Editor’s Note: This piece on black radicals and law enforcement is the fifth installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the speaker here. Find the rest of the series here.

Through the 1960s and early 1970s, black discontent grew. Although progress was made, the level of discontent was increasing. Black Americans put up with a lot when they thought there was no alternative to segregation and embedded discrimination. When they knew they could be jailed — or killed — for speaking out, there was an understandable reluctance to try to change things.

But the century-long repression of legal and de facto segregation was being challenged by a broad coalition of black civil rights leaders, white activists, and the federal courts. This coalition was knocking down repressive laws that maintained segregated society. The broad effort of sit-ins, freedom rides, and marches was being answered by a series of federal laws and actions. Real progress was being made. The FBI and the military were knocking down racial barriers, but they were not changing the quality of life for black citizens — or eliminating the underlying patterns of repression fast enough.

Now that black Americans found they could openly challenge the old order, the level of anger grew. The activists became more unwilling to wait and be patient. This combination of progress and frustration was the same kind of unstable, combustible social setting that led to revolutions in 18th-century France and 20th-century Russia. And the pressure to change things faster and deeper led to heightened fear among the formerly unchallenged dominant elements of society. The result was a struggle between black activists and radicals on one side and institutions of law enforcement (including the local police, the FBI, and, in some cases, the military) on the other.

I’m addressing all this in this series, because these struggles in the 1960s and 1970s led to the first weaponization of the FBI against Americans who were not agents of foreign powers. It led to publicizing police brutality in a way that shocked average Americans of all backgrounds. Police repression had occurred in the past, but it had not been on newspaper front pages or the evening news. In many ways, this period led to the FBI and other federal agencies feeling they had the authority to spy on, punish, and work to thwart American citizens and their political activity. 

There was a dynamic interaction between increasingly aggressive black activism and overt and covert policing to curtail it. These patterns would lead to the anti-police movement of the last decade — including the riots of 2020, activist prosecutors, flash gangs, car jackings, and the stunning rise in crime we are living through. But they also would lead to an FBI feeling empowered to treat concerned parents as terrorists, an IRS that believed it could punish conservative groups, and other political government activity. All have roots in the 1960s and the struggle between black radicals and traditional society. 

The Rise of Radicalized Black Activism

While Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, John Lewis, and thousands of other African American opponents of segregation were advocates for an integrated American society, there were some black activists who had given up on America and become increasingly radicalized. When Young ran for governor in Georgia, he said the only color that mattered was green and focused on the economy rather than race. The black radicals could not have disagreed more intensely. For them, the only color that mattered was black. 

While these radical opponents of America as it existed were small in numbers, they had two profound impacts. First, they were much more frightening and polarizing than the larger civil rights movement. Their use of violent language and actions made them appear as much more of a threat to everyday Americans. They rejected the positive, integrating language and goals of the classic civil rights movement. It was much harder for everyday pro-integration, pro–civil rights white activists to join with a group that insisted that white people and society were incurably evil. Second, the more aggressive black activists established radical lines of thinking and analysis. These would go on to become key building blocks for increased hatred of police, contempt for the law, and a dedication to tearing down and destroying the existing American system rather than trying to join it. This has morphed into current anti-white racism, the 1619 Project’s rewriting of American history to center it on slavery, demands for redistribution of wealth and reparations for black Americans, and so on. (WATCH: Speaker Gingrich Reveals America’s Current Crisis)

In a broader sense, the opposition to whiteness became an opposition to middle-class standards of education, discipline, work ethic, lawfulness, and even dress. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told me when my wife Callista was sworn in as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, he observed absolute opposition to studying while he was growing up in segregated Savannah, Georgia. He was ridiculed for reading books and “trying to be white.” In fact, when he was young, Thomas went to the white library because his peers would harass him at the black library for studying and reading too much.

