BY LARRY SEIGLE  
The FBI was working overtime to counter the growing civil rights fight. The facts about the FBI’s crusade against the Black movement in this period unfortunately remain largely unknown and only sketchily documented publicly. What is known, however, makes it abundantly clear that the FBI’s campaign of slander, frame-up, blackmail, and assassination against Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Black Panther Party, and other fighters for Black rights in the 1960s was not an aberration. It was the continuation of a course that began the day that the Roosevelt administration called on the FBI to go after “subversives.”

In fact, from the standpoint of the Justice Department and FBI, the Black population as a whole was, if not subversive, at least suspect. The FBI prepared a secret wartime “Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States” for the benefit of the Roosevelt administration. In this 714-page report, the FBI explored the question—deeply troubling to them—of “why particular Negroes or groups of Negroes or Negro organizations have evidenced sentiments for other ‘dark races’ (mainly Japanese), or by what forces they were influenced to adopt in certain instances un-American ideologies….”

The NAACP in particular, which was growing rapidly in size and activity, was targeted for infiltration by FBI stool pigeons and provocateurs. When fifteen Black sailors assigned as waiters for white officers in Washington, D.C., protested racial discrimination, the navy’s response was to ask the FBI to investigate the protesters. The FBI obliged by opening a full-fledged, nationwide “investigation,” including the massive use of informers, against the NAACP.

“FBI investigation of the NAACP [during the war]…produced massive information in Bureau files about the organization, its members, their legitimate activities to oppose racial discrimination, and internal disputes within some of the chapters,” a U.S. Senate committee concluded in 1975. But these “reports and their summaries contained little if any information about specific activities or planned activities in violation of federal law.”

In mid-1942 Attorney General Francis Biddle summoned several editors of Black weeklies to Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. Biddle arrogantly told the editors that their coverage of clashes between white and Black soldiers at army bases was a disservice to the war effort. Biddle did not challenge the accuracy of the reports but nonetheless insisted that the information should not have been printed. The attorney general, a liberal and staunch Roosevelt supporter, told the editors that if they did not change the tone of their papers, he was “going to shut them all up” on charges of sedition….

Biddle’s threats of prosecution for sedition did not come out of the blue. The editors he was threatening knew that leaders of the Teamster union and the Socialist Workers Party had been convicted in Minneapolis in 1941 for violation of the Smith Act, which outlawed advocacy of revolutionary ideas. In addition, sedition indictments had been brought in September 1942 against sixty-three members of the Temple of Islam (the Black Muslims), including its leader Elijah Muhammad. The Muslims were accused of sedition because they refused to accept the racist, anti-Japanese stereotypes that were a major part of U.S. war propaganda and expressed solidarity with the Japanese as a people of color. Although the Justice Department could not make the sedition charge stick, it did succeed in convicting Elijah Muhammad and the other defendants on draft-evasion charges.

The government blocked shipment to troops overseas of Black newspapers that continued to publish condemnations of racism and other “unhelpful” facts and opinions. These papers were also often confiscated on military bases in the United States.

Early in 1943, at Biddle’s urging, the U.S. Post Office began proceedings to suspend the second-class mailing rights of several newspapers with uncompromising stands against race discrimination. These included the Militant, whose contributors and editors included members of the Socialist Workers Party. The Postmaster General banned the Militant from the mails on the grounds, among others, that its articles included “stimulation of race issues.” All fighters for Black rights were supposed to get the point. The Militant won restoration of its mailing rights after a year-long battle that included the mobilization of protests from leaders of Black groups, trade unions, and civil liberties organizations….  
 
F.D.R. unleashes FBI
For several years after the First World War, the FBI had functioned as a political police force, carrying out the arrest or deportation of some 3,000 unionists and political activists in 1920 (the infamous “Palmer Raids”). But following widespread protests over these and other FBI actions, and with the decline of the postwar labor radicalization, the capitalist rulers decided against a federal secret police agency. They relied instead on city and state cops with well-established “bomb squads” and “radical units” and on state national guard units in cases of extreme necessity. These local and state agencies had intimate connections with antilabor “citizens” organizations organized by the employers and with hated private detective agencies, such as the Pinkertons, with long experience in union busting.

By the mid 1930s, however, a vast social movement was on the rise, with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) at the forefront. The relationship of forces was shifting in favor of working-class organizations. The bosses’ old methods could no longer always be counted on. Communist perspectives did not come close to commanding majority support among working people, and in fact remained the views of a small minority, but the bosses were nonetheless concerned that progressive anticapitalist and anti-imperialist political positions advanced by class-struggle-minded union leaders were winning a hearing among a substantial section of the ranks of labor. Especially in times of crisis, such as war, minority points of view defended by established and respected working-class fighters could rapidly gain support.

With this in mind, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt expanded and centralized federal police power.
 
 
Related articles:
FBI provocateurs conduct disruption operations  
 
 
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