Love Yourself and Fuck the Government: FBI Abuse in the Civil Rights Era

For 15 years, the FBI illegally surveyed, infiltrated, and disrupted the black liberation movement in the mid-1900's. Protests, gatherings, and anti-war and civil rights movements were constantly being subverted by the US government. The goal of this program was supposedly to destroy factionalism and its targets. Possibly the most famous example, the Cointelpro project wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. Cointelpro stands for the counter intelligence program and began in 1956. It was created and propagated by the powerful FBI Director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover. Though it initially targeted communist party members in the US, the program quickly broadened its focus to other groups, especially on the far left. A few KKK members and other right-wing terrorists were targeted, but mostly civil rights and community leaders were most impacted. 

It was only exposed, years later, in 1971 when a group of leftist activists broke into FBI offices. They stole boxes files that contained the FBI reports from the last 15 years and mailed them anonymously to reporters for publication. Cointelpro. This publication exposed an incredible amount of targeted leftist activists, including the Black Panther Party members. Hoover had a particular passion for targeting African Americans participating in the Civil Rights Movement. 

In 1963, FBI agents bugged MLK's hotel rooms and recorded him cheating on his wife. They then used these recordings to attempt to blackmail him into suicide: "It is all there on record, your sexual orgies. Listen to yourself you filthy, abnormal animal. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it ... You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." This excerpt is from the FBI-MLK suicide letter. 

FBI infiltrators worked within the Nation of Islam to exacerbate the rift between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed. This ended up leading to Malcolm;s assassination. Numerous Black Panther members were arrested and murdered by the police following FBI reports that orchestrated raids with little or no cause. The most famous of these was on Fred Hampton. Hampton was a Chicago Black Panther Chairman who advocated for an intersectional crossover movement. Because he was seen as a threat, Hampton was tracked by an FBI informant who then gave the bureau detailed plans of Hampton's apartment. A short time later, police stormed Hampton's home and shot him to death as he lay sleeping next to his pregnant fiancee. This was December of 1969. Police tried to claim that the Panthers had fired first and Hampton died in an unfortunate shoot out. This contradicted the results of the following investigation in which the police were found to have fired 90 shots into the apartment. 

Cointelpro is one of the many examples of how the government acts in the interest of maintaining state hierarchy. They don't care about you, your family, your community, or your freedom. The US government has not stopped spying on us for a single moment. Advances in technology have changed how they do it, yes, but the fact remains that violence against citizens is never off the table for the state. We only find out retroactively when we've been targeted. There are increasing accounts suggesting that black activists are being unjustly murdered by police, assassinations which not only haunt communities, but entire movements. Do not film or take pictures of fellow protesters, rioters, or looters. Do not engage police unless it is to distract or thwart their misguided efforts. Love yourself and fuck the government.