From the perspective of black radicalism, saluting the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and standing for the National Anthem were all examples of subservience to a racist system of oppression. (Does this sound familiar?) The rejection of the American system, the interpretation of law and order as repression and racism, and impatience with gradualist solutions led to violence and threats of violence. This led to a sense of insecurity and fear in the white community — which then led the established order to react with repression and hostility to what it perceived as a direct threat to its survival.

Two Wrongs Make it Worse

The struggle between black radicalism and law enforcement would rage throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The struggle of black radicals would attract wealthy white radicals who felt guilt-ridden (the first real examples of white privilege as a sign of self-flagellation). The often wealthy (and almost always college-educated) white radicals were eager to be validated that they were really “radical enough.” Their validators were the leaders of the black radical movement. 

The big civil rights fight of the period was, of course, largely focused on legal segregation and the South. However, in California, Illinois, New York, and other legally integrated states, there was deep discontent about poverty and police repression. This was growing out of an anti-American Marxist ideology that insisted that America was a bad country. The sense of a separate black experience had largely been built around the Nation of Islam. It had an estimated 500 to 1,200 followers until Malcolm X became the charismatic leader who attracted between 25,000 and 75,000 members.

X was a remarkable public speaker and one of the era’s most influential black leaders. His autobiography, which he wrote with Alex Haley (who would become famous for writing Roots), became one of the most influential books in defining the modern era for African Americans. But make no mistake — X was a genuine radical. His reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was captured in a speech he gave in New York City on Dec. 4, 1963, entitled “God’s Judgement of White America.” He asserted that we lived in “this evil Western world, the white world…a wicked world, ruled by a race of devils.” He said that “[r]evolutions are destructive and bloody.” When he was later asked about the assassination, X said: “Chickens coming home to roost never made me sad; they always made me glad.” He said that the United States had been involved in killing Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and leaders in Vietnam, and that it failed to protect Medgar Evers from being killed by a white extremist.

X’s comments on Kennedy were terribly received. The New York Times headlined “Malcolm X Scores U.S. and Kennedy; Likens Slaying to ‘Chickens Coming Home to Roost.’” To give you a sense of throughlines, almost 38 years later, on Sept. 16, 2001, the first Sunday after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, again used the “chickens come home to roost” metaphor during a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme,” Wright said.

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation that the United States had brought on al-Qaida’s attacks because of its own terrorism. 

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Wright said. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

In both cases, American tragedies were treated by radical black activists as legitimate and justified payment for the evil acts of white America. In X’s case in the 1960s, this kind of strong language attracted official attention.

X had a long experience of being watched and monitored by the FBI. In 1950, while serving time in prison for burglary, he wrote President Harry Truman saying he opposed the Korean War and was a communist. That led the FBI to open a file on him. By 1953, after he was released from jail and was rising rapidly in the Nation of Islam, the FBI had begun a surveillance program. 

But X was not the FBI’s only focus. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared black nationalism as much as he feared communism. He ordered the agency to be actively engaged in trying to undermine, weaken, and, if possible, destroy the movement for black equality. This was an enormous overreaction and overreach. In its own words, the FBI set out to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the black power and civil rights movements. Today’s conservatives should clearly recognize this as weaponizing government. In fact, when conservatives talk about the weaponization of the FBI and the Justice Department, they should include the astonishing story of our government having a long vendetta against the leading civil rights activists of our lifetime.

Adding to the troubles, while the FBI was watching black activists, it was ignoring anti-black violence by the local police. One of the incidents that led to X’s rise was the April 1957 beating of a Nation of Islam member by the New York Police Department — and the arrest of two other African Americans who tried to intervene, as the police beating was leading to severe brain damage. Community anger was aroused, a mob gathered at the precinct house where the four had been taken. X led negotiations that got the badly beaten man transferred to a hospital. As a powerful orator, X became a leading speaker on college campuses and in churches. His message was that blacks were the original humans. Whites were devils, and the demise of the white race was inevitable. 

