Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

Couldn’t nobody own Forest Joe. Very little is known about Forest before he escaped from the Carroll plantation in South Carolina’s Richland District, but by the spring of 1821, “the celebrated Bandit Joe” was becoming notorious for his brazen, charismatic leadership and his ability to vanish into thin air.16 Chronically ill with stage 5 drapetomania, he was unapologetic about infecting enslaved people with his affliction. If Angela Davis had a baby with T’Challa and gave it up for adoption to be raised by Tupac, that baby would one day read about the first man to truly live the thug life and say, “That Forest Joe dude be wildin’!”

Scholars and media outlets routinely cite Boston as creating the nation’s first municipal law enforcement agency in 1838, which is technically correct.22 However, over a decade prior on October 2, 1823, the citizens of Pineville, South Carolina, had met in the town library to “devise a plan for apprehending or dispersing a gang of desperate Runaways.”23 The group immediately began collecting money from the town’s citizens to solve its maroon problem.

The good citizens of South Carolina had no idea that they were treating a disease that wouldn’t be discovered for more than a quarter century. Twenty-eight years before a bunk physician discovered the “disease causing slaves to run away,” and fifteen years before the General Court of Boston passed a law to organize its Day Patrol,25 the newly formed “Standing Committee” simultaneously came up with the cure for the diseased freedom-thirsters and an official name for its Forest Joe apprehension commission. The slave-hunting squad’s name would eventually serve as a prescription for drapetomaniacs like Joe as well as define the relationship between Black Americans—free or enslaved—and law enforcement agencies for years to come. They called themselves the Pineville Police Association.26

FOOD STOP THE TOP-SECRET RECIPE TO AUNT PHYLLIS’S FRIED CHICKEN 1 chicken, cut into parts Some Lawry’s seasoned salt Some pepper Buttermilk Egg A big pot of used grease Piggly Wiggly bag 2 cups of Red Band all-purpose flour First of all, I know you’re wondering how this is related to history. Although there is a dispute over whether the Scottish or West Africans invented fried chicken, there is no dispute that the African version was the one that had seasoning and batter.1 We’re making the one invented by Black people.2 And joking about unseasoned chicken is actually an ethnic slur. I will not denigrate Scottish culture. They make great toilet paper. And yes, it has to be a Piggly Wiggly bag. This is not to say the bag must come from Piggly Wiggly. In South Carolina, all grocery bags are Piggly Wiggly bags, no matter where they come from. Unless, of course, you’re talking about a paper bag, which, of course, is technically called a “Kroger sack.” But you can’t make this chicken in a Kroger sack. Don’t be stupid. Next you need to salt it. Not with just any salt. You need the Lawry’s seasoned salt, the salmon-colored goodness that your mama taught you to sprinkle on everything from collard greens to corn on the cob. Sprinkle that on the chicken, along with some pepper, whisk the egg and milk together, and dump the chicken in there while you wait for your grease to heat up. Now here is the key: your grease can’t be new. It has to be melted Crisco used from the last time you f...

—“The Unanimous Declaration of ‘These Hands’ by the Black Folks of America”

Just as the Founding Fathers acquiesced to the South and excluded Black people from the “all men are created equal” when initiating the American experiment, most political leaders wanted to figure out a way to avoid a North vs. South showdown, even if it meant denying Black people’s freedom. This centrist sentiment resulted in the election of President Abraham Lincoln, who admitted that his “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.”4

Lincoln calmed fears of disunion by insisting that he had no plans to elevate Black Americans, free or enslaved, to the status of white men. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races,” he said in an 1858 speech. “I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”5

The Union army never intended to free the slaves. Lincoln didn’t want to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation couldn’t free the slaves. Black people freed themselves. And in doing so, they defeated the Confederacy and freed America from its most undemocratic institution. They were less concerned with flags, taxation, or saving the Union than they were with saving their people. Still, the result of their actions was a victory for America. The freed slaves would come to literally define what it means to be an American. We are the ones who continually push this country toward its goal of becoming more perfect. We are the reason it is still a union.

