Just Being Black Was Enough to Get Yourself Spied on by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI | The Nation owl.li/vcpVG Please tell me past is not prologue.... In an analysis of the Media files in summer 1971, then–Washington Post reporter William Greider wrote that the files offered “the public and Congress an unprecedented glimpse of how the U.S. government watches its citizens—particularly black citizens.” In Washington, DC, every agent was required to assign six informers to spy on black people. This requirement was so important in the bureau that exemption from it was an elaborate bureaucratic process. Agents in an FBI office in a community where no black people lived were required to “specify by memorandum form 170-6 with a copy for the RA (Resident Agency, what small FBI offices like Media were called) error folder, so that he will not be charged with failure to perform.” An assignment to build a large network of informers throughout the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia included these recommendations on who should be recruited: men honorably discharged from the armed services and members of veterans organizations; friends, relatives and acquaintances of bureau employees; “employees and owners of businesses in ghetto areas which might include taverns, liquor stores, drug stores, pawn shops, gun ships, barber shops, janitors of apartment buildings, etc.” Bureau officials also suggested that agents establish contact with “persons who frequent ghetto areas on a regular basis such as taxi drivers, salesmen and distributors of newspapers, food and beverages. Installment collectors might also be considered in this regard.”
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 04:08:41 +0000
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