TRANSCRIPT:

I was able to get a copy of the first edition, which is important, of the book, that the Socialist Workers Party put out about COINTELPRO, which is called COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom with an introduction by Noam Chomsky. I didn’t even know this book was still around, published in 1975.

So the suit had not– the Socialist Workers Party suit against the FBI – had not yet been resolved, and it was resolved in favor of the Socialist Workers Party. But it was in process then. And here’s, I’m going to– just a little bit from the introduction because I think this can say it a little bit more clearly than I could. “COINTELPRO is FBI lingo for its illegal and once top-secret counterintelligence program. COINTELPRO was part of the FBI’s unjustifiable destruction, illegal political activities of American citizens, activities protected by the Bill of Rights. The full story of the FBI’s operations is slowly coming out.”And that that continued to happen well after this book was published, especially showing actions were taken against civil rights groups and Black organizations.

But, for the background to this lawsuit, which I did work on raising money for, it says “the first disclosures of some important COINTELPRO files came from a Freedom of information Act suit by NBC reporter Carl Stern. The files he got in December 1973, and March 74, were those initiating some of the COINTELPRO operations. Noam Chomsky talks about them in this introduction, but most of what is now known about the day-to-day deception tactics of COINTELPRO has been made public as a result of a landmark civil liberties suit by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance and ordered by Federal Judge Thomas P. Grisea. Their suit has already forced the FBI to turn over more than a thousand pages of COINTELPRO files.” And so that, well, this goes on and starts and talks about some of those files.I was one of the people, along with Syd Stapleton, who worked in the office of the Political Rights Defense Fund to raise money to make this lawsuit happen.

In the course of that, the lawyer, Leonard Boudin, served in New York, who are our main– they were our attorneys and they were wonderful– and sought what has now become known as Freedom of Information Act procedures to get discovery in this lawsuit, the papers that these agencies had on those of us who were working on the lawsuit.

So in the course of this, I got to see a lot of the stuff that had been gathered on me since the sixties, since I was a kid. And on my mom. I didn’t see everything, and a lot of it was heavily redacted. I mean, files looked like: let me show you an example, a lot of the information was cut out of them and there are pictures in here of what they look like.

Now, here’s my this one. This one is not as heavily redacted as some others, but a lot of things are blacked out. So we didn’t get the names of the agents, ostensibly for national security reasons. But but we got to COINTELPRO had been used against against all kinds of organizations: church groups, you know, and PTAs and people who were doing things that the government thought was –somebody in the government that needed to be spied on so it could be exposed as, and certainly unions. I have an incredible report from the 1930s from Mariana Pennsylvania that the FBI, an FBI agent sent to them about the audacity of a Black woman in this coal mining, United Mine Workers meeting, speaking up for organizing solidarity among strikers. It’s a really great– I love this–I don’t even know how I got it, but I’m glad I have it! But this had been going on for a long time. So this is an example of the kind of thing that came up in these files.

This is an FBI inspired flier and it’s in handwriting and it says “Dear Mr., Look man, I guess your old lady doesn’t get enough at home. Or she wouldn’t be shucking and jiving with our black men in action, you dig? Like all she wants to integrate is the bedroom. Black sisters ain’t going to take no second best from our men. So lay it on her, man, and get the hell off of news–—off of– newsstand. Get the hell off of something. Signed a soul sister”. So this is an attack on a Black man who is engaged in a relationship with a white woman. Supposedly in the name of a Black woman. It’s an FBI thing. This is the kind of thing that COINTELPRO helped to expose.

And so this book actually has an interview with Syd Stapleton and me about the things that were done against us. Here’s another example of what these files look like. The redaction is, can you see? Anyway, the lawsuit was successful, and the FBI and the other police agencies were enjoined from doing some things. That didn’t stop them, of course.

It was an important contribution that the Social Workers Party, I think.