As Lincoln was struggling to come up with a plan for how to discipline the unpatriotic white Southerners, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General William Sherman met with twenty Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, to discuss the fate of the emancipated Americans. The main spokesperson, sixty-seven-year-old Garrison Frazier, had one request: “To have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”9 Of the twenty Black leaders, all but one confessed that their deepest desire was to live separate from whites. Armed with the Freedmen’s Bureau’s language that gave him the “authority to set apart, for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen, such tracts of land within the insurrectionary states as shall have been abandoned . . . acquired title by confiscation or sale, or otherwise,”10 in January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, issued Special Field Orders No. 15. The military directive commandeered over four hundred thousand acres of land in South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia and proclaimed that “no white person whatsoever” would be permitted to reside on the lands,” adding that “the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress.”11 With the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Black America had seized the opportunity to fulfill the dreams they had imagined.

With respect to Charleston, South Carolina, Sherman’s order specified that parcels of land would be given to the men and women who had been enslaved:

In 1865, Saxton’s officials lined up the formerly enslaved, many of whom had set up tents and temporary shacks at McLeod’s They handed each of the heads of the families a piece of paper, and explained that the deeds they just received meant they now owned the plantations they had spent their lives building for free. Some rejoiced, while others collapsed in tears. One of the men—America’s foremost expert in Sea Island cotton—broke into song. For the first time in his life, William “Hardtime” Dawson had a home of his own. But this joy did not last. On April 15, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, leaving Confederate sympathizer Andrew Johnson as president. Johnson was a Southerner, a slaveowner, and a Democrat who had been chosen for the vice presidency in the hopes of stopping the South from seceding. As a former senator of the Great State of Tennessee, Johnson repeatedly let his Democrat friends know where he stood on the issue of freedmen: “As for the Negro I am for setting him free but at the same time, I assert that this is a white man’s government,”14 he said in an 1864 speech, reiterating his earlier promises of “a free, intelligent white constituency, instead of a negro aristocracy”15 after the war. When Johnson ascended to the presidency, his first course of action was to stop that slaves-getting-land nonsense.

In July 1866, Congress agreed to reauthorize the Freedmen’s Bureau while stipulating that all the confiscated lands would be returned to the original owners. For nearly two years, Black people in South Carolina’s Lowcountry actually owned the land on which they had been enslaved. On James Island, America’s slave capital, most of the land had been redistributed to the former slaves before it was taken away. But now these freedmen were surrounded by angry Confederates whose land had been taken by Black repo men. And in those two years, they had all tasted Black power.

One of the most significant components of the Freedmen’s Bureau was its education initiative, which built more than a thousand Black schools throughout the nation and allocated $400,000 toward the training of their teachers. By the end of 1865, more than ninety thousand students attended freedmen’s schools, with an attendance rate eclipsing 80 percent of the school-age population.18 For some reason, the white administrators were astounded by the Black pupils’ “natural thirst for knowledge.”

By 1868, Charleston, a city that had thrived on slave trading and slave labor, was now being controlled by its Black majority. Africans took their own produce to the market. Workers unionized. Generations were becoming educated. They had financial independence and social mobility, which angered white men even more. “And beyond that,” Du Bois explained of the white Southerners’ fears, “if a free, educated black citizen and voter could be brought upon the stage this would in itself be the worst conceivable thing on earth; worse than shiftless, unprofitable labor; worse than ignorance, worse than crime. It would lead inevitably to a mulatto South and the eventual ruin of all civilization.”20

The worst conceivable thing on earth happened. Because the Confederate states were not represented in the federal legislature, Radical Republicans dominated Congress, and on July 9, 1868, another constitutional amendment was ratified. For the first time in American history, the federal government explicitly defined American citizenship, declaring, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The ex-slaves were not just free; the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionally guaranteed them all the “equal protection of the laws” previously afforded to white men. Almost eight months later, the Fifteenth Amendment declared, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

