Michael Harriot at The Root gives the sordid details of how J. Edgar Hoover built his reputation, and the FBI, on white supremacy, and the illegal targeting of Black political activists:
By the time Johnny earned his Master of Laws in 1917, he had become one of the federal institution’s most diligent workers, impressing supervisors with his work ethic and his expertise in cataloging the institution’s massive book collections. Speed would later say that his time at the Library of Congress trained him in “the value of collating material” and gave him “an excellent foundation” for assembling information and evidence. After he graduated, Speed took his talents to his new gig at the Bureau of Investigation’s War Emergency Division, where he earned $900 a year.
Speed’s boss was Tom Wilson, a virulent segregationist who rose from academia’s ranks to become one of the country’s most respected white supremacists. In his previous job as president of a prestigious Princeton University, Wilson successfully ensured that his beloved institution would be the last Ivy League school to admit Black students. He had famously written one of the more popular American history books. In it, he argued that the racial terrorism of Reconstruction was caused by white supremacists’ “instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes ignorant negroes.”…
By 1917, the U.S. was embroiled in the “Great War,” and Congress had just authorized the Espionage Act. The legislation gave the Bureau of Investigation the authority to investigate, interrogate, and surveil Americans suspected of “disloyalty.” In a few months, Speed had compiled thousands of files on American citizens who were suspected of being “subversive.” His knack for meticulously collecting and storing information landed him a promotion to head of the “Radical Division”—the Bureau’s new General Intelligence Division. But in 1918, a few months after Speed’s promotion, the First World War ended.
At 24 years old, he was in charge of the most advanced non-military intelligence operation in the known universe. But with no war to build a reputation on, no formal experience in policing or detective work, and surrounded by war veterans and Secret Service officers, Speed found a way to keep his status as a rising star in the Bureau of Investigation by casting the response to white supremacy as “subversive.”…
In late 1921, the General Intelligence Division was moved to the Department of Justice and, on May 10, 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone appointed John Edgar “Speed” Hoover as acting director of the new Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Hoover had a mission, and it was to use all of the power and resources of the FBI to destroy Black political efforts and aspirations:
The FBI has a history of targeting black activists. That's still true today
26 Jun 2020
In October 1919, a young J Edgar Hoover, director of the Bureau of Investigation’s general intelligence division, targeted “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey for investigation and harassment because of his alleged association with “radical elements” that were “agitating the Negro movement”. Hoover admitted Garvey had violated no federal laws. But the bureau, the precursor organization to the FBI, infiltrated Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association with informant provocateurs and undercover agents who searched for years for any charge that could justify his deportation.
The justice department ultimately won a conviction against Garvey on a dubious mail fraud charge in 1923. Meanwhile, white vigilantes, police and soldiers targeted Black communities with violence during this period, which included the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa massacre of 1921 and scores of lynchings, did not receive the same focused attention from Hoover’s agents.
The FBI used similar tactics to disrupt, discredit and neutralize leaders of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. The FBI’s Cointelpro program targeting civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael was specifically designed to “[p]revent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement” rather than to prevent any violent acts they might perpetrate. The methods included informant-driven disinformation campaigns designed to spark conflict within the movement, discourage donors and supporters, and even break up marriages. Overt investigative activity was also used, as one stated goal of the Cointelpro program was to inspire fear among activists by convincing them that an FBI agent lurked behind every mailbox.
The ties to white supremacist violence go beyond simply ignoring or coddling the Klan and Nazis. It includes commissioning acts of terrorism:
The FBI can't investigate white extremism until it first investigates itself
Akin Olla/ The Guardian
26 Jan 2021
The FBI’s first director, J Edgar Hoover, waged war on the civil rights movement from its onset. The war was ramped up in the age of Cointelpro, an FBI program designed to surveil, dismantle and destroy any movement working to end racism or capitalist exploitation in the United States. The FBI occasionally investigated white supremacists during this era (1956 to 1971),but spent the vast majority of its resources fighting those committed to Black and Indigenous liberation. And many of the bureau’s investigations of white supremacists were disingenuous; the FBI knew for a fact that the Birmingham police Department had been infiltrated by the KKK, for example, but continued to feed the department information about civil rights activists. During Hoover’s half century as director, the FBI sent a blackmail letter to Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide and was probably involved in the assassination of 21-year-old NAACP and Chicago Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton.
