America has a long and ugly history of law enforcement harassing political activists. One of their favored means of attacking protesters has been to surveil them, not only in the hope of learning their organizing plans, but also to try to intimidate them into submission.
This sort of repression thrives on secrecy. When law enforcement agents monitor their critics, they try their best to hide or destroy the evidence. Concerned about how their acts of retribution might appear in the public eye, these officials conceal their misdeeds from reporters and activists and aim to prevent later generations from writing about them. Although journalists and historians work on different timelines, both need sources. Without them, they can’t do their jobs. And activists need those documents too, because fighting surveillance is impossible without first proving that it’s happening.
It’s well known that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI attempted to track the civil rights movement’s every move. Largely forgotten today, however, is that countless local police departments did the same. In most cases, we only know about police targeting of civil rights activists because political organizers chose to fight back against repression.
In my new book Police Against the Movement, I explore how activists in the 1960s and ‘70s confronted police departments across the country with lawsuits demanding an end to illegal spying on political organizers. In response, police departments destroyed millions of incriminating records documenting their surveillance of movements. But they failed to destroy all the documents. After years of court battles, plaintiffs in Chicago and New York improbably succeeded in forcing police to downscale and restrict their monitoring of activists.
Just as police tracked civil rights, Black Power, feminist, and anti-war protesters in the 1960s and ‘70s, today they snoop on organizers taking a stand against ICE, Israel’s war on Palestine, and Atlanta’s Cop City. In our current moment, facial recognition software, cheap camera drones, and widely available phone-hacking tools make spying easier than ever. But at the same time, the efforts of earlier generations of activists to confront police surveillance provide today’s movements a blueprint for resisting the repression perpetrated by law enforcement officials.
On September 10, 1976, Memphis mayor Wyeth Chandler called a meeting with the city’s police chief and its head of domestic intelligence. The men had a political firestorm on their hands. Antiwar activist Rick Carter had requested that police provide him a copy of his surveillance file after a former roommate admitted that he had worked as an undercover officer assigned to spy on Carter when they lived together. After stonewalling the repeated requests for weeks, Memphis police informed Carter that they had destroyed the records.
The day before Chandler met with police, Carter’s failed attempt to obtain the files was front-page news in local papers. “Any group that is out protesting and marching—you always need to check it out to see if anything radical is going on,” the mayor insisted in the face of the revelations. One day later, the mayor had changed his tune. Now he was ordering police officials to disband Memphis’s intelligence unit and to burn its surveillance files. Within hours, local American Civil Liberties Union attorneys obtained a federal court order protecting the files until a judge could review them. Ten minutes after the injunction was issued, an ACLU lawyer rushed to the mayor’s office to deliver the order—but he was too late. Police had burned eighty trash bags of surveillance files dating back to 1965 in the less than five-hour window between the mayor’s directive and the injunction. Chandler claimed that he had ordered the files destroyed to satisfy activists, remarking that he had gotten the idea by “listening to the so-called liberal establishment that they objected to having such files in the possession of police.”
Though the Memphis police chief later admitted that they had burned the files to preempt the injunction, that may not have been their only motive. Four days prior to the mayor’s order, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson had reported that Coretta Scott King and the Congressional Black Caucus were lobbying legislators to investigate the April 1968 murder of King’s husband. At that point it had not yet been publicly disclosed that Memphis intelligence officer Marrell McCollough had spied on Martin Luther King and penetrated the civil rights leader’s inner circle. By the time that the House of Representatives announced the Select Committee on Assassinations on September 13, any records in the eighty trash bags related to their surveillance of King, the SCLC, and the Memphis sanitation workers strike were long gone. Two months later, a congressional investigator accused Memphis police of destroying documents relevant to the inquiry.
Memphis police were far from the only department to dispose of surveillance records in these years. In February 1973, NYPD commissioner Patrick Murphy—a named defendant in the Handschu federal suit—held a press conference at police headquarters to announce that the department’s red squad had taken “self-corrective measures” and trashed files containing the names of one million individuals and organizations since 1970, roughly 80 percent of the unit’s records. Murphy noted that the purge had been informed by a four-day course on handling political intelligence records offered by the Central Intelligence Agency, a training completed by a dozen city police officers the previous September but only revealed months later by Congressman Ed Koch, who denounced it as a violation of federal law barring the CIA from performing law enforcement duties on American soil.
The following year, in November 1974, local organizers aligned with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression in Chicago calling themselves the Alliance to End Repression developed plans to sue their city’s police intelligence unit. Before they could file suit, an undercover intelligence officer embedded in the Alliance warned his superiors of the organization’s intentions, in turn prompting Chicago police to destroy files on more than one hundred thousand individuals and 1,300 organizations. In the wake of a fire started in a filing cabinet in police headquarters, a federal judge ordered a halt to the destruction of all Chicago police records for the duration of the case.
And in Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley—a pioneering Black LAPD officer before he entered politics—announced the destruction of 1.9 million intelligence records in April 1975. The purge accompanied the release of a new set of guidelines prohibiting Los Angeles police from monitoring individuals on account of their race, nationality, sexual orientation, or political activity. “This enlightened approach demonstrates that through a spirit of cooperation between agencies of government we can rebuild the public trust in our institutions which is so vitally needed in today’s society,” Bradley proclaimed. Never mind that the destroyed files, in the words of one LAPD official, covered some 55,000 individuals “extending from the Wobblies of the 20s to the labor agitators of the 30s, the interned Nisei of the 40s, the alleged subversives of the 50s and some anti-war demonstrators of the 60s.” Los Angeles police had destroyed an irreplaceable archive of left-wing political activity in Southern California—and almost certainly documentation of untold civil rights violations by the LAPD, too.
Police officials in each of these cities insisted that they were performing a public service by destroying millions of surveillance records that happened to be the subject of civil litigation. They did so amid an ongoing reappraisal by Americans of intelligence agencies. Although the FBI and CIA had long been revered as guardians of the public order and national security, by the middle of the 1970s a large portion of Americans had come to view them as corrupt and invasive.
But while the misdeeds of federal intelligence agencies captured headlines, local political police attracted far less scrutiny, even as activists targeted them for reform. Without the glare of sustained national media, they had the freedom to play a longer game than their colleagues in the FBI and CIA. As they began to grasp that their actions against the civil rights movement would not age well, local law enforcement and their allies perpetrated a far-reaching erasure of history. Unlike the reckoning that federal intelligence agencies were forced to endure, police pulled off what we can call an act of great unremembering.
