Good Morning POU!
While many believe the surveillance of black leaders began with the modern Civil Rights Movement and culminated with the Black Panther Party, the truth is, the FBI kept surveillance on black writers and academics beginning in the 1920s. The literature and music of the Harlem Renaissance, and its devotion to authentic black thought was enough to warrant surveillance by the FBI for ‘subversion’.
(The following is taken from a 2015 column by William Maxwell)
When Black Writers Were Public Enemy No. 1
When poet Claude McKay announced the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance with the movement’s first book of poetry, Harlem Shadows in 1922, it began the decades long surveillance and harassment of literary and academic African Americans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover.
In the mind of the young FBI, McKay’s 1922 was most notable as a year of revolutionary danger. When other readers were appreciating “If We Must Die” and the rest of the poet’s fierce but well-mannered Shakespearian sonnets, Bureau bookworms—agents tasked with screening texts like McKay’s—were warning of a “collection of radical poems” composed by “a notorious negro revolutionary.”
In the summer of 1922, a “strictly confidential source” dropped word that the Jamaican-born poet and “well-known radical of New York City” planned a trip to the Soviet Union, the home of the Russian Revolution, which the left-wing McKay suspected might be “the greatest event in the history of humanity.” Following McKay’s embarking on the trip that fall, the FBI’s surveillance system plunged into overdrive: cross-examining ship schedules, scouring McKay’s passport records and pressing a distant acquaintance for clues in her Harlem apartment. Immigration and customs officials were ordered to confine man, baggage and documents for “appropriate attention” should McKay attempt to reenter the United States. The ports of New York and Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland, New Orleans and Baltimore, were all put on notice, with FBI agents in Maryland boasting of a local police department on the “lookout” for one “Claude McKay (colored).” For more than a decade, McKay, well aware he was afflicted by government spies, reasoned that U.S. authorities would not let him back into the country “without special intervention.” The poet would live abroad until 1934, spending most of his Harlem Renaissance wary of returning to Harlem.
The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover-era surveillance of so-called dissidents—a motley assembly of Soviet sympathizers, anti-war activists and civil rights leaders—has been well documented since the 1970s. But McKay was the first, though hardly the last, of one Hoover-tracked subculture that has received less attention: black writers, including some of the most celebrated names in American letters. In the heart of the 20th century, beginning decades before the FBI’s campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, later, the Black Panthers, dozens of allegedly subversive African-American poets, novelists, essayists and playwrights were distinct targets of the agency, whose surveillance of this group was thorough, far-reaching and sometimes ruthless.
The extensive scope of this surveillance is only now coming into focus, thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Building on the detective work of prior researchers who discovered files on the likes of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, I submitted more than 100 FOIA requests for my recent book and found that the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the FBI opened at least 51 files on individual black writers active during the Hoover years. My 106 FOIA requests have returned almost 14,000 pages of files in all; the average length of the 45 files with page numbers we can count is a healthy 309 pages.
Measured more narrowly, nearly half—23 out of a total of 48—of the historically relevant writers featured in the classroom staple The Norton Anthology of African American Literature were first anthologized by the Bureau, where agents combed works of literature for signs of dissidence. The FBI, it turns out, may have been one of history’s most dedicated critics of African-American literature.
Not that the agency’s surveillance was confined to academic-style close reading. Alarmingly, the disclosed files reveal that the FBI prepared preventive arrests of most of the names dropped above, and altogether more than half of the black authors stalked in its archive. Twenty-seven of 51, accused of communism and related extremisms, were caught in the invisible dragnet of the agency’s “Custodial Detention” index and its successors—hot lists of pre-captives “whose presence at liberty in this country in time of war or national emergency,” Hoover resolved in 1939, “would be dangerous to the public peace and the safety of the United States Government.”
Reasons for inclusion in the secret Custodial index were broad and fuzzy. Anyone suspected of “affiliation with organizations engaged in activities in behalf of a foreign nation, participation in dangerous subversive movements, advocacy of the overthrow of Government by force and violence, et cetera,” could be added, Hoover advised. Hoover was, after all, a lawman who ever sought to recriminalize treacherous expression: Some 16 years after the Sedition Act had been repealed, he told the New Yorker he would “view with favor the passage of legislation making the advocacy of violent revolution a crime in itself.”
While the “et cetera” in the FBI’s surveillance mission allowed for the widest of roundups, the criteria for listings on the basis of “advocacy” were specially attuned to literary offenders: Hoover instructed that Custodial Detention candidates should be investigated through “public libraries” and “newspaper morgues.” Non-black writing could be targeted, of course; Joyce and Eliot were both watched by the FBI, with the latter attracting a short file devoted to left-wing objections to his anti-Semitism. But inside Hoover’s Bureau, black writing was more often found guilty of speaking for revolution and against the U.S. government until proven innocent; according to the best seized evidence, African-American writers were disproportionately trailed, studied and subjected to the Custodial Detention index. The ugliness of Hoover’s personal racism, honed in a segregating turn-of-century Washington and complicated by rumors of his own black ancestry, has been exaggerated by some biographers. But the strength of his conviction that black self-assertion needed watching cannot be overstated. The director informed Congress in 1964, for instance, that the FBI’s concern with radical influence on African-American protest was deep, abiding and unbreakable.
Just who, and whose literary work, was caught up in the Bureau’s monitoring of African-American writing? Scrutinizing African-American authors was an institutional passion of the FBI that stretched from the Red Summer of 1919, Hoover’s first year at the Bureau as well as the first year of Harlem’s renaissance, to Hoover’s death in the Bureau saddle in 1972. As the newly named head of the Bureau’s Radical Division, the twenty-something Hoover first trained on the laboratory of modern black art the FBI’s legendary system for archiving and exploiting the results of intelligence work. Gwendolyn Bennett, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, as well as Hughes and McKay: All these Harlem Renaissance stars were eventually favored with FBI files, the nation’s highest medal of radical honor—some thin (Douglas Johnson’s is all of six sheets) and some as thick as windy literary biographies (Du Bois’ scales 756 pages).
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