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Used by the Communist party?                                                                                   Civil Rights Movement was a foreign Communist plot?

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Used by the Communist party?                                                                                   Civil Rights Movement was a foreign Communist plot?

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A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century (occasionally A Radical Program for the Twentieth Century) was a hoax that first gained public notoriety on June 7, 1957, during a debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, when Rep. Thomas Abernethy of Mississippi read a reputed quotation from it into the Congressional Record:
"We must realize that our party's most powerful weapon is racial tensions. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party. In America we will aim for subtle victory. While inflaming the Negro minority against the whites, we will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the Negroes. We will aid the Negroes to rise in prominence in every walk of life, in the professions and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige, the Negro will be able to intermarry with the whites and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause."

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Hippies commonly took up communal or cooperative living arrangements.

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In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the ease ntial effects" of the Beat Generation:

Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.

Liberation of the world from censorship.

Demystification and/or decriminalization of  cannabis and other drugs.

The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.

The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet."

Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.

Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy vs. state regimentation.

Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing."

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J. Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

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“When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist."

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--Black Nationalist Extremist/ Hate group?                                  --Black Freedom movement?

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--Black Nationalist Extremist/ Hate group?                                  --Black Freedom movement?

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The newly released FBI document described King as “a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it (Marxism), believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly.”

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The Culture of the Cold War by Stephen J. Whitfield   (Secondary source)

"To include the word 'Christian' in the name of the organization was also to demonstrate that, though the SCLC was consecrated to civil rights, it was not Communist-inspired." (p22)

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King's comment distancing himself from communists

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King's comment distancing himself from communists

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(Primary Source)
King told adviser Bayard Rustin in May 1965:
“There are things I wanted to say renouncing communism in theory, but they would not go along with it. We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us, but they wouldn’t go along with it.”

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(Primary source)

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Martin Luther King Jr. - A current analysis

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A “whole-hearted” communist who followed a “Marxist-Leninist line”

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A newly released FBI analysis from 1968 paints this picture of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: a "whole-hearted" communist who followed a "Marxist-Leninist line."

The 20-page document, dated March 12, three weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis, is included in the latest trove of government files about President John F. Kennedy's assassination, which the National Archives released Friday. It alleges that King's political ideologies and the creation of his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were heavily influenced by communists, specifically the Communist Party USA. The FBI document went into great detail about one of King's most trusted advisers, Stanley Levison, a New York lawyer and businessman who served as a top financier for the Communist Party years before he met King in 1956.

The document, titled "MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., A CURRENT ANALYSIS," alleged that Levison had a strong influence on many of King's activities as the leader of the civil rights movement, from what he said in his speeches and which demonstrations he took part in to where King's group got its funding.

David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian who had written extensively about King, said much of the explosive allegations in the document are neither new nor true.

"The number one thing I've learned in 40 years of doing this, is just because you see it in a top-secret document, just because someone had said it to the FBI, doesn't mean it's all accurate," Garrow told The Washington Post, citing the infamous dossier that contains salacious allegations against President Trump.

It's no secret that the FBI used invasive surveillance operations throughout the 1960s to collect troves of information on King. Though the agency, then under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, had unearthed embarrassing and sensitive information about the civil rights leader's personal life, it failed to find evidence of communist ties, Garrow said.

[New batch of JFK assassination files: Oswald in Mexico City and the Watergate burglars]

More broadly, the newly released FBI document reveals more about the government's preoccupation with the Communist Party USA, which by the 1960s had been reduced to a small, marginal group, Garrow said. It also says more about Hoover's personal hostility against King, whom he had sought to publicly discredit.

"I think the number one takeaway historically is how, even in March of 1968, the FBI continues to be bizarrely preoccupied with how important the Communist Party USA is. . . . The Communist Party, by 1968, is of no importance to anything," Garrow said. "These incredibly exaggerated statements of communist influence are exactly what the FBI wants to hear."

Garrow said that the FBI started wiretapping Levison after it realized in early 1962 that he was close to King.

"But day after day, they saw nothing in those wiretaps indicating that Levison was in any way representing the Communist Party or the Soviets, or was being manipulative with King," he said.

The efforts to pin King as a communist came at a time when the country was still reeling from fears of communist subversion, which had reached a feverish pitch when Sen. Joseph McCarthy rose to national prominence in the 1950s with his probes to expose alleged infiltration in the federal government.

The animosity between King and Hoover intensified in April 1964, after King said that the FBI was "completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the Deep South." Months later, Hoover said at a news conference that King was the "most notorious liar in the country."

In a 2002 article published in the Atlantic, Garrow said the question of whether King was a communist sympathizer had long preoccupied Hoover, as well as President Lyndon B. Johnson. But a piece of information that Hoover did not let Johnson know was that King had made a comment distancing himself from communists.

"There are things I wanted to say renouncing communism in theory, but they would not go along with it. We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us, but they wouldn't go along with it," King told adviser Bayard Rustin in May 1965, when King, Garrow wrote, was agonizing over a public statement proclaiming unity in the civil rights movement.

Instead, Garrow wrote, the FBI "continued to distribute utterly misleading reports that declared just the opposite."

[Strippers, surveillance and assassination plots: The wildest JFK Files]

The newly released FBI document described King as "a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it (Marxism), believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly."

