COINTELPRO is short for the FBI’s “Counterintelligence Program”, which launched in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party during the Second Red Scare (1947-1957). In the 1960s, COINTELPRO was expanded to include the surveillance, infiltration, and discretization of domestic political groups like the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers’ Party, White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist Hate Groups and the New Left; the Black Panther Party was specifically targeted. The program aimed to neutralize dissent and did not distinguish between political or criminal/terrorist activity. COINTELPRO served to “neutralize the activities of the black activists nationalists”. COINTELPRO “wanted to prevent the rise of a black “messiah” and Martin Luther King Jr. had been amongst the candidates until his assassination in 1968 when the attention shifted to Huey P. Newton.”
The FBI website claims that “although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.” Although the FBI claims differently on their website, this program targeted the Black Panther Party heavily, “of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO to disrupt Black groups, 233 were directed against the Black Panther Party.”
The Department of Homeland Security is currently monitoring the leaders and organizers of “Black Lives Matter” movement under suspicion of terrorism, “That we want to watch anybody who reaches the point that they can galvanize people, that is a concern here. It’s not that he’s a threat; it is that [the idea of a] black messiah still is a fear to our government. That has never changed, offense is his blackness. His offense is his ideology.”
Sources:
All images sourced from Pexels
“COINTELPRO.” FBI. FBI, 05 May 2011. Web. 25 Oct. 2016. <“>http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_cointelpro.html>.
Craven, Julia. “Surveillance Of Black Lives Matter Movement Recalls COINTELPRO.” Huffington Post. Huffington Post, n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2016. <