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F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghost Readers Framed African-American Literature author William J. Maxwell in conversation with Justin Desmangles (This was originally broadcast live on New Day Jazz, KDVS – Davis, Ca. February 15, 2015)
PART ONE
Justin Desmangles: What prompted the F.B.I. to view black literary work as a threat to national security?
William J. Maxwell: A threat and a challenge, I would say. You know when Hoover first comes the Bureau in 1919, he’s a very young man, he’s 24 years old. And his first assignment, essentially, is to prevent a second Red Summer. The Red Summer of 1919. The color supposedly both refers to both the communist influence on the streets of the United States and also the blood in the streets of many a race riot that year. So from the moment he takes on his mature career it’s the conjunction, it’s the alliance of essentially left-wing radicalism, particularly associated with anarchist and communist movements, and then black defiance and black literacy. That is the combination he aims to target. 1919 is the first year of the Harlem Renaissance. You can date it in many different ways, but it’s certainly the year of If We Must Die by Claude McKay. The clarion call which both introduces both the Harlem Renaissance sonnet and a new wave of black militancy in the face of white violence.
You know, it’s a complicated beast, the F.B.I., and they were interested in questions of American race even before that. One of their first big cases, according to a lot of Bureau historians, is chasing the boxer Jack Johnson across the United States and sicking the Mann Act against him. That would not be last time in African-American history that the Mann Act would be used against a figure whom the Bureau and other police forces thought was just too defiantly charismatic. So it goes in lots of different directions.
And when I said challenge earlier, what I was trying to emphasize is that the F.B.I. has always been a kind of hyper-literary organization. I mean, that seems a little incongruous, that seems strange, because we think of the F.B.I. as these kind of flat-footed guys in suits. But early on F.B.I. directors have to justify this new national police force to a country that’s quite skeptical about that kind of thing. The United States had never had one of those. And one of the first things they do is begin issuing literary publicity for the organization. There are earlier directors, William J. Burns, William J. Flint . . . being called William J. Maxwell, I had to work on this, right? (laughs) . . . These guys write the equivalent of detective literature that sort of defends a federal police presence. Hoover is publishing constantly. Not always under his own power, lots of people ghostwrite for him. But the F.B.I. knows it has to justify itself through literary publicity so the New Negro and his and her literary work is a challenge to the F.B.I.’s literary aspirations.
JD: This is very fascinating in terms of its continuity with earlier stages of development in black literary life. Or going back even further into the many centuries of slavery here in the New World. I am thinking most particularly of the way that language, literary language, but also legal, economic, and political language, is used as a means of gaining, and more importantly, I think, maintaining power. And of course we know from studying our history that there is a long period in which literacy is a capital crime. It’s punished by death.
WJM: Absolutely.
JD: Is this obsession with black American literature that emerges from the F.B.I. during this volatile period in American history at the beginning of the 20th century, is it also, or can it be viewed as a sort of maintenance project? Is it an extension of the earlier codes that punished literacy by death? How would you describe that continuity?
WJM: That’s interesting. That is a fascinating question. What I can tell you is, you know, John A. Williams who wrote The Man Who Cried I Am and a number of other important political novels . . .
JD: Brilliant.
WJM: Yes, brilliant guy who is actually from my hometown of Teaneck, New Jersey. As a young kid, he would come to my elementary school . . .
JD: Oh, wow!
WJM: Yes, I know! I grew up in a very strangely integrated suburb, let’s put it that way (laughs). I thought the rest of the world was like that, unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be Teaneck, New Jersey.
Anyway, when John A. Williams talks about literary black-balling, as he calls it, he talks about a whole series of literary prescriptions. Prescriptions against black literacy. And he certainly sees modern state surveillance aimed against African-Americans in continuity with this record.
In F.B. Eyes at least, for reasons of extent, it’s probably already a bit too crunchy and a bit too long, I track the F.B.I., particularly Hoover’s F.B.I., from 1919 to 1972. But you could put it in rhyme with that earlier decision that black literacy was a mode of social power that white supremacy could not afford. But when you get to this period with the F.B.I., I don’t think there is any assumption that it is going to be crushed entirely at this point.
