Contents:
Introduction
Local Surveillance & Repression Documents
State Surveillance & Disruption Documents
Federal Surveillance & Disruption Documents
U.S. Civil Rights Commission Documents
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." For well over a century thereafter, Taney's edict was 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 the Civil War was enforced by an interlocking system of police repression, judicial authority, economic power, religious piety, popular culture, and terrorist violence.
While most obvious and virulent in the South, to one degree or another it 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 police-states or systems close to it. So too, did Native Americans on reservations, and until the post-World War II years, to many Asian communities in the far West.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s was a social revolution that fundamentally challenged that system. North and South, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies saw the Freedom Movement as rebellion against the traditional racial order of white-supremacy — which it most definitely was — and they did everything they could to suppress it.
The defenders of the racial status-quo used their police and judicial powers at all levels to counter and suppress the the freedom movement directly (overtly) and indirectly (covertly):
The pages and documents of this website are replete with examples and instances of police repression. Less well-known than violent public attacks and mass arrests are the covert law enforcement and judicial acts of repression. Among the most notorious and illustrative were:
[Note that the documents provided in this section are not intended as a comprehensive collection of police and state-repression materials because there are other online acrhives that serve that purpose. Nor are they the result of any systematic search. Rather, these are just some examples found among the personal papers and arhives of Freedom Movement veterans.]
In the South (and some places elsewhere), segregation was the law of the land and anyone who defied it was guilty of criminal offense. Legislators, judges, and law enforcement officers never accepted that 1st Amendment free speech rights applied to nonwhites, so anti-parade and picketing ordinances along with laws prohibiting boycotts were available for police and judges to use against nonviolent protesters who challenged white-supremacy.
Local law-enforcement in the mid-20th Century 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 in the establishment's war against racial equality.
Local law-enforcement in the South traced its historical roots back to the notorious antebellum slave patrols who controlled, disciplined, and recaptured runaway slaves. In the mid-20th Century, most of them 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, neither U.S. nor state constitutions, nor the Bill of Rights, applied. 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 enforcment used in the South and Southwest to suppress dissent against segregation or any 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 couthouses to intimidate nonwhite applicants. When there was a mass meeting at a Black church, cops systematically broke the tailights 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 serveillance-state. It was common knowledge that phones used by activists were tapped and networks of snitches reporting regularly to the authorities were the primary means of surveillance. As one SCLC field organizer reported, within 10 minutes of arriving in a rural Alabama county the Chief of Police drove by to interrogate him.
Some informers snitched willingly for pay or favors from the white power-structure. But many others were coerced into informing on their neighbors and the movement by law enforcement officers who threatened them with consequences for some minor infaction (possession of alchohol, for example in a "dry" county), or dire retribution against a loved one serving a prison sentence.
In the South, white civilians frequently engaged in violence to maintain the "southern way of life" — everything from mob attacks to terrorist bombings and 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 sucessful 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."
Police forces at all levels, both South and North, 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 white politicians, community leaders, clergy, school systems, 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.
[Since few freedom movement veterans ever had access to local law enforcement documents and there wasn't much in the way of formal investigations our collection of local documents is thin.]
See also Affidavits, Depositions, & Statements About Repression, Retaliation, & Violence
| 1965 | Demonstration Permit, City of Luverne (Crenshaw County) Alabama, August 4 1965. (For demonstration to take place if Voting Rights Act was not immediately enacted. Since the Act was passed, the protest did not take place.) |
| 1969 | Report on NAACP/union protest. Memphis Police Dept. 10/24/69. |
| 1969 | Report on NAACP/union protest. Memphis Police Dept. 10/27/69. 3 pages. |
At the state level, troopers, investigation bureaus, soverignity commissions, legislative investigative committees, and a baised judicial system, were the main tools of surveillance, suppression, and repression of human rights.
From the lowest Justices of the Peace to the state Supreme Courts, the southern "justice" systems in the Jim Crow era were racially biased. The race of defendants and plaintiffs influenced, or outright determined, judgements, verdicts, and sentences. Civil rights advocates and activists had no expectation of fair or equal justice, while terrorist KKK-members had every expectation of impunity for whatever crimes they committed in defense of white-supremacy and the Southern Way of Life.
The common practice in most southern states was to assign a few state troopers (AKA "highway patrol" or "state police") to each rural county. But when local law enforcent was unable to suppress large protests or carry out mass arrests, troopers from far and wide were assembled into military-style formations equipped with tear gas, clubs, and firearms 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.
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 by spying on, smearing, disrupting, and destroying the Freedom Movement. Georgia had a Commission on Education for similar purposes. Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina had similar, but less sweepeing, legislative committees.
Regardless of name, these agencies were framed as defenses of states' rights, anti-communism, public order, or resistance to federal 'encroachment' — all of which terms were euphemisms for defending segregation and white-supremacy. In many ways similar to the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, they operated as state-funded intelligence, political-surveillance, covert sabotage, and repression-coordinating bodies that targeted racial justice advocates, civil-rights, organizations — and in some instances labor unions.
Mississippi Sovereignty Commission DocumentsAlabama State Trooper Field Interrogation Cards Targeting Civil Rights Workers
In the mid-20th Century, Congress and much of the Executive Brannch was dominated by segregationist "Dixicrats" 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 any dissident who questioned or challengeed the existing social order.
The FBI
FBI/COINTELPRO
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its autocratic czar, J. Edgar Hoover worked hand-in-glove with Dixiecrat segregationists. 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 Blacks 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 a deeply racist organization and an outright enemy of human rights.
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, and 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 already diligently surveilling and wiretapping Dr. King, and activists in SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and SCEF — despite that fact that none of them were suspected of violating any federal law. Hoover then greatly expanded the COINTELPRO to slander, attack, and sabotage 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.
Documents
[Note that some of these FBI/COINTELPRO Documents contain inaccurate, misleading, or patently false information. Some of it was supplied by paid informants and snitches under pressure from their handlers to provide materials to bolster politically-drive narratives of "communist subversion."Inline black-bars or blank spaces appearing in some of these documents indicate where information — such as the name of an informant — has been redacted out of the document by government censors to maintain secrecy.]
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Other arms of federal policy and law enforcement, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were equally hostile to social change. The CIA viewed the Freedom Movement and later the movement against the Vietnam War in the context of the "Cold War" against the Soviet Union. In their eyes, the popular struggles against colonial rule by peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America were instances of Soviet and Chinese "aggression," and the American Civil Rights Movement was an effort to undermine the role of the United States as the leader of the "Free World" on the international stage. So they closely monitored, surveilled, and did their best to disrupt contacts between international and American freedom activists — particularly those from SNCC.
Documents
TBD
Voting 1961. "Unlawful violence by the police remains in 1961 not a regional but a national shame."Justice, 1961. "Now in 1961 this Commission must report that police brutality is still a serious problem throughout the United States."
Law Enforcement in the South, 1965. "Racial violence against Negroes in the South is lawlessness with a history and a purpose. First with explicit and then with implicit legal sanction, violence has been used since the early days of slavery to maintain and reinforce the traditional subservient position of the Negro."
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