When Hoover reconstituted COINTELPRO, he was already worried that America’s black militants would be embraced by liberal whites, especially in a left-leaning place like Hollywood. In the August 1967 memo reanimating the counterintelligence program, he’d noted the importance of “prevent[ing] militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability”: “they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to the ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes.”
