Customer Reviews

"Seeing Red": Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Blacks in the Diaspora)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The FBI and the other "security" and "intelligence" agencies of the US government came into their modern identities in the vicious campaigns against dissent in this country during World War I and in the years after it when the heat of the Russian Revolution and the upserge of revolution that followed it swept over the United States. The government carried out a ruthless campaign of deportations, banning newspapers, imprisoning IWW and socialist leaders like Eugene V. Debs and violent crushing of strikes by the national guard, armies of cops, and the US Military. This was the period with US Army "air pioneer" Billy Mitchell offered to bomb West Virginia strikers, but was told the mine bosses would use their own planes!

This book indicates that the African American movement for civil rights and equality as well as early Black nationalist, socialist, and other radicals were the target of spying, harassment, and persecution during these days. Not only did government agents penetrate African American organizations and attempt to provoke them against each other, but the Post office and the FBI attempted to obstruct the circulation of main line Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. This book also show how Washington worked directly with the British government to harass, spy on, and hinder organizations that advocated independence and self-government for British and other European colonies in Africa and the West Indies.

The FBI, born in this period, was born to fight Black rights!