[This article is a compilation of the section-introductions in Documents: Police Surveillance & Repression]
In 1857, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that, "A negro of the African race had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."
Despite the outcome of the Civil War, for well over a century thereafter Taney's edict remained the governing principle of both the Southern Way of Life and large segments of American society outside the South. The Jim Crow system of racial segregation and systematic denial of voting rights for nonwhite citizens that emerged after that war was enforced by an interlocking system of judicial authority, police repression, economic power, religious piety, popular culture, and terrorist violence.
While most obvious and virulent in the South, to one degree or another the Jim Crow system applied to all nonwhite Americans everywhere — Black, Brown, Native, and Asian. In Southern and Southwestern states and northern inner-cities, Black and Brown communities existed under what were in effect close to police-states. So too, did Native Americans on reservations, and until the post-World War II years, so did many Asian communities in the far West.
The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th Century was a social revolution that fundamentally challenged that system. North and South, state and local law enforcement viewed the Freedom Movement as a rebellion against the traditional racial order of white-supremacy — which it most definitely was — and they did everything they could to suppress it. As defenders of the racial status-quo, they used their judicial and police powers to counter and suppress the freedom movement both directly (overtly) and indirectly (covertly):
In the South (and some other areas), segregation was the law of the land. Anyone who defied it was guilty of criminal offense. Most southern legislators, judges, and law enforcement officers did not accept that 1st Amendment free speech rights applied to nonwhites, so anti-parade and picketing ordinances and laws prohibiting boycotts were available for judges and police to use against nonviolent protesters who challenged white- supremacy.
In that era, local law-enforcement generally consisted of county sheriffs and their deputies and possemen, city police, rural constables, and (in some southern towns) "negro police" Except for the negro police, they were all white and all male and they manned the front lines power-structure's war against racial equality. In the South, local law-enforcement traced its historical roots back to the notorious antebellum slave patrols who controlled, disciplined, and recaptured runaway slaves. In the Civil Rights Era, most law officers still saw maintaining white-supremacy and the Southern Way of Life as an essential element of their mission.
To that end, they used their considerable police-powers to intimidate and arrest racial "troublemakers" and "agitators" on whatever pretext they could devise — or completely fabricate. For local law enforcement in the South, when race was at issue the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights did not apply. Nor, for that matter, did state constitutions. As the Ruleville MS constable (and mayor) explained to SNCC Field Secretary Charles McLaurin in 1962, "That law ain't got here yet."
The violent repression that local law enforcement used in the South to suppress any dissent against segregation or assertion of pride or basic human rights on the part of nonwhites is well known — mass arrests and jailings, tear gas assaults, and attack dogs.
Police intimidation was unrelenting. On voter-registrations days, for example, sheriff deputies lingered about the courthouses to intimidate nonwhite applicants. When there was a mass meeting at a Black church, cops systematically broke the taillights of every car parked nearby so that tickets could be issued the following days — and names noted down for further action.
Black and other nonwhite communities and activists in the South (and some places outside the South) existed in a low-tech surveillance-state. It was common knowledge that phones used by activists were tapped. But few southern Blacks were able to afford a phone, so networks of snitches who reported to the authorities on their neighbors were the primary means of surveillance. As one SCLC field organizer later recalled, within 10 minutes of arriving in a rural Alabama county the local Chief of Police showed up to interrogate him.
Some informers snitched willingly for pay or favors from the white power-structure. But others were coerced into informing on their neighbors — and the Freedom Movement — by law enforcement officers who threatened them with legal repercussions for some minor infraction such as possession of alcohol in a "dry" county, or with dire retribution against a loved one serving a prison sentence.
In the South (and at times elsewhere), white civilians used violence to maintain the "southern way of life" — everything from lynchings, to mob attacks, to terrorist bombings, to ruthless assassinations. In many locales, local police and courts actively enabled and protected them. Both terrorists and cops knew they could act with impunity, immune from sanction, arrest, or successful prosecution.
As the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported, police repression:
"Frequently took the form of judicial and legislative efforts to prohibit constitutionally protected activity. Mass arrests of persons attempting to exercise rights were common. Discrimination and arbitrariness were prevalent in the setting of bail, in sentencing, and in the handling of juveniles. ... In Mississippi, the widespread failure of local officials to solve and prosecute cases of racial violence and the pattern of harassment of local Negroes and civil rights workers raise questions not only about their performance as individuals, but also about the institutions which they represent."
Of course, police forces at all levels, both South and North, assiduously assured the (white) public that they enforced the law in a fair, just, and impartial manner at all times and in all ways. Their claims were repeated and reinforced by politicians, clergy, community leaders, schoolroom lessons, the local media, and the national film and TV industry. But in nonwhite communities, cops were often seen as the defenders and perpetuators of a racist and deeply unjust social order. People of color knew by bitter, first-hand personal experience that on real-life city streets and rural back roads there were two sets of laws and law-enforcement behavior — one for whites and a very different one for nonwhites.
At the state level, a biased judicial system, troopers, investigation bureaus, legislative sovereignty commissions, and investigative committees, were the main tools of surveillance, suppression, and repression of human rights.