There is a kind of chasing after it and an acknowledgement that we can’t quite stop this but perhaps we can slow it down. These F.B.I. readers who are looking at the first poems of the Harlem Renaissance, not just by Claude McKay but Andy Razaf, poets who are writing for the Garvey movement in Garveyite journals, they actually confess their admiration for the material. They say, you know, this is not the Negro of yore. Excuse me for that line (laughs).
JD: This is an extremely important point that you are picking up on and so, if you will, I’d like to unpack that a bit. Just a few moments ago at the beginning of our conversation you were talking about how the literary intellectualism and the powerfully deciphering attitudes of people at the Bureau is quite a contradiction to the public image of many of these men and later women who would work there. And in fact, the truth of it, as is emphasized so thoroughly in your book, is that they had a tremendous abiding respect and fear of the power of great literature, and not so great literature . . .
WJM: That’s true.
JD: . . . to change values. To shape points of view and to move forward political and social agendas. Could you address that further here? You were talking about that respect and occasionally reverent attitude towards this emerging new literature from black America. Could you address more of that, please?
WJM: Yes, sure, I can address that maybe by talking about the biography of an early Bureau sort of critic-in-chief, as I call him. He’s a man named Robert Adger Bowen, who has been essentially lost to history except in his own mind.
JD: (Laughter)
WJM: Well, you know, I’ve rescued him for better or worse. His papers are in the Clemson University special collections library. He’s a man out of South Carolina. A white man from one of the oldest slave owning families in South Carolina. Whose fortune later, built on the sweat and the skill of black laborers, was invested in banking and shipping. So he grew up on plantations in the south, fascinated by black song, early on. So, he actually fills out these song-catching scrapbooks and he migrates through a complicated literary career that includes writing black dialect literature in the style of Joel Chandler Harris in the 1880’s and 1890’s.
Now this man winds up as Hoover’s major literary detective, it’s not an exaggeration to say this, in New York City at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. He is running this thing called the Bureau of Translations and Radical Publications in New York, which is kind of like the F.B.I.’s literary main office. In New York City, the capitol of literary radicalism. And he’s the person who writes this early Bureau document called Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications. That’s a heck-of-a name.
JD: A tremendous document. Tremendous.
WJM: Well, it’s tremendous and it’s strange and it’s disturbing. You can get the drafts of this if you go to the Clemson University Library. He’s just amazed by the quality of this work and he realizes that this work is going to put him out of business as a white (black) dialect writer.
That’s a very particular kind of story but I do think it emphasizes the fact that for the most literate of Bureau readers who were assigned essentially Afro-America as a beat, there is this respect and a sense of rivalry. And that is hardly unusual in the history of American racism. As Eric Lott said years ago, you know, there’s this desire. You both love and you want to steal black culture the moment you try to destroy it.
JD: You can see that in the story of Lee Atwater. You know, he clearly comes out of that same bag.
WJM: Yes. Yes. So in my discussing this, I am not talking about a new dynamic. It is a dynamic that first of all, black people have known about forever.
JD: There you go.
WJM: And scholars have caught up with over the last few generations. To find this at the heart of really the central icon in American law enforcement, which would be the F.B.I., was startling and interesting.
JD: Now, I’d like to pick up on this idea of the literary detective and his fluency, if you will, or lack of, that leads to this ventriloquizing of black speech or black literary product. I think at one point you refer to it as literary minstrelsy. But this becomes key in the tactics of psychological warfare, intimidation and humiliation that are earmarks of F.B.I. tactics in all directions when it finds and wants to locate an enemy. Could you talk a little about this relationship, I used the word ventriloquism, you talked about literary minstrelsy, and how that played a part in the psychological warfare, the intimidation that was used to make this battle, frankly, a lop-sided one.
