#decolonize history

With school around the corner, this is a reminder to not allow the history textbooks have you go & discredit revolutionary heroes that fought & died for your rights. It’s important to educate yourself & others about COINTELPRO, an FBI government-sponsored series of covert, and often illegal, projects aimed at spying on, infiltrating, discrediting, disrupting & destroying leftist political organizations & leaders they deemed “subversive” including the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Civil Rights organizations, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, women’s liberation groups, LGBT activists, & anti-Vietnam war organizers.

“COINTELPRO used informants, agent provocateurs, infiltrators, legal and illegal wiretaps, break-ins, false correspondence, and “bad-jacketing,” which was the act of making a legitimate member of a group appear to be a collaborator with the state. Psychological warfare included calling the parents of young civil rights activists to inform them that their children had been murdered or kidnapped. FBI agents worked with journalists to plant stories in order to discredit leadership and organizations. Across the country, the Bureau collaborated with local police to repress targeted groups. Sharing resources & intelligence, activists were arrested, fired from jobs, expelled from schools and lost business contracts. COINTELPRO even used switchboard operators and postal workers to spy on citizens, with or without court order… The effectiveness of COINTELPRO was overwhelming. Many organizations were destabilized with arrests, raids, break-ins, & killings. The most famous raid of the Panthers occurred in December 1969 in Chicago when a 14-man police raiding party killed two Panthers, Fred Hampton &  Mark Clark. Several other Panthers were injured in the pre-dawn attack. Nationally, the Panthers insisted that the FBI and local police were involved in a conspiracy to destroy them. Hoover denied it. The magnitude of these coordinated activities, however, were not known until the 1976 congressional hearings.” -Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar