too “fancy” for a Black person; King changed to the Lorraine Motel, where on the evening of April 4, he would be assassinated coming out of his room.38 And the FBI stepped up its surveillance of Coretta after King’s death, worried that she might attempt “to tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement,” and it closely monitored her travel and read her personal letters.39 Lest we write this off as Hoover’s obsession with the Kings, the Nixon administration and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were kept in the loop on the “nearly constant” surveillance of Coretta in the years following Martin’s death.40
From World War II on, the FBI also took aim at the Nation of Islam. FBI agents visited Elijah Muhammad’s home in 1942, investigating him for sedition and draft evasion, and confiscating sixteen boxes of files on the Nation of Islam.41 Muhammad served four years in prison. Heavily monitoring Malcolm X from 1950 until his death in 1965, the FBI relished the growing rift between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad in the mid-1960s and sought to widen it, sending fake letters and disseminating information to keep it in motion.42 On June 5, 1964, Hoover sent the FBI’s New York office a telegram: “Do something about Malcolm X enough of this black violence in NY.”43
The FBI initiated many efforts that targeted Black activists or civil rights organizations. In addition to its revisal of the COINTELPRO, in 1968, it introduced the Ghetto Informant Program, and with Project Z (a program to “prevent the rise of a Black Messiah”), the bureau took special measures to combat the rising Black Power movement.44 The agency worked in collusion with the Chicago police in the raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and it spread misinformation and secret letters to spark rivalries and violent reprisals between Black groups.
As the bureau sent an army of Black informants into groups like the Black Panther Party, it finally desegregated its own ranks. Hoover had resisted hiring Black people except for menial jobs. In 1962, under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the FBI hired two Black special agents. But as the FBI’s surveillance of the Black struggle expanded rapidly, it was forced into more hiring—and into developing a wide cadre of Black informants, in essence weaponizing members of the Black community against the freedom struggle. The FBI also surveilled the burgeoning women’s movement, and by the 1970s took aim at growing militant indigenous rights activism, particularly the American Indian Movement organization. Yet these uncomfortable truths find little place in our public celebrations of the civil rights movement.
While the FBI could find no proof of Communist influence on Martin Luther King (its alleged justification for wall-to-wall surveillance of him), it did gather evidence of his adultery, which it passed along to journalists and other government officials, hoping to discredit King’s leadership. The FBI sent the anonymous letter urging King to commit suicide, hoping to destabilize the civil rights leader. No government official ever intervened to halt or divulge the surveillance. No journalist ever exposed the monitoring of King, though many knew at the time. The surveillance of the civil rights movement only began to be revealed to the public after activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in March 1971, took records, and sent them to three news outlets. Under pressure from the government not to publish, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times promptly returned the files to the FBI, but the Washington Post courageously went ahead and reported the story. (Once the Post took the risk, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times quickly followed with their own stories.)
As Betty Medsger, the Post reporter who broke the initial story, details, the Media files revealed the extent of surveillance of the Black community:
To become targets of the FBI it wasn’t necessary for African Americans to engage in violent behavior. It wasn’t necessary for them to be radical or subversive. Being black was enough. The overall impression in directives written by Hoover, other headquarters officials, and local FBI officials was that the FBI thought of black Americans as falling into two categories—black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI. The latter group was to be recruited by the bureau to become part of its vast network of untrained informers.45
FBI agents were required to develop informants in the Black community. Even if an agent was in charge of an overwhelmingly white area, the agent was still expected to have a Black informant and “a fairly elaborate bureaucratic process was required to assure that an agent who worked in a white area was not penalized for not having black informers .”46 There was a pervasive assumption of foreign influence on Black people, though most Black people would have considered this a “joke,” according to Medsger. Students and campus Black organizations were targeted especially. A 1970 memo by Hoover noted, “Increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the Nation’s stability and security.”47 Hoover then “required agents to investigate and, if possible, infiltrate every black student organization at two-year and four-year colleges and universities, and to do so without regard for whether there had been disturbances on campus.”48 Every Black student organization was a threat; in other words, it wasn’t about what these students were doing, but who they were.
The government’s reaction to the leak of the Media files demonstrates its willingness to claim “national security” to protect its dirty laundry. Attorney General John Mitchell called the Post twice to say that reporting on the files would endanger national security and the lives of federal agents and would reveal national defense secrets, though “he had neither read the documents nor had been briefed on them.”49 What the files did contain, as Mitchell knew, was some suggestion of the extent of the secret policies and surveillance practiced by the FBI. In other words, they would embarrass the government.