A significant part of his attitude was also deeply anti-Semitic — including a dismissal of the Holocaust and an assertion that the Jews had brought it on themselves. This sense of anti-Semitism would be sustained by Louis Farrakhan, who was mentored by X. It is today a significant part of the American Left, which is increasingly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. 

The FBI tracked X closely until he was tragically assassinated. He was killed at a meeting on Feb. 21, 1965, by members of the Nation of Islam. They were bitter because he had left their organization and set up a competing movement. He was only 39, yet he had already made a remarkable impact (just three years later, King would be assassinated, also at the age of 39).

The Weaponization of Government

The FBI’s role was a complicated one. On one hand, it was actively engaged in infiltrating and undermining black activism. On the other hand, it was the primary law enforcement when local police in segregated states refused to do their jobs.

A good example of the FBI’s schizophrenia in this era was its intense and successful handling of the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi on June 26, 1964. As I mentioned in my previous essay, the FBI sent in 150 agents, borrowed 400 sailors from a nearby naval base, and used some of the National Guard to find the activists’ bodies. In the process, they also found the bodies of eight other people — three of whom were college student volunteers who had been missing for several months. The FBI arrested 21 men, including a deputy sheriff. When the state of Mississippi refused to prosecute the perpetrators, the federal government charged 18 of them for violating the victims’ civil rights.

When told about the arrests, King said: “I must commend the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the work they have done in uncovering the perpetrators of this dastardly act. It renews again my faith in democracy.” Ironically, he might have been less complimentary about the FBI if he had known how much they were monitoring him. The FBI began watching King during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Much of the nation saw King’s “I have a Dream” speech as brilliant and visionary, but the FBI had a different response. Agent William Sullivan, who led the domestic intelligence division, wrote later that month that “We must mark [King] now…as the most dangerous Negro of the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and National security.” (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: American Despotism: The Historic Roots of the Constitutional Crisis)

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized wiretaps on King and the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And the FBI went well beyond monitoring and wiretapping King. As he grew more powerful and influential, its efforts grew more desperate.  When King was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI put together a suicide kit and sent him an anonymous letter along with tapes they had made of him in various hotel rooms. They threated to destroy his reputation unless he committed suicide. When he ignored the letter, a senior FBI official tried to get key national media to write about King’s personal life.

Even after King was killed, the FBI continued to try to smear him and block any honors being given in his name. The FBI was investigating more than King. Its COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) dated back to 1956 and started out hunting communists. It rapidly spread to hunting all so-called subversive groups, as defined by the FBI. Its net was nationwide. Beyond the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the FBI was interested in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Nation of Islam, and others.

Some 23 FBI offices were involved. They were told the program’s goal was to: 

1. Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real “Mau Mau” [Black revolutionary army] in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.
2. Prevent the RISE OF A “MESSIAH” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah;” he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.
3. Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups. This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.
4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to “liberals” who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group; it adds “respectability” in a different way.
5. A final goal should be to prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed.

The FBI thought King could become a “messiah” figure. They also feared Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) who the FBI believed had “the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.” Ture clearly had a much more militant sense of black power than King. 

The scale of the FBI violations of the constitutional rights of Americans was captured in the “Final Report” of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities:

The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the “national security” the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law….

[M]any of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that … the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

Our generation’s concerns about the weaponization of government have a long past going back to the 1950s and 1960s. However, the intensive FBI efforts also must be put in context with the rising level of militant black nationalism and organized violence. In truth, the anti-American activists were met with a profoundly anti-American response from the FBI and other law enforcement. The repercussions were fairly immediate. The FBI’s law breaking only fueled discontent among black Americans — which empowered the radical black power movement.

I will discuss the full escalation of the black power movement in my next essay. But I can’t stress enough the contemporary point here: The gross overreach and abuse that the FBI exercised against black civil rights leaders in the 1960s planted the seed for the politicization and law-breaking we see today.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.