The document alleges that that characterization came from Levison, who passed it on to Gus Hall, then general secretary of the Communist Party USA. Garrow described it as Hall "mouthing off boastfully" to Jack Child, a Communist Party veteran who became an FBI informant.

Garrow is not the only historian to speak about Hoover's campaign against King and to debunk allegations of his communist ties.

In a November 2014 essay published in the New York Times, Yale University history professor Beverly Gage wrote about a so-called "suicide letter" by an unnamed author to King. The letter called King a "colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that" and denounced him for his alleged lovers. Years later, the Senate's Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King's suspicion that the letter had come from the FBI, Gage wrote.

Gage described the letter as "the most notorious and embarrassing example of Hoover's FBI run amok."

The FBI also was criticized by a Senate committee that convened in the 1970s to investigate the agency's domestic intelligence operations.

"Rather than trying to discredit the alleged Communists it believed were attempting to influence Dr. King, the Bureau adopted a curious tactic of trying to discredit the supposed target of Communist Party interest - Dr. King himself," according to the committee's report.

The FBI document was among the 676 files that the National Archive released Friday. Among the recent disclosures are more than 500 never-before-seen CIA files that contain information about Lee Harvey Oswald and operatives-turned-Watergate-burglars James McCord and E. Howard Hunt.
Ian Shapira and Michael E. Miller contributed to this story. READ MORE: Trump delays release of some JFK assassination documents, bowing to national security concerns What the JFK assassination files can tell us about the U.S. plot to kill Castro JFK assassination records: The promise of revelations derailed by CIA and FBI

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In the latest JFK files: The FBI's ugly analysis on Martin Luther King Jr., filled with falsehoods

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A newly released FBI analysis from 1968 paints this picture of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: a "whole-hearted" communist who followed a "Marxist-Leninist line." The 20-page document, dated March 12, three weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis, is included in the latest trove of government files about President John F.

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--Cointelpro operations against black activists
--F.B.I. spied on Martin Luther King Jr.
--Fake bombing conspiracy in 1969
--J. Edgar Hoover ordered the agency to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” what he called “black nationalist hate-type organizations.”

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The F.B.I. document takes pains to say that the mere exercise of constitutional rights to protest and even the "rhetorical embrace" of violent tactics "may not" constitute extremism. But the danger - or even the aim - is that the entire racial justice movement gets painted with the brush of terrorism.

The next time there is an act of violence by an African-American against police officers, brace yourself for the right-wing media or the attorney general or the tweeter in chief to seize on the phrase "black identity extremists."

It has already happened. Fox News obligingly used videotape of Black Lives Matter protests as the backdrop for its credulous account of the report after it was published.

The report inevitably draws comparisons to the notorious Cointelpro operations against black activists in the last century. But it would be unfair to say the F.B.I. has not made any progress since J. Edgar Hoover ordered the agency to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" what he called "black nationalist hate-type organizations."

The language of the new document is more cagey. But the sentiments are chilling.

The report "conflates black political activists with dangerous domestic terrorist organizations that pose actual threats to law enforcement," the Congressional Black Caucus said in a letter asking for a meeting with the F.B.I.

"It relies on a handful of obviously terrible incidents to paint black Americans who exercise free speech against witnessed police brutality as possible violent extremists," the letter said. (It was referring to six cases since 2014 in which the F.B.I. said the black identity menace was behind attacks on police officers, including the reprehensible shooting of 11 police officers, five of whom died, in Dallas on July 7, 2016.)

The F.B.I. draws a line from the killing by a police officer of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 to all those other cases and warns of a "surge" in ideologically motivated violence against the police.

The report also draws a line from the activists of the '60s and '70s to the "extremists" of today. The black threat, it said, had simply been dormant.

There is no such connection. The F.B.I. failed even to make any real connection among the six incidents it cited.

The authors of the report act as though there is doubt about the institutional racism in our country and in some police forces. (I am not saying all white police officers are racists.)

The F.B.I. document talked about "perceived injustices against African-Americans" - perceived by anyone who is really paying attention.

The counterterrorism division said it "considered" the possibility that violence against the police is not driven by their phantom B.I.E.s but decided that was "very unlikely."

Fifty years ago, Hoover's F.B.I. spied on civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. It forged letters to create friction between rival black-power movements, which led to a shooting at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1969 that left two dead. Undercover police officers were responsible for framing 21 Black Panthers for a fake bombing conspiracy in New York in 1969.

The list goes on and on.

There is a slippery slope between this kind of intelligence assessment and acts of repression. The F.B.I. has slid gleefully down that slope before. It must not be allowed to do so again.

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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Opinion | The F.B.I.'s Black Phantom Menace

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The F.B.I. document takes pains to say that the mere exercise of constitutional rights to protest and even the "rhetorical embrace" of violent tactics "may not" constitute extremism. But the danger - or even the aim - is that the entire racial justice movement gets painted with the brush of terrorism.

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(Primary Source)
"If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is inequality of wealth, there is every reason to believe that person is a Communist."  (Albert Canwell)

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The Culture of the Cold War by Stephen J. Whitfield   (Secondary source)

"The struggle for civil rights, which became conspicuous in the fifties, aroused the suspicion of those who inferred froth evidence that Communism was loathsome the conclusion that anything loathsome was Communism"  (p21).

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What role did Cold War paranoia about Communism play on the civil right movement?