odinsblog:“We’ve seen this before. This is history repeating itself.” — Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA)The FB
odinsblog:“We’ve seen this before. This is history repeating itself.” — Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA)The FBI’s practice of tracking so-called “Black extremists” goes all the way back to the early 1900s, when, in 1919, a document called the “Final Report on Negro Subversion” landed on the desk of 24-year-old Justice Department staffer J. Edgar Hoover. As Jelani Cobb explained in a column for The New Yorker this past December:“The document portrayed the civil-rights movement as potentially Bolshevik-inspired, and suggested that black discontent might easily turn into support for Communism. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan, which had been all but crushed by a series of anti-terrorism laws passed during Reconstruction, surged back to life after the release, in 1915, of the film “Birth of a Nation.” Yet its transformation from a Southern phenomenon into a national one elicited little concern from law-enforcement officials, some of whom were members.”The targeting of Black activists continued throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with the arrival of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, or counterintelligence program.Established in 1956 to “cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party USA, COINTELPRO later include surveillance of Black civil rights leaders, specifically targeting founding members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), including Martin Luther King Jr.(continue reading) -- source link
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