Review, Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (The Free Press, 1989)

The IRE Journal, Fall 1990

At the 1963 March on Washington, John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, planned to ask, “I want to know, which side is the federal government on?” While more moderate leaders of the march convinced Lewis to cut this particular section of his speech, the question remained valid—probably even more valid than Lewis realized. For, as Kenneth O’Reilly shows, the federal government, at least in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, engaged in a systematic effort to discredit and destroy the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.

O’Reilly details the Bureau’s attempts to undermine one of the largest mass democratic movements in twentieth-century America. Under the leadership of its director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI consistently stood on the side of the status quo, which in Hoover’s mind meant the continued supremacy of white Americans. Acting out of a variety of considerations—personal, bureaucratic, political and ideological—the FBI undertook a range of campaigns from failing to enforce civil rights laws to smearing the movement’s major leader, Martin Luther King, to infiltrating and sabotaging black organizations. Parts of this story have been told before, for instance in the reports of the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate in 1975-1976, and in books like David Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King (1981), but the strength of O’Reilly’s book is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the FBI’s racial politics and places them in the broader context of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ civil rights policies.

Drawing on FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and personal interviews, O'Reilly details the way Hoover used bureaucratic decision-making processes, both within the FBI and between it and other departments, to serve his own ends. He demonstrates Hoover’s attitude by showing the drastic difference in the Bureau’s enforcement of civil rights laws compared to its investigation of civil rights organizations. Intra-departmental memos reveal that, when told by the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights laws more rigorously, Hoover engaged in “a campaign of bureaucratic resistance.”

But when, in light of the 1961 Freedom Rides, administration officials asked for better intelligence information enabling them to anticipate outbreaks of violence, Hoover responded with a vigorous program of surveillance.

Using FOIA requests to follow the flow of Bureau memos, O’Reilly shows this policy of surveillance was tailored to fit Hoover’s preconceived views. In the summer of 1963 the FBI Domestic Intelligence Division issued a summary of communist attempts to infiltrate the civil rights movement. The Division’s sixty-eight page brief concluded that communist influence was minimal and that Marxist-Leninist ideology made it irrelevant to the struggle for black equality. Hoover, however, rejected the report and ostracized Division chief William Sullivan. Realizing his miscalculation, Sullivan issued a new report a week later saying, “The Director is correct. We were completely wrong . . . the Communist Party, USA, does wield substantial influence over Negroes, which one day could become decisive.”

The FBI’s policies markedly changed after the movement reached its pinnacle of popularity with the 1963 March on Washington. O’Reilly argues the march convinced Hoover that the movement posed too great a threat to the status quo and needed to be destroyed. Thus the FBI set out to discredit King, the movement’s most visible figure. King had been the target of FBI surveillance before the summer of 1963, largely because one of his chief advisers, Stanley Levison, had been a high-ranking member of the Communist Party in the 1950s. But according to O’Reilly, Levison merely provided a pretext for Hoover in his attempt to undermine King and, through him, the movement as a whole.

As a result of the surveillance of King, the FBI discovered that he was carrying on a variety of adulterous affairs. In light of this knowledge the FBI shifted focus in its efforts to smear King, concentrating on the issue of morality. The FBI’s vendetta reached its apex in November 1964 when Sullivan, with Hoover’s approval, sent King an anonymous letter, purportedly from another black pastor, threatening to release damaging information unless King committed suicide. Sullivan’s letter read, in part, “King, look into your heart. You know you are a fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. . . . 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.”

The FBI found willing accomplices in its campaign against King and the movement generally among members of the media. Hoover had developed a symbiotic relationship with selected members of the Fourth Estate, feeding them inside information in return for good publicity. By the early 1960s, O’Reilly says, the FBI had cultivated over 300 television, radio, and print journalists who “could be counted on to publicize the FBI’s position on virtually any issue.”

Despite its efforts to destroy King, in some ways the FBI’s work aided the civil rights movement. For instance, the Bureau undertook a campaign to investigate the Ku Klux Klan.

The greatest success of this effort came when the FBI solved the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. In O’Reilly’s view Hoover sought to defeat the Klan in an attempt to distance the FBI from white extremists who were giving the struggle against civil rights a bad name. A less Machiavellian—and more plausible—explanation of Hoover’s motives was offered by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray in their 1988 book We Are Not Afraid. Hoover, according to Cagin and Dray, held a typical lawman’s hatred for all secretive, vigilante organizations. Regardless of motive, O’Reilly certainly is correct in saying, “From beginning to end, the Klan wars remained a sideshow to the real war against the black struggle for racial justice.”

O’Reilly traces the FBI’s relationship with black Americans through the rest of the decade as calls for integration were replaced by cries of “black power” and the language of anti-communism was supplanted by the rhetoric of “law and order.” As he had with the “communist menace” of earlier decades, Hoover came to view all blacks as a potential threat to America and thus he justified the FBI’s violating their civil liberties.

Under its counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist, the FBI worked to infiltrate and destroy a range of radical black organizations, especially the Black Panthers. The FBI attempted to stir up intra- and inter-organizational strife amongst black groups by such tactics as falsely telling individuals that others had issued death contracts on them. As O’Reilly says of the FBI policy, “Physical violence, as opposed to violent rhetoric, was never more than a peripheral part of the black struggle for equality. Political violence, in contrast, was a central part of the FBI response to that struggle—something located within the mainstream of policy toward blacks.”

Responsibility for this policy cannot be confined to Hoover or the FBI, O’Reilly argues, but most be shared by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Hoover may have been extremely powerful, but he was still answerable to the president. As O’Reilly points out, even the attorneys general most sympathetic to black Americans, Robert Kennedy and Ramsey Clark, acquiesced in Hoover’s policies. Ironically then, O’Reilly concludes, the FBI’s war on the civil rights movement was as much a legacy of the Great Society program as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

O’Reilly occasionally overemphasizes the racist motivations of the FBI’s policies. Infiltration, “dirty tricks,” and attempts to discredit individuals were also part of the FBI policy against white dissidents in the anti-war movement and the New Left. But, though his argument is occasionally tendentious, O’Reilly’s research accumulates enough evidence to mark this story as one of the most shameful in recent American history. With the government abuse of the FOIA that has occurred over the last decade, it may be a long time before we get another look at how irrational fears and prejudices can be transformed into official government policy.