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COINTELPRO Revisited - The Federal Bureau of Intimidation
by Howard Zinn
I thought it would be good to talk about the FBI because they talk
about us. They don't like to be talked about. They don't even like the
fact that you're listening to them being talked about. They are very
sensitive people. If you look into the history of the FBI and Martin
Luther King-which now has become notorious in that totally notorious
history of the FBI- the FBI attempted to neutralize, perhaps kill him,
perhaps get him to commit suicide, certainly to destroy him as a
leader of black people in the United States. And if you follow the
progression of that treatment of King, it starts, not even with the
Montgomery Bus Boycott; it starts when King begins to criticize the
FBI. You see, then suddenly Hoover's ears, all four of them, perk up.
And he says, okay, we have to start working on King.
I was interested in this especially because I was reading the Church
Committee report. In 1975, the Senate Select Committee investigated
the CIA and the FBI and issued voluminous reports and pointed out at
what point the FBI became interested in King. In 1961-62 after the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, after the sit-ins, after the Freedom Rides of
'61, there was an outbreak of mass demonstrations in a very little,
very Southern, almost slave town of southern Georgia called Albany.
There had been nothing like this in that town. A quiet, apparently
passive town, everybody happy, of course. And then suddenly the black
people rose up and a good part of the black population of Albany ended
up in jail. There were not enough jails for all who demonstrated.
A report was made for the Southern Regional Council of Atlanta on the
events in Albany. The report, which was very critical of the FBI, came
out in the New York Times. And King was asked what he thought of the
role of the FBI. He said he agreed with the report that the FBI was
not doing its job, that the FBI was racist, etcetera, etcetera.
At that point, the FBI also inquired who the author of that report
was, and asked that an investigation begin on the author. Since I had
written it, I was interested in the FBI's interest in the author. In
fact, I sent away for whatever information the FBI had on me, through
the Freedom of Information Act. I became curious, I guess. I wanted to
test myself because if I found that the FBI did not have any dossier
on me, it would have been tremendously embarrassing and I wouldn't
have been able to face my friends. But, fortunately, there were
several hundred pages of absolutely inconsequential material. Very
consequential for the FBI, I suppose, but inconsequential for any
intelligent person.
I'm talking about the FBI and U.S. democracy because here we have this
peculiar situation that we live in a democratic country-everybody
knows that, everybody says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our
ears a thousand times, you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute
the flag, you hail democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you
read the history of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of
democracy. And, of course, there's some truth to that. There are
things you can do in the United States that you can't do many other
places without being put in jail.
But the United States is a very complex system. It's very h |