Book Review : If They Were Paranoid, Activists Were Also Right

Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-72 by Kenneth O’Reilly (Free Press: $24.95, 443 pages)

How paranoid, I used to think, were those enrages of the ‘60s who shrilly insisted that the government of the United States was spying on its own citizens. Be careful, they would warn their comrades during overheated debates around the mimeograph machine late at night--one of us might be a spy for the FBI!

As it turns out, of course, the radicals may have been paranoid, but they were right. Throughout the ‘60s, the whole law enforcement apparatus of the federal government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was put to the task of watching us. Exactly how the FBI went about its work of domestic espionage, at least against black Americans in the civil rights movement, is exhaustively detailed in Kenneth O’Reilly’s “Racial Matters.”

“Racial Matters” is a dense, closely documented study of J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, but it’s also a fascinating (and, considering the abundance of detail and the velocity of the narrative, quite readable) survey of the overheated racial and cultural politics of America in the mid-20th Century, ranging from the earliest years of the civil rights movement, through the tumultuous era of urban riots and campus demonstrations, to the atrocities of Watergate and COINTELPRO in what O’Reilly calls “the Surveillance State.”

‘Spied on Anyone’

“(T)he FBI spied on anyone interested in the state of race relations in the United States . . . from the first sit-ins and voter registration campaigns to the historic march on Selma,” O’Reilly writes, “and the FBI spied on blacks as potentially dangerous class of activists thereafter, a period that spanned the years of urban riots and Vietnam war protests.”

The real outrages in “Racial Matters” are mostly examples of Hoover’s passivity and sheer lack of interest when it came to enforcement of federal civil rights law. While Klan lynchings and police brutality in the Deep South were routinely ignored by the FBI, for example, Hoover sent his men to tap Paul Robeson’s telephone and open his mail in a heavy-breathing effort to prove that Robeson was having an affair with Lord Mountbatten’s wife. When the Justice Department drafted Hoover’s legendary “G-men” to investigate the violation of voting rights in the early ‘60s, “Hoover sent over clock-punchers, 9-to-5 men who apologized before asking any white person a question in a voting rights or other civil rights case.”

Even when the FBI managed to find its way to the front lines of the civil rights struggle, the results were hardly reassuring. The FBI investigated the shooting of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young children--but no federal convictions were obtained in either case, and Hoover later admonished his own investigators that they had erred in hastening to the crime scene in Birmingham by hopping a military jet: “(H)ereafter commercial aircraft should be used if available,” Hoover instructed.

Contributed to Polarization

“By pursuing justice in its own way,” O’Reilly writes, “the FBI contributed to the growing polarization between civil rights activists and the federal government. The movement continued to perceive the Bureau as indifferent to everyday civil rights violations in the South and strangely incompetent even when investigating the big cases.”

Hoover was considerably more energetic when it came to spying on the civil rights movement, and especially its most revered leader, Martin Luther King Jr., whom the FBI characterized in a secret memo as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” (Hoover himself, who nurtured an unsavory interest in King’s sex life, called him “a dissolute, abnormal . . . evil beast.”)

After the March on Washington in 1963, “the FBI began to transform what had been a holding action against black demands for justice and equality into a frontal assault on Dr. King and the movement he helped to lead,” O’Reilly writes. “The director had spent his life destroying communists and their causes, and now he would try to destroy King and his cause.”

A Temperate Muckraker

O’Reilly is a disciplined historian, a temperate muckraker, and a fair-minded man who does not allow his unmistakable passions to get in the way of his scholarship. He allows that Hoover “spurned the temptation . . . to obstruct the (civil rights) movement in the 1960s,” and contented himself with “the familiar comforts of dossier collecting.” He points out that Presidents and attorneys general “accepted the idea that the specter of communist influence in the civil rights movement justified FBI spying.” Even Robert Kennedy, who considered Hoover to be “rather a psycho,” worked hard as attorney general to keep Hoover happy and in power because, in Kennedy’s words, “he was a symbol and the President had won by such a narrow margin and . . . it was much better for what we wanted to do in the South, what we wanted to do in organized crime . . . if we had him on our side.”

Still, O’Reilly’s verdict is harsh: “J. Edgar Hoover had always been a racist,” he concludes. “While spying on civil rights workers, Hoover refused to make a commitment to protect them from anti-civil rights violence.”

Even if many of the plaints in “Racial Matters” were sins of omission, the fact remains that Hoover’s FBI was content to leave the vanguard of the civil rights movement--a movement committed to nonviolence--to the not-so-tender mercies of Southern sheriffs and backwater vigilantes. In that sense, “Racial Matters” comes as a healthy corrective to the revisionist myth-making of a movie like “Mississippi Burning,” and reminds us that the enemies of freedom in America were not only and not always on the wrong side of the law.