Black Americans: The FBI File

Excerpts from the FBI's files on prominent African-American activists, including Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, reveal the scope of the agency's surveillance. Simultaneous.

The demonization of original FBI director J. Edgar Hoover continues. O'Reilly, whose Racial Matters (1989) homed in on FBI surveillance of the black civil rights movement during 1960-72, here presents actual excerpts from the files the bureau kept on prominent black Americans from as early as 1922 and into the 1970s. The subjects of scrutiny whose files are presented constitute a veritable who's who of twentieth-century black American social and cultural activism, from W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey to James Baldwin and Malcolm X. O'Reilly prefaces the documents with a historical essay on Hoover and his relationship to the black civil rights movement. He maintains that although Hoover was indubitably racist, he directed the FBI not out of his own prejudice but as an arm of a national "government at war with its own people." Ray Olson