African Americans registered to vote in droves. South Carolina’s Black voters quickly outnumbered whites. In 1868, the Black majority elected Francis Lewis Cardozo as the South Carolina secretary of state. Howard and the American Missionary Association had sent Cardozo to the state to establish freedmen’s schools in South Carolina before he became the first African American to hold a statewide office in the United States. Black voters also sent Richard Cain, superintendent of AME missions and pastor of the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, to the South Carolina state senate. In the state house of representatives was Union veteran and hero the notorious Robert Smalls. By 1870, the lieutenant governor of South Carolina was Black. A Black man was on the state’s supreme court. And the state house of representatives was majority Black. Forty-seven percent were from Charleston, and as soon as they ascended into office, they started exercising Black power. A Black aristocracy had entered the chat.

When Hose was captured on April 23, a lynch mob of at least five hundred white people kidnapped him from deputies and took him to a field. People from across the state boarded trains to view the spectacle, but they did not lynch Hose immediately. First, the crowd took turns cutting off pieces of Hose’s nose, ears, fingers, and genitals. Others used their knives to stab him repeatedly as onlookers cheered. Then they skinned him alive and doused him with kerosene while young children collected wood to build a pyre, before burning him alive, watching as his veins ruptured and his eyes withered. After the fire subsided, the crowd diced Hose’s dead body into pieces and sold the remnants of their handiwork as souvenirs for those not fortunate enough to have attended the “barbecue.” The festivities concluded with a prayer, and a sign marking the occasion, reading: “We Must Protect Our Southern Women.”9

Between 1889 and 1922, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) counted 3,436 lynchings, a rate of two Black people each week.*10 Although this bloodlust was often characterized by mob violence, accusations of crimes, or hangings, white people would continue to implement increasingly brutal new techniques in the great American pastime of murdering Black people in bulk. Their techniques varied so widely that the NAACP* eventually came up with four distinct qualities that defined lynching.

Long before it was called “Jim Crow,” the white citizens of the Northern United States had established a de facto system of segregation that was, in many ways, more odious than the deep-fried racism in the South.* The Northern form of American apartheid had less to do with property rights, economics, or fear of Black rule; it existed because whites sincerely believed they were more human than their Black counterparts. Pennsylvania disenfranchised Black voters in 1838 after initially allowing free Black men to vote. The Union army was divided into racial companies.

The whites were at it again.

I know you think I’m finna tell you about poll taxes and literacy tests. Nah, bruh. They thought of all the white things to further suppress the Black population. The constitution used taxpayer money to provide pensions to Confederate soldiers. It included compulsory service to the state that could be waived if you paid your “road tax.” They required a literacy test for all male voters, which could be waived if you were a “male person who was on January 1st, 1867, or at any date prior thereto, entitled to vote under the constitution or statutes of any State of the United States.”** The provision in Section 5 that would become known as the “grandfather clause” exempted the “son or grandson of any such person not less than twenty-one years of age at the date of the adoption of this Constitution.”11 They didn’t have to hide it any longer. The only thing that would make their intentions more obvious is to restrict voting to “any male citizen over eighteen who has never used a jar of Murray’s or a washcloth.”

Now that you know what the white people were up to, lemme tell you what Black folks were doing. As White America struggled to rebuild its empire of racism, Black Americans were trying to accomplish the one goal they had been pursuing since 1620*—having white people leave us alone. Wait. Did you think we were clawing and scratching for the right to hang out in train cars and movie theaters with white people? Hold up, gimme a few minutes to stop laughing. Have you met white people? Think about it. If someone kidnapped you, made your family work for free, and murdered, raped, and brutalized your kin, who would want to kick it with them on the train?

The fight against segregation had less to do with the proximity to whiteness and more about the social, political, and economic subjugation of Black people. Resisting Jim Crow was about our humanity. Plus, we had a sneaky suspicion that white people would soon forget about the “equal” part of “separate but equal.” After all, white folks invented skiing, roller coasters, and bobsledding. They love a slippery slope.

