Outside of being prominent voices of the Civil Rights Movement, what do Huey P. Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael all have in common? Each man was a target in an investigation led by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the infamous surveillance program known as COINTELPRO.
Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO for short, was a program started in 1956 with an aim to monitor the Communist Party’s activities. However, the program changed in scope with Hoover’s August 25, 1967, memo initiating the investigation into major civil rights figures.
The document opened with the statement, “Offices receiving copies of this letter are instructed to immediately establish a control file captioned as above, and to assign responsibility for following and coordinating this new counterintelligence program to an experienced and imaginative Special Agent well versed in investigations relating to black nationalist, hate-type organizations.”
According to the files, the purpose of the surveillance program was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”
The tactics employed in this program were often illegal and consisted of wiretaps, surveillance and disruption to any organization or figure that was perceived to be associated with Black nationalism. Those who were investigated were subject to various forms of discrediting and manipulation from special agents that would negatively impact the Civil Rights Movement.
COINTELPRO lasted until 1971 but became a target of public scrutiny after the true nature of the program was revealed. On March 8, 1971, members of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and took more than 1,000 classified documents. The stolen documents were then mailed anonymously to different newspaper outlets in the United States. The members of the commission were never caught and did not reveal their identities for more than 40 years. The documentary film 1971 was released in 2014 and detailed the story of the members responsible for the break-in.
The U.S. Senate Church Committee launched a major investigation into COINTELPRO in 1975 after more information was obtained with the use of the Freedom of Information Act. Both Congress and the public criticized the agency for infringing upon the First Amendment rights of the individuals under investigation.