WJM: A lop-sided one and in the late 60’s and early 70’s a violent one. We’re talking about COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence programs that we’re aimed initially against the Communist Party. That came first and then with a lot of prodding from Lyndon Johnson and some of the saner people at the Bureau, finally against some of the most vicious attacks on the Civil Rights Movement, so the Klan was targeted. But then those same techniques were aimed against, let’s just say, the post-non-violent phase of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement of the late 60’s.
One thing that we have come to know more centrally is important in the history of the Civil Rights Movement is the F.B.I.’s opposition. In this film Selma that has just come out several months ago, a fascinating movie on a couple of different levels. One of the things that’s featured is this letter from the F.B.I., actually written by a Hoover lieutenant William C. Sullivan, that advises Dr. Martin Luther King to not pick up the Nobel Peace Prize and/or commit suicide. So this is the nadir of F.B.I. history and maybe the nadir of American state intelligence. If you want to say that. The thing that is fascinating about that is, you know, fascinating again and gross, is the fact that it’s written is a pseudo-black voice. It’s written in the voice of a disaffected foot soldier of the Civil Rights Movement who thinks that King has come to embarrass the movement because of his sexual peccadillos and his betrayal of his office as a preacher, as a man of God.
It turns out there is a lot of COINTELPRO literature that is produced by F.B.I. agents, largely in field offices, it didn’t all come out of Washington, it didn’t all come out of the hands of Sullivan, that’s aimed against the Black Power Movement. There’s this thing you can find on line pretty easily online, it may or may not be apocryphal, which is a Black Panther coloring book which was supposedly spread around California, which hyperbolizes Black Panther rhetoric. Which was kind of hard to do, I have to admit (laughs) but it does do that. You know, and there was basically this attempt to use the styles of Black Power literacy against the movement itself by exaggerating them, by causing disruption. But this was a mode in which essentially you had F.B.I. agents pretending to be black writers. And people have known about this for a long time and have measured its political effects. It certainly helped to divide and distort the movement. But I see it in continuity with this earlier history of the F.B.I.’s deep interest and investment in African-American letters.
JD: And in particular, managing the trajectory of that mission, if that word is appropriate, the trajectory towards emancipation. Towards freedom, towards autonomy, towards self-determination.
I’d like to hold on to that for a moment or two here because one of the bizarre conflations that emerges as we progress through the 20th century and into the period following the Second World War, is this freakish conflation between a kind of morbid fear of communism and its growth and black self-determination. In Hoover's and the F.B.I.’s imagination, and the C.I.A.’s too. Could you talk a little about that? It is really just bizarre and sick. Really.
WJM: Yes, I was trying even to suggest earlier that this conflation for Hoover is very, very early. In his history and the F.B.I.’s history. It comes out of 1919 as much as the Cold War. It is a conflation in which any form of black self-assertion or particularly black progressive politics is thought to be allied with the Soviet Union. But the thing is, there is something to the conflation in the sense of the history of African-American letters. I mean there is a heck of a lot of leftist involvement and communist involvement among the people who made black literary history. Particularly in the middle decades of the 20th century.
JD: But of course many of those figures, you’ll forgive my interruption . . .
WJM: No, absolutely go for it. Yes.
JD: Many of those figures, as we know, Richard Wright, or the early, early Ralph Ellison, prior to the publication of the novel (Invisible Man), McKay of course of whom you are a great authority, felt tremendous betrayal in respect to the Communist Party as well.
WJM: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I am not recommending this as the necessary road by any means or advocating everything the communists did in relation to Afro-America. I’m just saying there was enough interest and involvement to sustain this fantasy and this conflation that you’re speaking about. Which is not to cast blame on the writers, it’s just to say there were things there. There were things that could feed Hoover’s machine.
But what you’re pinpointing, which I think is accurate, is the way that any form of black self-assertion gets conflated with Soviet influence.
JD: Right. With outside agitation.
WJM: Exactly!
JD: Somebody must be putting them up to it.