Essentially, the educator proposed that Black people would chill out on the trying-to-be-equal stuff if white people just left us alone. In exchange for the gracious allowance of our existence, Black people wouldn’t ask for the right to vote, nor would they seek education beyond vocational training. The speech was seen by many as a total capitulation to white supremacy, as if white people haven’t whited since the day the Jamestown settlers demanded that the Powhatans enroll the colonizers in their free lunch program.

Oh, snap! Did he just say Washington was helping white people?

At the heart of the dispute between these two historical giants lies the question of Black liberation: “How do we get free?” It is easy for a man like Du Bois, who grew up in an integrated community and studied all over the world, to criticize the tactics of millions of people like Washington, whose lives in the Deep South dangled at the end of a white man’s whims on a daily basis. Booker T. Washington was a literal slave. For him and most Black Americans, the small amount of liberty and freedom afforded to Black people was abundantly better than being enslaved.

“The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again,” complained the senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina.17

Even after those white boys tried to kill him, Washington continued to push his narrative that the dignity gained through hard work was the path to earning America’s respect. Imagine trying to earn respect from people who don’t use washcloths. It don’t make no sense.

What is the flaw in the “separate but equal” argument? If separation is based on race, it cannot be equal. Who separates things that are equal? It is theoretically possible, but practically improbable. The “but” part.

FUNNY AF The Man Who Invented Laughter Most of the artistic creations commonly referred to as “American art” originated from the brains, hearts, and hands of Africans in America. Jazz is ours. We created the blues. Rock and roll belongs to us. Although most of these art forms evolved over time from a collection of intersecting sources, there is one uniquely quintessential American art form that every vaudeville historian and chronicler of American theater agrees was created by a Black man. While it might not sound so revolutionary now, the idea of a live entertainer of any color working without music, dancing, or tricks was simultaneously an act of pure hubris and a mark of a generational talent. And although he is not a household name, nearly every vaudeville historian and chronicler of American theater agrees: Charles Case was the first stand-up comedian.

But Case’s legacy remains. “Case suffered from more pirates than anyone in show biz,” wrote vaudeville chronicler Joe Laurie Jr. in 1953, adding, “In fact, entertainers are still using his stuff on the radio and TV but it’s not like it’s Charlie Case.”8 Perhaps the most famous of the movie vaudevillians was W. C. Fields, the “comic genius” whose entire career was essentially a Charlie Case impersonation. In 1928, Fields copyrighted all his live sketches, including the sketch that later became the movie The Fatal Glass of Beer. The sketch, the movie, and even the song that opened the film were all created by Charlie Case. In announcing his death, the reviewer for the New York Evening World said, “If all the minutes of joy he gave to the public could be added up it would cover hundreds of gladsome years.”

In 1958, a young Howard Law School student was riding the bus to Selma for Christmas break when the bus stopped at a Trailways bus station in Virginia to allow the passengers to eat. Bruce, the law student, posted up at the “whites only” counter just like everyone else. When authorities told him to leave, Bruce wouldn’t budge. He was arrested and convicted, but he wouldn’t stop until his conviction was overturned. His mother called an NAACP lawyer she knew and made that friend promise to fight for her son, even if they had to go to the Supreme Court. Those cops had no idea that Bruce Boynton’s mother was infamous organizer Amelia Boynton, and that lawyer pal was none other than Thurgood Marshall. The landmark Supreme Court case of Bruce George Washington Carver Boynton v. Virginia overturned segregation on interstate commerce, changing the course of history forever. Shortly thereafter, young activists Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, and others gained prominence on the Freedom Rides—a joint effort by CORE and the SNCC to enforce Boynton v. Virginia.

While many of the league’s members were dubious that any of them would show up, Amelia was there in her living room with Martin Luther King and James Bevel, along with organizers from the SCLC and SNCC, planning how to defeat segregation. There, they organized a march to the state capital in Montgomery to talk to Governor George Wallace about Jackson’s death, but of course, Wallace dispatched his club-toting troopers to the march that became known as Bloody Sunday. When officers cracked John Lewis’s skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the demonstration, Amelia did not run. The viral picture of the protest was a photo of Amelia Boynton being gassed and beaten by police officers. That was one of the photos that turned public sentiment and convinced President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act.