Towards the end of Hoover’s tenure, the FBI even went so far as to allegedly create and arm a far-right paramilitary organization in San Diego for the purpose of disrupting, attacking and potentially assassinating leftwing, particularly Chicano, leaders. On 6 January 1972, the FBI’s secret army attempted to murder Peter G Bohmer, a Marxist economics professor, and Paula Tharp, who had previously worked for an underground newspaper. The offices of that same newspaper had been previously raided twice by the FBI’s army. The army also bombed a movie theater and planned the assassination of leaders of the leftwing Chicano organization the Brown Berets, along with a second attempt on Peter Bohmer. No member of the FBI has been held accountable for these actions.
While the FBI likes to pretend that those were crimes of the past, there are more recent examples of white supremacist behavior in the organization. There is evidence that some FBI agents and other federal agents frequented an annual party called “The Good Ol’ Boys Roundup” from 1980 to 1996. The “Roundup” was known as a whites-only gathering that involved the selling of fake “N----r hunting licenses” and T-shirts with King’s face in a sniper’s crosshairs. While the Department of Justice insists that federal agents weren’t overwhelmingly engaged in racist behavior, their investigation of the Roundup was primarily conducted through interviews with participants of the event itself.
And it wasn’t just individual officers engaging in racist behavior. In the late 1990s the FBI launched an investigation of the Wu-Tang Clan, classifying it as a “major criminal organization”, with one agent comparing it to the Bloods. The FBI’s history of harassing and surveilling Black artists includes targeting Duke Ellington in 1938 and Gil Scott-Heron in the 1970s and 1980s. The FBI has long feared Black artists and their ability to reach the American public, which is why, in 1989, Milt Ahlerich, its assistant director of public affairs, sent a threatening letter to NWA’s record label in response to their evergreen classic Fuck tha Police.
It should, therefore, be no surprise that while white supremacists were making the necessary preparations for violent insurrection (with the encouragement and assistance of elected officials and law enforcement personnel) the FBI considered Black activists to be the real threat to American law and order:
THE FBI SPENDS A LOT OF TIME SPYING ON BLACK AMERICANS
October 29 2019
The latest batch of FBI documents — obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and the racial justice group MediaJustice and shared with The Intercept — reveals that between 2015 and 2018, the FBI dedicated considerable time and resources to opening a series of “assessments” into the activities of individuals and groups it mostly labeled “black separatist extremists.” This designation was eventually folded into the category of “black identity extremism.” Earlier this year, following an onslaught of criticism from elected officials, civil liberties advocates, and even some law enforcement groups, the FBI claimed that it had abandoned the “black identity extremism” label, substituting it for a “racially motivated violent extremism. ” Critics say that this designation conveniently obscures the fact that black supremacist violence, unlike white supremacist violence, does not actually exist…
“These documents suggest that since at least 2016, the FBI was engaged in a national intelligence collection effort to manufacture a so-called ‘Black Identity Extremist’ threat,” Nusrat Choudhury, deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, told The Intercept. “They are spending a lot of energy on this and they are clearly reaching out to other law enforcement.”…
The bureau’s memos refer to a number of “strategy meetings” involving local law enforcement, including in the days before the first anniversary of Brown’s killing in Ferguson, which reignited protests. In another exchange, law enforcement partners were asked to contribute to “collecting better intelligence on possible Black Separatist Extremists.”
The documents also refer to the FBI’s work with “Joint Terrorism Task Forces,” which bring together agents with officers from hundreds of state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies. Because JTTFs are run by the FBI, they operate under FBI guidelines, which provide fewer protections for speech, privacy, and civil liberties than the rules governing local police and other law enforcement…
“The Black Lives Matter movement, black-led organizations that are focused around policing and police brutality have not had a single incident of violence associated with their activist work,” Hayes told The Intercept. “That tells me that what the FBI is looking for is opportunities to basically disrupt organizing that challenges and threatens the status quo.”