WJM: Exactly. The bomb-throwers who come in from outside. Yes, absolutely. Or writing the stuff for them. It’s like, you know, the man Bill Ayres in Chicago who writes Obama’s autobiographies. We’ve heard that one. That is a later day version of this in a sense. Black liberalism can’t possibly write for itself, it has to come from outside.
But, I also think the F.B.I. acknowledged the power of black literacy pretty early.
JD: That’s a curious racism that emerges often on the left as well, which culminates with the refusal of black leadership in certain areas of American life.
WJM: Yes, I think that that is true, I think that that is true.
For the F.B.I. though, I think there’s less of a sense that African-Americans aren’t in control of the Harlem Renaissance. I think they believed that.
I think you were talking about this earlier or certainly suggesting it.
I do this in part to make a point ironically and open up our easy sense of surveillance is bad, which it is. But the question is why did it have such power? I emphasize the fact that the F.B.I. was extremely prescient and consistent in a way that a lot of American academic organizations and journalistic organs of literary criticism were not in its acknowledgment of the power of black literature throughout the century.
There is this interesting moment in the 30’s where they are not quite as interested, they don’t open as many files. They have a lot of fish to fry with white writers or other non-black writers. So that’s the sort of hole in the history of this, but through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s when other American white, let’s just say interpretative bodies, have lost interest, the F.B.I. is still there. I’m making an ironic point when I make that claim in the book but I think it’s worth looking at. The F.B.I. has its eye on the ball of African-American literature throughout the whole century.
JD: Throughout the century. And I want to hear more from you about this. At the beginning of the interview I predicted what I think is going to be a recalibration, a reevaluation of the immediate literary history over the last hundred years as a result of your work. So, for listeners who may not quite understand why I would use such intense language, could you offer us at this point in our conversation a glimpse at the scale of the amount of investigation that is involved here. It is daunting to discover the tremendous volume of careful, close, rigorous, relentless attention and the amount of files that you were actually looking at.
WJM: When I started working on this, this is the early 2000’s, right? And it gets really energized for me after 911 and the USA Patriot Act and the return of invasive surveillance into daily American life. You can understand why we would want to know about the history of surveillance aimed a cultural figures.
I thought it was going to be smaller than it was. Other scholars had looked at Richard Wright’s file and James Baldwin’s file. Lorraine Hansberry’s file had been discovered. But, it’s huge. What I decided to do was ask for the file of everybody who was in the Norton anthology of African-American literature and I chose that because it’s the canonical college text. And I wanted to see to what extent the F.B.I. had predicted the formation of that canon. And to what extent could we think of the straightest vision of what African-American literary history really is and how much had the F.B.I predicted it. And it turns out that they were monitoring about 48% of those folks.
JD: Unbelievable.
WJM: Yes. And then I asked for further files of the people who are coming up in African-American literary history, so to speak. People like Henry Dumas and Eric Walrond of the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser names but important figures and added some more. By the way, all this is documented in the book, this is not a guessing game you can’t see. I pretty carefully annotate all the file requests that I made. Those that came up with a hit and those that didn’t. And there is a website where you can find all these files, too, which is called the F.B. Eyes digital archive http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/ and you just plug that in to a search engine and it will get you there pretty quickly.
Anyway, I made a 106 requests altogether. Helped by a number of earlier scholars who short-circuited the whole painful process and sent me things. People who work on the F.B.I. tend to be pretty generous with each other because it’s so hard to get stuff out sometimes. I have a friend who says, we share them like baseball cards, you know, these files, they go back and forth. So there were 106 requests and we came up with evidence of about 51 files. They stretch from Claude McKay in the early 1920’s to many of the stars of the Black Arts Movement. As folks in the Black Arts Movement get older, they may decide to publicize some of these files. Amiri Baraka did before he passed away in 2014. And as they pass away other researchers can request files. You can’t request a file on a living citizen unless that citizen gives you permission. That’s a very sane rule if you ask me.