With such a momentous victory under her belt, one would assume Bethune would leave well enough alone. “But more can be done,” she wrote in a letter to Roosevelt on November 27, 1939. “One of the sorest points among Negroes which I have encountered is the flagrant discrimination against Negroes in all the armed forces of the United States. Forthright action on your part to lessen discrimination and segregation and particularly in affording opportunities for the training of Negro pilots for the air corps would gain tremendous good will, perhaps even out of proportion to the significance of such action.”15 Bethune didn’t just make the suggestion that Roosevelt introduce Black pilots to the army’s newly created air force, she laid out a plan on how to get it done without ruffling feathers.

Remember Eleanor’s meeting for the Rosenwald Fund? After her flight, the First Lady arranged for a loan to build Moten Field in Tuskegee, where the soldiers could complete their first phase of training. And because Randolph’s Executive Order 8802 forbade discrimination in awarding defense contracts, Black-owned construction firm McKissack and McKissack won the contract to build a state-of-the-art training facility. Using a design by African American architect Hilyard Robinson, labor from two thousand of those Black public works employees that Bethune had lobbied for, and the funds from Public Law 18, McKissack and McKissack completed Tuskegee Army Air Field in just six months, making it the only army site that hosted three phases of pilot training (basic, advanced, and transition) at a single location.

THREE LITTLE QUESTIONS How did Black women contribute to the civil rights movement? They started it. They only provided the strategy, tactics, legwork, vision, and manpower. According to census data, the vast majority of Black activists were birthed by Black women. By being Black women.

ACTIVITY MORE FIRE Read about these Black women: Daisy Bates Josephine Baker Elaine Brown Septima Clark Shirley Chisholm Anna Julia Cooper Angela Davis Charlotte Dupuy The Edmonson sisters Fannie Lou Hamer Dorothy Height Claudia Jones Barbara Jordan Marsha P. Johnson Pauli Murray Sojourner Truth Madam C. J. Walker

What we know as rock and roll did not exist before Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She came before Elvis and Johnny Cash. She preceded Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Rock and roll did not exist before Rosetta Tharpe, but to say she “invented” it may be a little presumptuous. Yet she was somehow erased from the history of music. Most reasonable music historians will tell you that one person shouldn’t receive credit for an entire genre. While it is true that not every single musician who ever played rock and roll was inspired by Rosetta Tharpe, it is also true that there is not a single rock musician playing in the current era doing something that Rosetta Tharpe wasn’t doing eighty years ago. She did it first.

The anti-immigrant movement* was just beginning in post-war America when presidential-inspired Klansmania was taking over the country. By the summer of 1919, the original anti–Black Lives Matter movement had mushroomed into a full-on race war.

Born in 1887 in Jamaica, Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. became one of the most controversial figures of his time for his views on racial separatism. His Universal Negro Improvement Association’s “Back to Africa” movement was one of the most influential Black movements of its time. In 1919, the UNIA’s Negro World weekly publication boasted more readers than the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and many other “mainstream” papers. And the Negro World reported the events of 1919 as one unified singular event of racial terrorism. Speed was taking notes. As the Red Summer raged, Speed was still investigating “subversives.” But with no foreign war to build a reputation on and no formal experience in policing or detective work, he had to find a new way to keep his status as a rising star in the Bureau of Investigation. And he soon did, by casting white terrorism as a response to Black “subversive” activity. To convey his growing power, Speed decided to adopt a more dignified persona. He was now known as J. Edgar Hoover.

In April 1921, twenty-six-year-old J. Edgar Hoover became deputy head of the Bureau of Investigation. The following year, Marcus Mosiah Garvey was charged with mail fraud.23 Garvey was convicted for mailing a radical leaflet to a Hoover informant. However, no one ever presented this brochure in court, and the informant could never quite recall what was in the envelope obtained by prosecutors. Garvey was free on appeal until March 1925, nine months after Hoover was named director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, when he was imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. When he was released in 1927, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was elected to serve on Kingston’s city council and established the country’s first modern political party.

