[A little long but important history...if you cant read it now, save it to read at first opportunity...] The fury among American blacks sparked by Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was powerful enough to cause serious concern to the U.S. government, urban mayors, and major newspapers, and even prompted CIA Director John Deutch to make an extraordinary appearance at a town meeting in South Central Los Angeles, where Rep. Maxine Waters was accused of fanning the flames of “black paranoia.” We will now briefly outline why this “paranoia” is amply justified and why Webb’s series very reasonably struck a chord in the black community. In all discussions of “black paranoia” during the Webb affair, white commentators invariably conceded—as indeed they had to—that the one instance where such fears were entirely justified was the infamous Tuskegee experiments. Yet in the press coverage no more than a sentence or two was devoted to any account of what actually happened at Tuskegee. The facts are terrible. In 1932, 600 poor black men from rural Macon County, Alabama, were recruited for a study by the United States Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute. The researchers found 400 out of the 600 infected with syphilis, and the 200 uninfected men were monitored as the control group. The other 400 men were told they were being treated for “bad blood” and were given a treatment the doctors called “pink medicine,” which was actually nothing more than aspirin and an iron supplement. No effective medical treatment was ever given to the Tuskegee victims because the researchers wanted to study the natural progress of venereal disease. When other physicians diagnosed syphilis in some of the men, the Public Health Service researchers intervened to prevent any treatment. When penicillin was developed as a cure for syphilis in 1943, it was not provided to the patients. Indeed, the development of a cure only seemed to spur on the Tuskegee researchers, who, in the words of historian James Jones, author of Bad Blood, saw Tuskegee as a “never-again-to-be-repeated opportunity.” As an inducement to continue in the program over several decades the men were given hot meals, a certificate signed by the surgeon general, the promise of free medical care, and a $50 burial stipend. This stipend was far from altruistic because it allowed the Health Service researchers to perform their own autopsies on the men after they died. The experiments continued until 1972, and were canceled only after information about them had leaked to the press. Over the course of the experiments more than 100 of the men died of causes related to syphilis, but even after exposure, the lead researchers remained unapologetic. “For the most part, doctors and civil servants simply did their job,” said Dr. John Heller, who had headed the U.S. Public Health Services Division of Venereal Diseases. “Some merely followed orders, others worked for the glory of science.” In 1996, President Clinton issued a public apology to the Tuskegee victims. Nor was this an entirely disinterested act of governmental contrition. Earlier in the year, Clinton had been approached by Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala regarding the scarcity of blacks willing to volunteer as research subjects. Shalala attributed this reluctance to “unnatural fears” arising from the Tuskegee experiments. George Annas, who runs the Law, Ethics and Medicine program at Boston University, notes that the apology was skewed and that Clinton and Shalala should have been finding ways of recruiting more blacks as medical students rather than research subjects. “If you were to look at the historical record, you will see that blacks’ distrust predated Tuskegee,” according to Dr. Vanessa Gamble, an associate professor of the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There were experiments dating back to more than a hundred years that were more often done by whites on slaves and free blacks than on poor whites.” Another oft-cited explanation for the readiness of blacks to believe the worst about the white man’s intentions is briskly referred to as “the FBI’s snooping on Martin Luther King Jr.,” as Tim Golden put it amid his reflections on black paranoia in the New York Times. The government’s interest in Dr. King went considerably beyond “snooping,” however, to constitute one of the most prolonged surveillances of any family in American history. In the early years of the 20th century, Ralph Van Deman created an Army Intelligence network targeting four prime foes: the Industrial Workers of the World, opponents of the draft, Socialists, and “Negro unrest.” Fear that the Germans would take advantage of black grievances was great, and Van Deman was much preoccupied with the role of black churches as possible centers of sedition. By the end of 1917, the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division had opened a file on Martin Luther King Jr.’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A. D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and first president of the Atlanta NAACP. King’s father, Martin Sr., Williams’ successor at Ebenezer Baptist, also entered the army files. Martin Jr. first shows up in these files (kept by the 111th Military Intelligence Group at Fort McPherson in Atlanta) in 1947, when he attended Dorothy Lilley’s Intercollegiate School; the army suspected Lilley of having ties to the Communist Party. Army Intelligence officers became convinced of Martin Luther King Jr.’s own Communist ties when he spoke in 1950 at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the integrated Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Ten years earlier, an Army Intelligence officer had reported to his superiors that the Highlander school was teaching a course of instruction to develop Negro organizers in the southern cotton states. By 1963, as Tennessee journalist Stephen Tompkins reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, U-2 planes were photographing disturbances in Birmingham, Alabama, capping a multilayered spy system that by 1968 included 304 intelligence offices across the country, “subversive national security dossiers” on 80,731 Americans, plus 19 million personnel dossiers lodged at the Defense Department’s Central Index of Investigations. A more sinister thread derives from the anger and fear with which the Army’s high command greeted King’s denunciation of the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967. Army spies recorded Stokely Carmichael telling King, “The Man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.” After the 1967 Detroit riots, 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the Army’s Psychological Operations group, dressed as civilians. It turned out King was by far the most popular black leader. That same year Maj. Gen. William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for intelligence, observing the great antiwar march on Washington from the roof of the Pentagon, concluded that the Empire was coming apart at the seams. There were, Yarborough reckoned, too few reliable troops to fight in Vietnam and hold the line at home. In response, the army increased its surveillance of King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying landing zones and potential sniper sites in major U.S. cities. The Ku Klux Klan was whiteouthardrecruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama as a subsidiary intelligence network. The Army began offering 30-06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. In his fine investigation, Tompkins detailed the increasing hysteria of Army Intelligence chiefs over the threat they considered King to pose to national stability. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover was similarly obsessed with this threat, and King was dogged by spy units through early 1967. A Green Beret special unit was operating in Memphis on the day he was shot. He died from a bullet from a 30-06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store, a murder for which James Earl Ray was given a 99-year sentence in a Tennessee prison. A court-ordered test of James Earl Ray’s rifle raised questions as to whether it in fact had fired the bullet that killed King. Notable black Americans, from the boxing champion Jack Johnson to Paul Robeson to W. E. B. Du Bois, were all the object of relentless harassment by the FBI. Johnson, the first black superstar, was framed by the FBI’s predecessor under the Mann Act. Johnson ultimately served a year for crossing state lines with his white girlfriend (who later became his wife). Du Bois, founder of the NAACP, was himself under surveillance for nearly seventy years and was arrested and shackled for urging peace talks with North Korea. More here: counterpunch.org/2014/10/24/a-short-history-of-black-paranoia/
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 00:35:33 +0000
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