So (the book) goes from 1919 to 1972 at least. That’s the whole Hoover era. It involves 41 files that I can see and a hit rate of about 48%.
END OF PART ONE
PART ONE
Justin Desmangles: What prompted the F.B.I. to view black literary work as a threat to national security?
William J. Maxwell: A threat and a challenge, I would say. You know when Hoover first comes the Bureau in 1919, he’s a very young man, he’s 24 years old. And his first assignment, essentially, is to prevent a second Red Summer. The Red Summer of 1919. The color supposedly both refers to both the communist influence on the streets of the United States and also the blood in the streets of many a race riot that year. So from the moment he takes on his mature career it’s the conjunction, it’s the alliance of essentially left-wing radicalism, particularly associated with anarchist and communist movements, and then black defiance and black literacy. That is the combination he aims to target. 1919 is the first year of the Harlem Renaissance. You can date it in many different ways, but it’s certainly the year of If We Must Die by Claude McKay. The clarion call which both introduces both the Harlem Renaissance sonnet and a new wave of black militancy in the face of white violence.
You know, it’s a complicated beast, the F.B.I., and they were interested in questions of American race even before that. One of their first big cases, according to a lot of Bureau historians, is chasing the boxer Jack Johnson across the United States and sicking the Mann Act against him. That would not be last time in African-American history that the Mann Act would be used against a figure whom the Bureau and other police forces thought was just too defiantly charismatic. So it goes in lots of different directions.
And when I said challenge earlier, what I was trying to emphasize is that the F.B.I. has always been a kind of hyper-literary organization. I mean, that seems a little incongruous, that seems strange, because we think of the F.B.I. as these kind of flat-footed guys in suits. But early on F.B.I. directors have to justify this new national police force to a country that’s quite skeptical about that kind of thing. The United States had never had one of those. And one of the first things they do is begin issuing literary publicity for the organization. There are earlier directors, William J. Burns, William J. Flint . . . being called William J. Maxwell, I had to work on this, right? (laughs) . . . These guys write the equivalent of detective literature that sort of defends a federal police presence. Hoover is publishing constantly. Not always under his own power, lots of people ghostwrite for him. But the F.B.I. knows it has to justify itself through literary publicity so the New Negro and his and her literary work is a challenge to the F.B.I.’s literary aspirations.
JD: This is very fascinating in terms of its continuity with earlier stages of development in black literary life. Or going back even further into the many centuries of slavery here in the New World. I am thinking most particularly of the way that language, literary language, but also legal, economic, and political language, is used as a means of gaining, and more importantly, I think, maintaining power. And of course we know from studying our history that there is a long period in which literacy is a capital crime. It’s punished by death.
WJM: Absolutely.
JD: Is this obsession with black American literature that emerges from the F.B.I. during this volatile period in American history at the beginning of the 20th century, is it also, or can it be viewed as a sort of maintenance project? Is it an extension of the earlier codes that punished literacy by death? How would you describe that continuity?
WJM: That’s interesting. That is a fascinating question. What I can tell you is, you know, John A. Williams who wrote The Man Who Cried I Am and a number of other important political novels . . .
JD: Brilliant.
WJM: Yes, brilliant guy who is actually from my hometown of Teaneck, New Jersey. As a young kid, he would come to my elementary school . . .
JD: Oh, wow!
WJM: Yes, I know! I grew up in a very strangely integrated suburb, let’s put it that way (laughs). I thought the rest of the world was like that, unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be Teaneck, New Jersey.
Anyway, when John A. Williams talks about literary black-balling, as he calls it, he talks about a whole series of literary prescriptions. Prescriptions against black literacy. And he certainly sees modern state surveillance aimed against African-Americans in continuity with this record.
In F.B. Eyes at least, for reasons of extent, it’s probably already a bit too crunchy and a bit too long, I track the F.B.I., particularly Hoover’s F.B.I., from 1919 to 1972. But you could put it in rhyme with that earlier decision that black literacy was a mode of social power that white supremacy could not afford. But when you get to this period with the F.B.I., I don’t think there is any assumption that it is going to be crushed entirely at this point.