The histories of these movements reveal the contingent and political definitions of “national security” and of those viewed as “troublemakers” and “extremists,” who bore the brunt of such targeting. Those individuals considered threats to national security have long included people who criticize the government and members of minority groups who are viewed as suspicious or un-American for asserting their racial pride and rights, and feared as potentially aiding the enemy in their criticisms. Such targeting was done not just by “bad guys” like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover but by “good guys” like Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who saw a need to impose special measures to control these dangerous individuals.
When Muhammad Ali died in 2016, there was wall-to-wall celebration of his life, but as Medsger notes, there was little acknowledgment of the years of relentless surveillance of Ali “beginning with [the FBI’s] investigation of his Selective Service case. Some of his phone conversations were tapped, and FBI informers gained access to, of all things, his elementary school records in Louisville.”50 Given public suspicion of the Nation of Islam, FBI informants closely monitored Ali’s connections with the group, the proceedings of his divorce from his first wife, and his traffic tickets.51 His bold, poetic voice and deep courage of conviction; his decision to join the Nation of Islam and change his name in 1964; and his subsequent refusal to be drafted to serve in Vietnam in 1967—all made the government and many Americans consider him dangerous and in need of extensive monitoring. It was only when Ali was beset by Parkinson’s in the 1980s, according to biographer Mike Marqusee—when his public persona was stripped of his powerful and beautiful voice—that the boxer became fit for national honors.52
Ali’s funeral became an occasion for a huge swath of Americans to celebrate a Muslim hero secure in their own liberalness. “Muhammad Ali became the ‘brave American’ who stood up for a cause,” according to anthropologist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, “rather than the ‘black Muslim’ who stood for his religious convictions . . . a kind of religious whitewashing that matches a broader tendency to dilute the radical politics of most figures of the era.”53 Little connection was made to the treatment and monitoring of politically active Black Muslims today—or to the way Ali’s proud Muslim faith and criticism of US imperialism in post-9/11 America would have been treated by the federal government, if his voice still rang out.
This history of demonizing racial dissent shows the interconnections between the practices of surveillance and repression, then and now. It provides a caution to the massive surveillance state created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and contemporary justifications that, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. By illuminating the ways full-throated dissent from nonwhite communities has long been regarded as “extremist” and “dangerous,” this history demonstrates that claims of “new urgency” and “imperiled times” used today to justify surveillance and monitoring are similar to the rationales used fifty years ago against the civil rights movement. Fears of Communist subversion that provided justification for mass surveillance of Black communities are replicated in the fears of terrorism that justify counter-radicalization theories and the widespread monitoring of Muslim communities today.54 Moreover, what the government had to keep somewhat hidden in its surveillance of King or through its COINTELPRO program fifty years ago has been largely legalized in measures like the USA PATRIOT Act. The tools of secrecy are now even more robust, making government overreach even harder to expose and root out.
The mass targeting of Black student groups and the development of tens of thousands of Black informants in the 1960s bear a sobering resemblance to the mass targeting of Muslim student groups and development of tens of thousands of FBI informants in Muslim communities in post-9/11 America.55 The surveillance, harassment, and targeting of Muslims, particularly Muslims who express dissenting views, in post-9/11 America, have uncomfortable parallels in the civil rights era, as the intimacies of Muslim life—from worship to family time to community organization to student activities—have come under persistent scrutiny. Added to this is the particular targeting of activists of color. Growing reports attest to FBI and local police monitoring of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, and revelations from a leaked FBI counterterrorism memo claiming “Black Identity Extremists” are a rising threat.56
As part of their training, FBI agents now take a trip to the King memorial in Washington, DC, and pick a favorite King quote to discuss.57 Former FBI director James Comey started this practice in 2014 to “provide a lesson on what happens when power is abused.” But such an exercise misses what is to be learned through this history and the connections that need to be made. To take seriously how “power is abused” requires looking more soberly at our fears and who we monitor today. It necessitates identifying new forms of political repression, rethinking the ways we have conducted a domestic War on Terror over the past two decades, and seeing the ways present-day fears have countenanced a vast apparatus of surveillance and targeting of Muslim Americans and Black activists with eerie parallels to the civil rights era.
It is easier to be aghast at how unpopular the civil rights movement was and how surveilled Black activists were than to reconsider whom we fear and monitor today. It is easier to celebrate the civil rights movement against the “extremism” of Black Lives Matter than to see the historical continuities in the ways Black critics have been treated then and now. While the fables gloss over it, these histories demonstrate how critics of color have long been unpopular with the public and targeted by the government—often because they refused to accept the terms of American domestic and foreign policy. Over time, many of yesterday’s “extremists” have been revealed to be not so much threats to national security, but deep critics of US policies.