Rosa McCauley was six years old during the Red Summer. She recalled nights staying up late with her grandfather as he sat by the door with a shotgun, protecting the family during Klan raids in rural Alabama. But McCauley was not afraid. When asked by a biographer why she couldn’t sleep, she said she was waiting for her grandfather, a devout member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, to fulfill one of her childhood dreams. “I wanted to see him kill a Ku-Kluxer,” she explained. “He declared that the first to invade our home would surely die.”24

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth is one of the greatest civil rights heroes you’ve never heard of. He spoke at the March on Washington and helped organize the Selma-to-Montgomery march that ended with an attack by Alabama state troopers. Klansmen beat him with bats and chains for trying to enroll his daughter in a white school. White supremacists bombed his house . . . twice. (In all fairness, Shuttlesworth was accustomed to being bombed. He lived in “Bombingham,” a city that Klansmen bombed at least forty times during the civil rights era, including the notorious terrorist bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church.)26

That June, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a telegram to the New York FBI offices that simply said, “Do something about Malcolm X.” He was no longer a marginal figure in an obscure religion. He was speaking at Oxford University, meeting with heads of state from around the world, and had been invited to serve in the governments of three African countries—Ghana, Algeria, and Egypt. On February 14, 1965, Malcolm X’s house was firebombed while he and his children slept. By the time Malcolm’s bodyguards arrived, the police were there. Malcolm suspected that the Nation of Islam was behind the bombing and wanted him dead because he was being openly critical of Elijah Muhammad. As Malcolm sat in a police car with his bodyguard, he repeatedly told the police that he ran to grab his firearm after a Molotov cocktail crashed through his window. He knew he was under surveillance by the FBI and the local police force. Yet he insisted on telling the police that he, a felon, was in possession of not one but two firearms. But, for some reason, they wouldn’t take him into custody. It was almost as if they wanted him on the streets.

A week later, on February 21, 1965, three men charged the Audubon Ballroom stage at a meeting for the new Black nationalist group the Organization of Afro-American Unity. The armed infiltrators stood up and released a barrage of bullets from two semiautomatic handguns and a sawed-off shotgun. Wood quickly left the scene, and the iconic leader El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was rushed to a nearby hospital. Malcolm X was dead. Speed was still not satisfied.

When officers checked Hampton’s body, they discovered he was still alive. Then, according to his wife, who survived the incident, two more shots rang out, and another officer said, “He’s good and dead now.”34 Hampton was twenty-one years old.

Over time, it became clear that the government was trying to frame everyone in the Black Panthers’ ranks. Panther cofounder Huey Newton faced four trials for two different murders. His 1968 conviction for killing a police officer would be overturned, and he would be acquitted of killing a white woman in 1974. Officials charged Panther cofounder Bobby Seale with murder because he happened to be in town for a few hours when the death took place. Seale would beat the case, but not before he faced conspiracy charges for organizing an anti-war protest in 1968. Seale was found not guilty, but served four years in prison for contempt of court. The conviction was later reversed. During his murder trial in 1969, Seale was bound and gagged. The offenses were so egregious that a young law student organized law school students to document violations of Seale’s civil liberties. That student? None other than Hillary Clinton.

The documents would reveal that John Edgar Hoover had used his skills to create a fifty-year intelligence-gathering and surveillance project that evolved into COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that targeted every Black leader during the civil rights struggle. Its stated goal was to: Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups . . . Prevent the RISE OF A “MESSIAH” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement . . . Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community . . . Prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth.37

This is how we know that William O’Neal, Hampton’s bodyguard, was an FBI informant.38 This is how we know that the FBI believed Stokely Carmichael had “the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way” because, during the Freedom Rides, he began using the phrase “Black Power.”39 This is how we know that the FBI sent a “suicide package” to Martin Luther King Jr. after Hoover heard the “I Have a Dream” speech and told agents, “We must mark him now if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation.”40