There is a kind of chasing after it and an acknowledgement that we can’t quite stop this but perhaps we can slow it down. These F.B.I. readers who are looking at the first poems of the Harlem Renaissance, not just by Claude McKay but Andy Razaf, poets who are writing for the Garvey movement in Garveyite journals, they actually confess their admiration for the material. They say, you know, this is not the Negro of yore. Excuse me for that line (laughs).
JD: This is an extremely important point that you are picking up on and so, if you will, I’d like to unpack that a bit. Just a few moments ago at the beginning of our conversation you were talking about how the literary intellectualism and the powerfully deciphering attitudes of people at the Bureau is quite a contradiction to the public image of many of these men and later women who would work there. And in fact, the truth of it, as is emphasized so thoroughly in your book, is that they had a tremendous abiding respect and fear of the power of great literature, and not so great literature . . .
WJM: That’s true.
JD: . . . to change values. To shape points of view and to move forward political and social agendas. Could you address that further here? You were talking about that respect and occasionally reverent attitude towards this emerging new literature from black America. Could you address more of that, please?
WJM: Yes, sure, I can address that maybe by talking about the biography of an early Bureau sort of critic-in-chief, as I call him. He’s a man named Robert Adger Bowen, who has been essentially lost to history except in his own mind.
JD: (Laughter)
WJM: Well, you know, I’ve rescued him for better or worse. His papers are in the Clemson University special collections library. He’s a man out of South Carolina. A white man from one of the oldest slave owning families in South Carolina. Whose fortune later, built on the sweat and the skill of black laborers, was invested in banking and shipping. So he grew up on plantations in the south, fascinated by black song, early on. So, he actually fills out these song-catching scrapbooks and he migrates through a complicated literary career that includes writing black dialect literature in the style of Joel Chandler Harris in the 1880’s and 1890’s.
Now this man winds up as Hoover’s major literary detective, it’s not an exaggeration to say this, in New York City at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. He is running this thing called the Bureau of Translations and Radical Publications in New York, which is kind of like the F.B.I.’s literary main office. In New York City, the capitol of literary radicalism. And he’s the person who writes this early Bureau document called Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications. That’s a heck-of-a name.
JD: A tremendous document. Tremendous.
WJM: Well, it’s tremendous and it’s strange and it’s disturbing. You can get the drafts of this if you go to the Clemson University Library. He’s just amazed by the quality of this work and he realizes that this work is going to put him out of business as a white (black) dialect writer.
That’s a very particular kind of story but I do think it emphasizes the fact that for the most literate of Bureau readers who were assigned essentially Afro-America as a beat, there is this respect and a sense of rivalry. And that is hardly unusual in the history of American racism. As Eric Lott said years ago, you know, there’s this desire. You both love and you want to steal black culture the moment you try to destroy it.
JD: You can see that in the story of Lee Atwater. You know, he clearly comes out of that same bag.
WJM: Yes. Yes. So in my discussing this, I am not talking about a new dynamic. It is a dynamic that first of all, black people have known about forever.
JD: There you go.
WJM: And scholars have caught up with over the last few generations. To find this at the heart of really the central icon in American law enforcement, which would be the F.B.I., was startling and interesting.
JD: Now, I’d like to pick up on this idea of the literary detective and his fluency, if you will, or lack of, that leads to this ventriloquizing of black speech or black literary product. I think at one point you refer to it as literary minstrelsy. But this becomes key in the tactics of psychological warfare, intimidation and humiliation that are earmarks of F.B.I. tactics in all directions when it finds and wants to locate an enemy. Could you talk a little about this relationship, I used the word ventriloquism, you talked about literary minstrelsy, and how that played a part in the psychological warfare, the intimidation that was used to make this battle, frankly, a lop-sided one.
