Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement
Why We Should Teach About the FBIs War on the Civil Rights Movement
Published on Tuesday, March 01, 2016
by Zinn Education Project
by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
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Some of the groups targeted by the FBIs COINTELPRO. (Source: Zinn Ed Project)
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This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfolda group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:
I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracyknown as COINTELPROto disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in, and the government treachery it revealed, is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school studentsand all the rest of usshould learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags. The article detailed the departments digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this storythe ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/01/why-we-should-teach-about-fbis-war-civil-rights-movement
noretreatnosurrender
(1,890 posts)And now they've gotten even better at surveillance. This is MUST HAVE knowledge.
Downwinder
(12,869 posts)"Who Bombed Judi Bari.
http://www.whobombedjudibari.com/