Selma and the history of FBI surveillance

Dan Jones

February 4, 2015

Category: From the Front Lines

Dr. Athan Theoharis is a leading historian of the surveillance and repression of movements for social justice by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, especially the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. As we continue to call for a new Poor People’s Campaign for today and to work toward the unity of the poor, we have to study the steps that were taken to stop Rev. Dr. King and other social movement leaders. We can expect similar measures to be taken against ourselves and all those who would put forward a meaningful challenge to those in power today. We’re grateful to Dr. Theoharis for sharing his knowledge and insight with us.
The film “Selma” graphically captures the courage and resilience of the civil rights activists who, during the 1960s, challenged Southern segregation policies and ultimately succeeded in securing the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The film, however, omits a serious obstacle that civil rights activists confronted (beyond the brutality and hateful intolerance of Southern police officers and many white Southerners): the politics of anti-Communism. Southern segregationists aggressively sought to tar proponents of racial desegregation as having been influenced by and promoting Communist objectives. Significantly, their charges commanded the covert support of senior FBI officials who purposefully leaked (on the strict condition that the recipients not disclose the FBI’s assistance) derogatory personal and political information about civil rights leaders, notably Martin Luther King, Jr.

The FBI had monitored civil rights activists since the 1920s. These investigations intensified after the 1963 March on Washington, with FBI agents employing more intrusive and often illegal investigative techniques (wiretaps, bugs, break-ins). The resultant investigations, however, uncovered no evidence that any of the targeted civil rights activists had violated any federal law (or had engaged or planned to engage in espionage or sabotage). FBI agents instead discovered King’s involvement in illicit sexual activities and his associations with former Communist Party members. Since the acquired information could not be used to advance legitimate law enforcement purposes, senior FBI officials sought alternative uses—thus their decision to leak information questioning the loyalty and morality of King (and other activists) to prominent Southern leaders and “reliable” reporters. Their underlying objective was to influence public policy and contain demands for social reform.
These actions were not exceptional. Nor were FBI surveillance operations otherwise confined to radical activists and organizations (e.g., the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panthers, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Women’s Liberation Movement). FBI agents also monitored prominent Americans, in the process acquiring and maintaining derogatory personal and political information about them. Some notable examples are: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Illinois Governor and 1952 and 1956 Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, Ensign/Congressman/Senator/President John F. Kennedy, Republican Senator and 1960 Vice Presidential nominee Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, former White House aide and prominent Washington attorney Thomas Corcoran. FBI agents were directed to target specifically those individuals who could influence the political culture.
The broad scope of their operations are highlighted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s 1960 decision to create a special index, the Reserve Index, listing for possible detention those individuals who “are in a position to influence others against the national interests or are likely to furnish financial or other material aid to subversive elements due to their subversive associations and ideology.” The FBI Director specifically identified those individuals who were to be listed in this special index: professors, teachers, labor union organizers, writers, reporters “and others in the mass media field,” and “other potentially influential persons on a local or national level.” Significantly, among those who were listed in this special index were Martin Luther King, Norman Mailer, and “a former history teacher who was recently fired for praising [Soviet] Premier [Nikita] Khrushchev before his history class and stating that the [U.S.] pilot of the [recently Soviet-downed] U-2 plane should be executed by the Reds.”
The scope of the FBI’s covert surveillance activities, and attendant covert efforts to exploit the acquired information to influence public policy, first became known through the unprecedented congressional investigations of the mid-1970s. These investigations broke from and challenged the indiscriminate anti-Communist politics of the Cold War era. Until then, by exploiting public fears about internal security threats, FBI officials were able to monitor, with impunity and seemingly without risk of exposure, individuals and organizations whom they deemed “subversive.” Their covert actions did successfully delay the enactment of laws to end racial desegregation. At the time, civil rights activists suspected that they were being monitored by the FBI (although unaware of the scope and effect of such surveillance) and yet remained undaunted in their efforts to effect social change.
The congressional investigations of the 1970s, the enactment of key amendments to the 1966 Freedom of Information Act in 1974, and the emergence of a more sceptical media and Congress did for a time deter the widespread but covert abuses of power engineered by senior FBI officials during the Cold War era. The re-emergence of heightened security concerns in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, however, led Congress and the White House to expand the FBI’s (and the NSA’s) surveillance powers. And while the full scope and targets of the resultant surveillance operations conducted by the FBI and NSA remain unknown, activists today (like their counterparts in the religious-based civil rights movements of the 1960s) should not be deterred by the possibility that their quest for social justice through acts of civil disobedience, disruptive marches and demonstrations might be monitored as prospectively terrorist. Their actions should be governed by their confidence in the righteousness of their actions, mirroring the courage and resilience of the civil rights activists of the 1960s.