WJM: A lop-sided one and in the late 60’s and early 70’s a violent one. We’re talking about COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence programs that we’re aimed initially against the Communist Party. That came first and then with a lot of prodding from Lyndon Johnson and some of the saner people at the Bureau, finally against some of the most vicious attacks on the Civil Rights Movement, so the Klan was targeted. But then those same techniques were aimed against, let’s just say, the post-non-violent phase of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement of the late 60’s.
One thing that we have come to know more centrally is important in the history of the Civil Rights Movement is the F.B.I.’s opposition. In this film Selma that has just come out several months ago, a fascinating movie on a couple of different levels. One of the things that’s featured is this letter from the F.B.I., actually written by a Hoover lieutenant William C. Sullivan, that advises Dr. Martin Luther King to not pick up the Nobel Peace Prize and/or commit suicide. So this is the nadir of F.B.I. history and maybe the nadir of American state intelligence. If you want to say that. The thing that is fascinating about that is, you know, fascinating again and gross, is the fact that it’s written is a pseudo-black voice. It’s written in the voice of a disaffected foot soldier of the Civil Rights Movement who thinks that King has come to embarrass the movement because of his sexual peccadillos and his betrayal of his office as a preacher, as a man of God.
It turns out there is a lot of COINTELPRO literature that is produced by F.B.I. agents, largely in field offices, it didn’t all come out of Washington, it didn’t all come out of the hands of Sullivan, that’s aimed against the Black Power Movement. There’s this thing you can find on line pretty easily online, it may or may not be apocryphal, which is a Black Panther coloring book which was supposedly spread around California, which hyperbolizes Black Panther rhetoric. Which was kind of hard to do, I have to admit (laughs) but it does do that. You know, and there was basically this attempt to use the styles of Black Power literacy against the movement itself by exaggerating them, by causing disruption. But this was a mode in which essentially you had F.B.I. agents pretending to be black writers. And people have known about this for a long time and have measured its political effects. It certainly helped to divide and distort the movement. But I see it in continuity with this earlier history of the F.B.I.’s deep interest and investment in African-American letters.
JD: And in particular, managing the trajectory of that mission, if that word is appropriate, the trajectory towards emancipation. Towards freedom, towards autonomy, towards self-determination.
I’d like to hold on to that for a moment or two here because one of the bizarre conflations that emerges as we progress through the 20th century and into the period following the Second World War, is this freakish conflation between a kind of morbid fear of communism and its growth and black self-determination. In Hoover's and the F.B.I.’s imagination, and the C.I.A.’s too. Could you talk a little about that? It is really just bizarre and sick. Really.
WJM: Yes, I was trying even to suggest earlier that this conflation for Hoover is very, very early. In his history and the F.B.I.’s history. It comes out of 1919 as much as the Cold War. It is a conflation in which any form of black self-assertion or particularly black progressive politics is thought to be allied with the Soviet Union. But the thing is, there is something to the conflation in the sense of the history of African-American letters. I mean there is a heck of a lot of leftist involvement and communist involvement among the people who made black literary history. Particularly in the middle decades of the 20th century.
JD: But of course many of those figures, you’ll forgive my interruption . . .
WJM: No, absolutely go for it. Yes.
JD: Many of those figures, as we know, Richard Wright, or the early, early Ralph Ellison, prior to the publication of the novel (Invisible Man), McKay of course of whom you are a great authority, felt tremendous betrayal in respect to the Communist Party as well.
WJM: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I am not recommending this as the necessary road by any means or advocating everything the communists did in relation to Afro-America. I’m just saying there was enough interest and involvement to sustain this fantasy and this conflation that you’re speaking about. Which is not to cast blame on the writers, it’s just to say there were things there. There were things that could feed Hoover’s machine.
But what you’re pinpointing, which I think is accurate, is the way that any form of black self-assertion gets conflated with Soviet influence.
JD: Right. With outside agitation.
WJM: Exactly!
JD: Somebody must be putting them up to it.
