How the FBI Undermined & Controlled Civil Rights Activists & Activities

COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO was the acronym for the FBI's ''Counterintelligence Program,'' a wide-ranging effort to discredit organizations that the government considered ''subversive.'' Many of these groups were considered to have Communist ties (during the Cold War, anti-Communism influenced every aspect of U.S. domestic and foreign policy). They included not just civil rights organizations, but also groups such as the Communist Party of the United States and the Ku Klux Klan.

COINTELPRO worked to discredit civil rights activists through both legal and extralegal means. A few of the tactics included:

1. Using informants, infiltrators, and agent provocateurs to discredit civil rights organizations.
2. Intense surveillance of subjects, including legal and illegal wiretaps
3. Police harassment
4. Using journalists to plant false stories in the press to discredit local activists
5. Using private citizens (such as switchboard operators or mailmen) to spy on activists

Although COINTELPRO was directed at multiple groups, the Civil Rights Movement took most of its energy during its short-lived existence (the program began in 1956 and was shut down in 1971). In particular, COINTELPRO targeted the Black Panther Party, providing information to the Chicago Police Department that led to a 1969 raid that killed two black power activists, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Although the Black Panthers insisted at the time that the FBI and the Chicago police were conspiring together to limit their activities and right to protest, the full extent of the FBI's involvement was not known until the mid-1970s, after COINTELPRO had been disbanded. In 1971, activists stole documents confirming the existence of COINTELPRO efforts, and in 1976, the Church Committee (a Congressional committee investigating abuses by U.S. intelligence groups) released a report detailing the FBI's activities.

J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another example was the FBI's personal targeting of Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent civil rights leader. Hoover himself personally hated King, calling him the ''most notorious liar in the country.'' He directed the FBI not only to target King's civil rights activism, but also to examine and discredit his personal life.

Like so many other things during the Cold War, Hoover's excuse for placing King under surveillance was communism. Hoover was convinced that King was a leader in a communist conspiracy to take down the United States, and he convinced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to place King under surveillance.

FBI agents bugged King's hotel rooms and home; they also tapped his phones. The surveillance resulted in information about the civil rights movement but also about King's personal life. Among other information, the hotel room bugs revealed him having extramarital affairs. The FBI collected these tapes and mailed them to King's home in Atlanta, along with an anonymous letter urging King to commit suicide. The letter read, in part: ''You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile...King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is...You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.''

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Civil Rights Activist

Lesson Summary

In this lesson, we learned how the federal government had a conflicting relationship with the Civil Rights Movement. Although the federal government supported many aspects of the movement and put into place important legislation guaranteeing civil rights, it also used the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to discredit and disrupt civil rights groups and their activities.

We looked specifically at two examples of this: COINTELPRO, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program that worked to discredit civil rights activists through both legal and extra legal means (especially the Black Panther Party), and J. Edgar Hoover's personal targeting of Martin Luther King, Jr..