In writing about the Civil Rights era Klan, I mentioned that the FBI of the time did, eventually, step in. Agent Roy Moore, by all accounts, was a good and honorable man. No. A good and honorable agent. I don’t know what kind of man he was. People are capable of being many, often contradictory, things. Moore’s boss, however, was an asshole.
One of the many asshole things Hoover did was set up COINTELPRO, or the Counterintelligence Program. The feds and their acronyms. COINTELPRO began in 1956. It ended in 1971 when a group of activists broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pa. The piles of secret files they stole they then sent to lawmakers and journalists. The files included damning details of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program.
Ostensibly COINTELPRO was created to track and damage the Communist Party of the United States. Which is pretty fucked up. I mean, I get it. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when the Cold War was still subzero. Soviets were more than the bad guys, they were the Boogeyman. The reason that we could all wake up dead at any given moment. It doesn’t help that almost every communist regime has turned into an authoritarian torture factory.
None of that changes the fact that our freedom to express ourselves politically in the US is covered by the First Amendment of the Constitution. For the government to step in and attempt to disrupt people attempting to form political parties is a gross violation to those rights. COINTELPRO was not simple surveillance. It was actively sowing division among groups involved in constitutionally protected political activism.
Eventually its scope was expanded to cover other domestic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Awesome. The Klan is a domestic terrorist organization that inflicts violence and mayhem on entire communities. COINTELPRO continued to grow to encompass the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and even Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. which were all cast under the umbrella of “black nationalist hate groups”. Not so awesome. I am not a fan of the Nation of Islam’s brand of isolationist patriarchal misogyny but, as far as I know, they haven’t roamed the streets murdering anyone who doesn’t fit into the mold they deem acceptable.
COINTELPRO’s actions included: spying on, infiltrating, and discrediting groups and individuals it considered insubordinate. Through COINTELPRO the FBI indulged in psychological warfare, manipulation of the media with false reports, smear campaigns often based in complete fabrications, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, violence, and assassination. Among many other things COINTELPRO is directly responsible for the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the Chicago Police.
Though COINTELPRO only lasted a decade and a half, covert operations under the U.S. Government against domestic political groups have occurred since its inception and continue to this day. Which brings us to BLM. In July of 2013 George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder after stalking, attacking, and finally shooting to death Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager. I read the news in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Paris. I remember crying while my husband slept beside me. On the 13th Alicia Garza posted a message about this shocking yet unsurprising miscarriage of justice. Garza’s post ended, “…I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter… Stop giving up on Black life. Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Patrisse Cullors, a friend of Garza’s, would almost immediately use her words to create the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Most of the articles I found noting a differentiation between Black lives mattering and #BLM were written by those who contort themselves to separate the idea of Black lives mattering from the organization agitating for Black lives to matter to American government and society. They tend to have a lot about “law abiding citizens” in them. But the fact is, there is a difference between BlackLivesMatter the hashtag and the organization Black Lives Matter founded by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi that has grown from its use. The hashtag is used in support of the broader social movement. Most, the vast majority of, posts or tweets that have the BLM hashtag are not associated with BLM the organization. The phrase Black Lives Matter and the various BLM hashtags have become umbrella terms for all pro-Black and anti-racist efforts.
In 2014 police killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown, both of whom were Black an unarmed. Garner’s murder was captured on video by bystander, Ramsey Orta, who was the only one arrested in association with Garner’s death. In support of the protests and uprisings following the deaths BLM, both as a hashtag and an organization, stepped in to draw attention to the many ways in which Black Americans are treated unfairly by institutions, laws, and policies in the US. In other words, it focuses a light on the systemic racism that is part of America’s foundation. The focus is on police brutality and over-policing of neighborhoods of color. BLM also spotlights our for-profit jail system which is an obscenity in of itself.
To this effect BLM has called for better training and accountability for US police forces and for a “defunding” of police. In the case of BLM and most who use the phrase “defund the police”* this means using the funds now funneled into police departments towards mental health services or other social services. The average policeman is not trained in conflict resolution or mental health support and should not be sent out to deal with those issues. Too many of those killed at the hands of the police are in the midst of a mental health crisis the cops should not have been called for in the first place. Unfortunately, there is often no one else to call. Defunding the police would change that.
BLM is now a global organization based in the US, the UK, and Canada. Activists also work on voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns in Black communities. Like many Black led organizations before them their mission is to wipe out white supremacy and to oppose the violence inflicted on Black communities. Violence inflicted by both vigilantes and that which is state sanctioned. BLM focuses on Black creativity and innovation by sponsoring and celebrating Black artists within and outside of Black communities. Ultimately the goal is to center Black joy and improve Black lives. All Black lives, regardless of ability, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more.
The movement has spread throughout the nation and the world. In the US, a study suggests that death at the hands of police has dropped in US cities that hosted significant BLM inspired protests. Because the federal government does not track deaths at the hands of non-federal policing agencies data had to be compiled through media and grassroots organizations. The study, an online item posted on the Social Science Research Network, found drops of as much as 20 percent of killings by police in towns and cities in which BLM protests were held between 2014 and 2019. This may, in part, be due to the fact that local protests were linked to the higher use of body cameras and the use community policing by law enforcement. BLM has also helped shift the national conversation about policing, changing the way leaders respond to death and injuries that are the result of state violence.
This is not to say there haven’t been problems. As noted, BLM, rather than being one organization is, in many ways, thousands of different organizations with different goals and different ideas on how to reach those goals. The organization founded by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi uses its cachet to support these various organizations in various ways but when there are this many spoons in the soup there is bound to be conflict.
Sources
https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/
https://theconversation.com/the-backlash-against-black-lives-matter-is-just-more-evidence-of-injustice-85587
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/906809148/in-rural-oregon-threats-and-backlash-follow-racial-justice-protests
https://prospect.org/justice/civil-rights-movement-politics-memory/
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-civil-rights-reflections-civil-rights-act-1964
https://www.noi.org/cointelpro/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/killings-by-police-declined-after-black-lives-matter-protests1/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5161811
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fbi-cointelpro-progra_b_4375527
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fred-hampton-black-panthers-fbi-surveillance/2021/05/04/2b12f826-acd7-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/blacklivesmatter-hashtag-first-appears-facebook-sparking-a-movement
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/where-is-black-lives-matter-headed
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/08/15/the-hashtag-blacklivesmatter-emerges-social-activism-on-twitter/
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/page/things-you-need
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-lives-matter-backlash/
https://nyti.ms/2AvYz8Q
https://nyti.ms/3ecYd6I
https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro
https://nyti.ms/2ZqRyOU
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Lives-Matter
*The phrase ‘defund the police’ is illustrative of the barriers of communication between groups.
The Left says, “Defund the police!”
The Right says, “You want to eliminate the cops?!?”
The Left says, “No, we want to redirect some of the money put into policing into other organizations that will better support the community. For example, the police shouldn’t be called, nor should they be forced to respond, to handle mental health crises for which they have no training.”
The Right says, “Don’t tell us what you mean. We know what you mean. You want to eliminate the cops!”
(It doesn’t help that there are some on the fringes of the Left that do want to eliminate policing as we now know it. But that would be like painting the entirety of the Right with extremist like Mitch McConnell.)