WJM: Exactly. The bomb-throwers who come in from outside. Yes, absolutely. Or writing the stuff for them. It’s like, you know, the man Bill Ayres in Chicago who writes Obama’s autobiographies. We’ve heard that one. That is a later day version of this in a sense. Black liberalism can’t possibly write for itself, it has to come from outside.
But, I also think the F.B.I. acknowledged the power of black literacy pretty early.
JD: That’s a curious racism that emerges often on the left as well, which culminates with the refusal of black leadership in certain areas of American life.
WJM: Yes, I think that that is true, I think that that is true.
For the F.B.I. though, I think there’s less of a sense that African-Americans aren’t in control of the Harlem Renaissance. I think they believed that.
I think you were talking about this earlier or certainly suggesting it.
I do this in part to make a point ironically and open up our easy sense of surveillance is bad, which it is. But the question is why did it have such power? I emphasize the fact that the F.B.I. was extremely prescient and consistent in a way that a lot of American academic organizations and journalistic organs of literary criticism were not in its acknowledgment of the power of black literature throughout the century.
There is this interesting moment in the 30’s where they are not quite as interested, they don’t open as many files. They have a lot of fish to fry with white writers or other non-black writers. So that’s the sort of hole in the history of this, but through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s when other American white, let’s just say interpretative bodies, have lost interest, the F.B.I. is still there. I’m making an ironic point when I make that claim in the book but I think it’s worth looking at. The F.B.I. has its eye on the ball of African-American literature throughout the whole century.
JD: Throughout the century. And I want to hear more from you about this. At the beginning of the interview I predicted what I think is going to be a recalibration, a reevaluation of the immediate literary history over the last hundred years as a result of your work. So, for listeners who may not quite understand why I would use such intense language, could you offer us at this point in our conversation a glimpse at the scale of the amount of investigation that is involved here. It is daunting to discover the tremendous volume of careful, close, rigorous, relentless attention and the amount of files that you were actually looking at.
WJM: When I started working on this, this is the early 2000’s, right? And it gets really energized for me after 911 and the USA Patriot Act and the return of invasive surveillance into daily American life. You can understand why we would want to know about the history of surveillance aimed a cultural figures.
I thought it was going to be smaller than it was. Other scholars had looked at Richard Wright’s file and James Baldwin’s file. Lorraine Hansberry’s file had been discovered. But, it’s huge. What I decided to do was ask for the file of everybody who was in the Norton anthology of African-American literature and I chose that because it’s the canonical college text. And I wanted to see to what extent the F.B.I. had predicted the formation of that canon. And to what extent could we think of the straightest vision of what African-American literary history really is and how much had the F.B.I predicted it. And it turns out that they were monitoring about 48% of those folks.
JD: Unbelievable.
WJM: Yes. And then I asked for further files of the people who are coming up in African-American literary history, so to speak. People like Henry Dumas and Eric Walrond of the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser names but important figures and added some more. By the way, all this is documented in the book, this is not a guessing game you can’t see. I pretty carefully annotate all the file requests that I made. Those that came up with a hit and those that didn’t. And there is a website where you can find all these files, too, which is called the F.B. Eyes digital archive http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/ and you just plug that in to a search engine and it will get you there pretty quickly.
Anyway, I made a 106 requests altogether. Helped by a number of earlier scholars who short-circuited the whole painful process and sent me things. People who work on the F.B.I. tend to be pretty generous with each other because it’s so hard to get stuff out sometimes. I have a friend who says, we share them like baseball cards, you know, these files, they go back and forth. So there were 106 requests and we came up with evidence of about 51 files. They stretch from Claude McKay in the early 1920’s to many of the stars of the Black Arts Movement. As folks in the Black Arts Movement get older, they may decide to publicize some of these files. Amiri Baraka did before he passed away in 2014. And as they pass away other researchers can request files. You can’t request a file on a living citizen unless that citizen gives you permission. That’s a very sane rule if you ask me.
So (the book) goes from 1919 to 1972 at least. That’s the whole Hoover era. It involves 41 files that I can see and a hit rate of about 48%.
END OF PART ONE
