Discredit, Disrupt, Destroy: What the FBI Files Reveal About the War on Black Leadership

By HistorianSpeaks

In August 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a memo to its field offices with a blunt instruction. Agents were to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" what the bureau called "Black Nationalist Hate Groups." Over the next four years, under Director J. Edgar Hoover, that order turned into a secret campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X's heirs, Elijah Muhammad, the Black Panther Party and many local organizers. A digital collection of FBI records acquired by the University of California, Berkeley Library, and described in a 2021 Library report now circulating again, shows how much of that campaign survives on paper.

Born in the Cold War

The program had a name: COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence Program. The FBI launched it in 1956 against the Communist Party, then widened it to the Socialist Workers Party in 1961, white hate groups in 1964, the "New Left" in 1968 and, above all, the Black freedom movement. For Hoover, any hint of communist ties justified the dirtiest tactics in the bureau's playbook. "No holds were barred," assistant director William C. Sullivan later told the U.S. Senate's Church Committee. "We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. ... We did not differentiate."

What COINTELPRO Was, and How It Worked

COINTELPRO was not ordinary surveillance. Watching and recording was only the start. The program's purpose, in the bureau's own words, was to act: to break up organizations and ruin the people who led them, whether or not they had broken any law. The Church Committee later counted more than 2,000 approved COINTELPRO actions between 1956 and 1971. It found that the bureau had used "dangerous and degrading tactics" that would be unacceptable "even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity," and that many had not.

The Black Nationalist program began on August 25, 1967, weeks after the Newark and Detroit uprisings. Its first targets included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and the Nation of Islam. A March 4, 1968, memo set out five long-range goals. Agents were to prevent a "coalition of militant black nationalist groups," prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could "unify, and electrify" the movement, prevent violence, stop groups from gaining "respectability," and keep them from recruiting young people. The memo named King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad as possible "messiahs." By the end of 1968, field offices had been told the Black Panther Party was the main target. In 1969 Hoover called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

The toolkit was wide:

• Informants and infiltrators. Paid informants joined chapters, rose to positions of trust, reported on meetings and, at times, urged the violence the bureau said it feared. William O'Neal, chief of security for the Chicago Panthers, was on the FBI payroll.
• Forged letters and anonymous mail. Agents wrote fake letters between leaders to spark feuds, most notoriously between the Oakland and New York Panthers and between the Panthers and the US Organization in Los Angeles, a rivalry that ended in the 1969 killings of John Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter at UCLA.
• Planted press stories. "Friendly" reporters received leaks and story ideas meant to paint activists as criminals, hypocrites or communist dupes.
• Pressure on jobs, homes and families. Agents called employers, landlords and parents, and worked with local police and tax authorities to bring charges, raids and audits.
• Targeting the community programs. The bureau went after the Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children program, which Hoover saw as a recruiting tool, warning churches and donors away from it.

The Targets

The files document wiretaps, informants, forged letters and planted stories. The bureau wiretapped and bugged King for years. In November 1964, weeks before he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, it mailed him a recording and an anonymous letter that ended, "There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is." It worked to prevent the rise of what one memo called a Black "messiah." It infiltrated the Black Panther Party and spread rumors meant to turn members against one another.

In Chicago, O'Neal gave agents a floor plan of Fred Hampton's apartment. Before dawn on December 4, 1969, police raided it, firing nearly a hundred shots. Hampton, 21, was killed in his bed, and Mark Clark, 22, was killed too. A civil suit by survivors and the families ended in 1982 with a $1.85 million settlement from the city, county and federal governments.

The bureau's reach went beyond one party. When Angela Davis was charged after the August 1970 Marin County courthouse raid, the FBI put her on its Ten Most Wanted list; a jury acquitted her on all counts in 1972. Its files tracked Malcolm X's family and followers, the poet Amiri Baraka, and student groups at Black colleges. Geronimo Pratt, a Los Angeles Panther leader, spent 27 years in prison for a murder before his conviction was overturned in 1997, after courts learned the key witness against him had been a police and FBI informant.

How the Secret Came Out

The public learned of COINTELPRO only because activists broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in March 1971 and mailed stolen files to newspapers. Hoover formally ended the program weeks later. In 1976 the Church Committee concluded that the bureau had waged a "sophisticated vigilante operation" against Americans exercising their constitutional rights.

Why the Files Still Matter

UC Berkeley professor Leigh Raiford told the Library that the records "reveal and confirm the kind of root investment in anti-Blackness and quelling dissent that has long been part of our government structure." Her hope is that a new generation of researchers will learn "how to outmaneuver these attempts." The question is not academic. Each new movement for Black rights, from Black Lives Matter to today's campus and voting campaigns, inherits both the courage of those who were watched and the record of the state that watched them. That danger is not confined to the archive. As WIRED reported on October 28, 2026, court filings in the federal "Minnesota 15" prosecution show that Homeland Security Investigations sent more than 120 agents, Reaper drones and undercover operatives, some into churches, to infiltrate grassroots community-defense networks, an operation defense attorneys have likened to a twenty-first-century COINTELPRO.

The files are a warning, and a resource. They show that the attack on Black leadership was organized, funded and deliberate, and that it was exposed only because citizens and historians insisted on the record. Keeping that record in public view is part of the work HistorianSpeaks does every week.

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