What if I told you the FBI Sought to Neutralize Civil Rights Activists? Seems blasphemous, right? Well, sadly, this did happen.
The FBI referred to this as COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Programs, specifically those targeted at activists of almost any organization from 1956 to 1971. COINTELPRO was used to monitor, manipulate and disrupt social and political movements in the United States. During those years of turmoil, Martin Luther King was the primary spokesperson for civil rights in America, and the FBI considered him and his movement equivalent to the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the anti-Vietnam war activists, and dozens of others all striving to attain equal rights for all races. COINTELPRO referred to all of these groups and movements as “black hate groups,” even the American Indian Movement, and spent 85% of its money on attempts to subvert them; the remaining 15% it spent on the subversion of “white hate groups” like the KKK.
All these domestic political organizations and movements, as the FBI labeled them, were deemed threats to national security. This to me makes absolutely no sense. Movements to create equality were considered “threats?” If he had done his thing in America in the 20th Century, it is probable that the FBI would have considered Jesus guilty of the same kind of sedition. In general, COINTELPRO targeted the entire left wing of political thought; anyone liberal was seen as a danger to American society and slandered in print, sued or threatened with imprisonment, imprisoned, and illegally wiretapped.
The most shocking discovery while reading upon this topic was what happened with Fred Hampton. The home of Fred Hampton, a Black Panther Party officer, invaded by the Chicago Police, who used deadly force against him and Mark Clark. Clark was shot first, and Hampton was unable to wake to the sound of gunfire because FBI agent William O’Neal had infiltrated their organization and spiked Hampton’s supper with barbiturates. The police shot him to death while he slept unarmed in bed. Things like this make you wonder, what “threat” did these organizations pose, and was what the FBI did justified?
Stories like this are always shocking. Every time a government overreach like the NSA bulk data collection comes to light, some people have a tendency to dismiss the issue as nothing to worry about if “you’re not doing anything wrong”. Programs like COINTELPRO or McCarthyism remind you that the government isn’t always that benevolent.
Yeah, there was also one point early in our history when speaking out against the government was illegal, and then there was McCarthyism, so that doesn’t surprise me as much as it should. I do believe that the people who set up the programs like that think they’re going against the spirit of the Constitution for some greater good, but it can be hard to tell exactly what they were thinking some times.