Vol. 79/No. 18      May 18, 2015

The candidate for Manhattan borough president was a Black man named Clarence Franklin. “I live in a one-and-a-half-room apartment in a crowded tenement in Manhattan and I have to pay 40 percent of my total monthly wage for rent,” Franklin wrote in the Militant. He offered a socialist solution to New York’s housing problem.

At the New York FBI office there were people who pored over that issue of the Militant with unusual care. J. Edgar Hoover had recently sent out special instructions for FBI agents to be alert for possible Cointelpro operations, and someone in the New York office spotted the opportunity for a vicious attack against both the Black movement and the SWP.

The vast FBI arrest files told them that Clarence Franklin had some years earlier acquired a criminal record. That fact is not very unusual; many Black workers in this society find themselves in trouble with the law. But the agents in charge of Cointelpro thought they could use his record to embarrass him and the SWP and to drive a Black activist out of politics.

One of the things that come through clearest in the Cointelpro papers is that the FBI reserved a special hatred for the Black civil rights movement, and Black members of the SWP were singled out for special attention.

Cointelpro files document a pattern of systematic sabotage directed at the Black movement that makes the Watergate break-in and Donald Segretti’s dirty tricks against the Democrats look like college pranks. Segretti and other Watergaters have been sent to jail, but the conspirators responsible for Cointelpro have yet to be charged with breaking any law.

Clarence Franklin was born into a family of Mississippi sharecroppers in 1932. When he was ten years old he moved to New York, where his mother went to work as a housecleaner. When he was fourteen he got a job setting pins in a bowling alley. Through the years Franklin found work as a dishwasher, porter, and construction laborer. Along the way he picked up an arrest record.

One might assume that a law enforcement agency such as the FBI would have noted with satisfaction that Franklin had not been charged with violating any law in several years and was currently engaged in perfectly legal activity—running for public office.

However, the FBI had different concerns. “Careful consideration has been given to the fact that the SWP in New York City is now getting some propaganda attention through the press, television and radio because it has succeeded in placing on the ballot four candidates for office in the New York City fall elections,” the FBI wrote.

In a subsequent memorandum not printed here, the FBI elaborated. “The SWP has met with little or no opposition in carrying forth its aims and purposes and in securing positions on the ballot for its candidates. It is felt that some disruptive action should be taken….”

The FBI evidently used one of its numerous agents in the news media—this one at the Daily News—to break the “story.” The News published a story on Franklin’s arrest record on election day. It is worth noting that the rules of fair play between Democratic and Republican politicians brand as “unfair campaign practices” eleventh-hour charges that are impossible to answer before the voters go to the polling place. This, of course, did not stop the FBI. …

Sabotaging a civil rights case

These FBI papers accord SWP leader George Weissman the dubious distinction of being the first publicly known subject of an FBI poem. The poet tried to frame Weissman on charges of stealing money from the Monroe home of Dr. A.E. Perry, head of the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants (CAMD) and vice-president of the Monroe NAACP.

The poem, along with a clipping from a North Carolina newspaper showing that Weissman had been in Perry’s house at the time of a robbery, was sent to a carefully selected FBI mailing list.

In 1964 George Weissman was managing editor of the Militant. He had first visited Monroe in 1958 to report on the notorious “kissing case.” Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe NAACP, had received attention in the press by organizing armed defense guards, which put a stop to a series of Ku Klux Klan assaults on the Black community. …

In retaliation against the Black community, the local racist authorities charged two Black youths, eight and ten years old, with “assault upon a white female” for the crime of being kissed by a white playmate.

The two were tried and committed to a reformatory “possibly until they are twenty-one.”
 
 
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