No surveillance program is more intertwined with the federal government than the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Headed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO began in 1956 to track and disrupt the activities of the Communist Party. The program expanded significantly in the 1960s, aiming to, in Hoover’s words, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of a range of moderate, progressive, and radical groups.1 The federal government sanctioned decades-long surveillance on a wide range of activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and groups like the Black Panther Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
At Hoover’s behest, a legion of special agents wiretapped organizers’ homes; followed their families and harassed them with menacing phone calls that threatened to expose family secrets; posed as activists and infiltrated organizations; and raided the offices and homes of activists—all actions that periodically led to agents killing those targeted men and women.
The male victims of such surveillance have gotten the lion’s share of attention over the years. Yet many women, too, were targeted. Their stories of resistance are important not just as historical footnotes, but also in helping today’s generation of activists as they struggle to navigate the increasingly perilous currents of our moment.
In the 1950s, the Bureau hounded women organizers whom they deemed to be “subversives” and “communists.” Most of the women whom they targeted, however, were simply local-level activists engaged in labor and civil rights organizing within progressive groups. As COINTELPRO expanded, so too did Hoover’s tracking of black women. By the 1960s, this intensified, with special agents surveilling black women activists who led welfare rights organizations, those who engaged in voter registration work through the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as more radical groups like the Black Panther Party. The FBI’s ever-growing list of “threats” included activists ranging from black nationalist “Queen Mother” Audley Moore to NAACP and SNCC leader Ella Baker to novelists and poets Pauli Murray and Sonia Sanchez, among many others.
The Bureau used a network made up largely of white men, so-called “special agents,” to monitor black women activists. Surveillance could mean a special agent walking ten steps behind as activists strolled in the park with their children. It could materialize as an unfamiliar face in a community meeting. It could resemble a friendly neighbor who asked a few too many questions. Despite the harassment, these black women labored, organized, and survived, developing multifaceted strategies for challenging surveillance.