Judiciary. From the lowest Justices of the Peace to the state Supreme Courts, the judicial systems of the Jim Crow South were racially biased. Judges, prosecutors, juries, and almost all defense lawyers were white. The race of defendants and plaintiffs influenced, or outright determined, judgments, verdicts, and sentences. Civil rights advocates and activists had no expectation of fair or equal justice. Terrorist KKK-members, though, had every expectation of impunity for whatever crimes they committed in defense of white-supremacy and the Southern Way of Life.
State Troopers (sometimes known as, 'highway patrol' or 'state police'). The common practice in most southern states was to assign a few state troopers to each rural county. But when local law enforcement was unable to suppress large protests or carry out mass arrests, troopers from far and wide were assembled into military-style formations equipped with clubs, firearms, and tear gas in places like Jackson, Canton, and Grenada MS, Selma and Montgomery AL, Plaquimine and Bogalusa LA, Orangeburg SC, and other freedom battlegrounds throughout the South.
Sovereignty Commissions. In response to the NAACP's effort to end school segregation and then the Brown v Board of Education decision, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Virginia, enacted laws establishing "Sovereignty Commissions" to maintain white-supremacy and segregation. Georgia had a Commission on Education for similar purposes. Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina had similar, but less sweeping, legislative committees. In many ways they were similar to the FBI's COINTELPRO operation. They operated as state-funded spying, surveillance, sabotage, and repression-coordinating bodies that targeted individual racial justice advocates, civil-rights organizations, and in some cases labor unions or other organizations.
Politically, all of these various agencies — judicial, police, commissions — framed their mission as defense of states' rights, anti-communism, public order, and resistance to federal 'encroachment' — all of which terms were euphemisms for defending segregation and white-supremacy.
This archive's pages and documents are replete with examples and instances of police repression at state and local-levels. But less well-known than violent public attacks and mass arrests are the covert law enforcement and judicial acts of repression. Three of the most notorious and illustrative examples are:
In the mid-20th Century, significant portions of Congress and the Executive Branch were dominated by segregationist "Dixiecrats" who viewed all forms of progressive social change as inherently subversive. For them, the label "Communist" was a convenient pretext for justifying political suppression and persecution of dissidents who questioned or challenged the existing social order. In Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (McCarran committee) used their powers to suppress dissent and repress social change. In the Executive Branch, the two federal agencies most active in maintaining white supremacy were the FBI and the CIA.
The FBI and COINTELPRO
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its autocratic czar, J. Edgar Hoover, worked hand-in-glove with Dixiecrat segregationists. In that era, FBI field agents were are all white males (no Blacks or women need apply). As a matter of policy directed from the top, FBI agents consistently allied themselves with those determined to prevent African-Americans and other racial minorities from achieving political, economic, or social equality with whites. Freedom Movement activists quickly learned that the FBI they encountered day-to-day was deeply racist, an outright enemy of human rights, and an organization that bore scant resemblance to how it was portrayed in film and on TV.
Time after time in the 1950s and '60s, FBI agents in the South stood idly by as police, the Klan, and the White Citizens Council, trampled Constitutional rights, suppressed legal and peaceful free speech, and blatantly violated federal court orders. Under its "Racial Matters Program," at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 the FBI began monitoring Dr. King. It then established its COunter INTELigence PROgram (COINTELPRO) to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of organizations that Hoover considered subversive.
By 1963, the FBI was diligently surveilling and wiretapping not just Dr. King, but an uncounted number of other activists in SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and SCEF — despite the fact that none of them were suspected of violating any federal law. Hoover then greatly expanded the scope of COINTELPRO to include slandering, attacking, and sabotaging the civil rights movement in general and Dr. King in particular. In response, King stated: "[It is] difficult to accept the word of the FBI on communistic infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement when it has been so completely ineffectual in protecting the Negro from brutality in the Deep South."
Years later, in 1976, a committee of the U.S. Senate (the "Church Committee") issued an official report on COINTELPRO that concluded:
"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, ...]Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. COINTELPRO. U.S. Senate, 1976:
Church Committee Report–Domestic, 404 pages.
Church Committee Report–Domestic: Detailed Reports, 996 pages.
The CIA
Though their focus was foreign affairs and international activity, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was just as hostile to social change in America as the FBI. The CIA viewed both the Freedom Movement and the movement against the Vietnam War as domestic "subversion" in the context of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. To the CIA, the popular struggles against colonial rule by the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America were instances of Soviet and Chinese "aggression" against the colonial powers of Europe who were America's allies. And to the CIA, the American Civil Rights Movement was an effort to undermine the role and standing of the United States as the leader of the "Free World" on the international stage.
From the mid-1960s into the 1970s, civil rights activists, particularly those from SNCC, began developing contacts with anti-colonial freedom fighters in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere — first with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and then other liberation struggles in the global revolt against colonialism. The CIA did their best to monitor, disrupt, and sanction contacts between American and international freedom activists.
Copyright © Bruce Hartford
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