![]() In other words, the FBI files on authors read in large parts as disjointed pages, almost like scrapbooks, similar to those made by obsessed celebrity fans. It also included outbursts of literary critical prose (Email to author on July 1, 2019) Mixed bag of memos, letters, and clippings more than espionage reports and the less interesting paperwork of a massive police bureaucracy. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Framed African American Literature, explains how most FBI files are a However, each served a purpose: to build a case against the individual as a threat to the nation and American values. Most of these pages in the authors’ files contain trivia and are trivial: news clippings, repetitive long summary reports, and back-and-forths between the director and various field offices of the Bureau. There are potentially still files on Black authors not yet released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – such as the file of Eslanda Goode Robeson, whose file was requested in 2019 and which the archivist confirmed to exceed 2,500 pages. Such disparity between male and female authors’ the file sizes, especially a husband-and-wife pair, was not the norm but an exception and would merit much more research beyond the scope of this article. Shirley Graham Du Bois’s file extended even beyond her famous husband’s – Shirley’s 1,068 pages to W.E.B’s 756 pages. To name but a few prominent writers, James Baldwin’s file is 1,884 pages long, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1,052, Claudia Jones’s 882, Louise Thompson Patterson’s 921, and Richard Wright’s only 244. The (by now released) pages on a multitude of writers extend to the hundreds, in some cases even thousands, with numerous pages redacted and/or blackened out. The majority of existing FBI files on Black writers were opened in the 1940s, their number exponentially increasing after World War II. He presided over an Anglo-Saxon America, and he aimed to preserve and defend it. In his world, knew their place: they were servants, valets, and shoeshine boys. Had been born in nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., a southern city that stayed segregated throughout most of the twentieth century. Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: The History of the FBI, recalls Hoover’s biography as a man who For example, the division produced a 1919 report titled “‘Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications’ cemented Hoover’s newly minted anticommunism to the FBI’s established Negrophobia.” (Maxwell 2015: 225) Communism became another way to rationalize racism and to institutionalize the way the government and the Bureau approached Black struggles and the affiliated individuals. He exhibited suspicion and scrutiny for Black America since the early days of his career, starting while he was the head of the Radical Division. Hoover, the FBI, and being Black and subversive in AmericaĮdgar Hoover served as the director of The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 to his death at the peak of the Black Arts movement in 1972. Therefore, through a short overview of the history of the FBI’s (and its longtime Director’s) delusive interference with, interpretation of, and fascination with Black literature, this article will examine two authors, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, whose texts impressed the ghost-reading agents so much, they included positive reviews of these texts in the FBI files of the two authors. Nonetheless, they were expected to provide reports and investigate the subjects as per the Bureau’s (more likely, the Director’s) standards, which is why alongside reviews and reports there are recommendations and warnings as to whether or not to approach these subjects – for fear of embarrassment for the Bureau due to the popularity (deemed notoriety by the reporting agents) of these writers. Agents would be assigned to ghostread and provide reports to the Director and relevant field agencies in order to analyze whether the writings would include any potentially subversive propaganda, such as subliminal Communist Party messages or inciting unrest regarding the Race Question.ĭespite orders from the Director, however, to find condemnable content within the writings of Black authors, the agents would often find recommendable attributes – and thus they expressed their pleasure in reading/witnessing Black texts. ![]() ![]() Hoover’s appointment re-aligned the Bureau’s modus operandi in multitude of ways but especially in how and why Black writers were being investigated, intimidated, and their works infiltrated – which are the considerations most pertinent to this paper and the author’s on-going overall research. Writers became some of the most targeted individuals in the FBI’s war against propaganda, especially after J. Ever since the early-twentieth century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) considered writers (novelists and journalists alike) to have occupied a unique position from which they could influence readers and thus potentially spread subversive ideas.
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