orgtheory.net

I was recently watching What We Want, What We Believe, a massive 4 DVD anthology of rare video and audio materials related to the Black Panther Party (BPP). What We Want has two fascinating interviews with former FBI agents who tracked and meddle with the BPP. There’s interesting stuff to be had in the interviews. M. Wesley Swearington worked for the LA “race unit” in the FBI, whose job it was to follow and disrupt radical, and many not so radical, black political organizations. Swearington helped BPP defense lawyers discover massive troves of files that documented the extensive surveillance and infiltration of the BPP. William A. Cohendet worked in the San Francisco FBI office collecting data and writing extensive reports on the BPP.

Observations, in no particular order:

• The bureaucratic structure of the FBI makes it very easy for individual actors to maintain plausible deniability. Only certain agents have access to certain files, files are detached from each other, information is distributed across networks, agents may not know which other agents are collaborating with other agencies, etc. While most agents almost certainly knew what was going on in some broad sense, only a few elites really had a sense of what the entire picture looked like. Thus, it is fairly easy to convince yourself that *your* actions weren’t that important to the whole affair.
• Self-selection: The FBI established a “race unit” to follow black political groups. This is not the same thing as investigating particular crimes. This was a political surveillance unit. Also, one of the FBI officers insisted (unsurprisingly) that race unit agents were highly racist. That’s another lesson: repression requires specialization and attracts people who are emotionally attached to repression. Perhaps this is a rejection of the banality of evil hypothesis.
• Lax legal rules facilitate repression. There are numerous instances where law enforcement repressed political groups with arrests based on flimsy evidence.* Once courts get into the habit of accepting evidence that would be rejected in a freshman rhetoric seminar, it’s not hard to repress people. The example that stuck with me – Los Angeles BPP leader Geronimo Pratt was convicted for murder and the only evidence was testimony from someone who was not there. Unsurprisingly, the court vacated the conviction when it was revealed that the main witness was an FBI informant.
• The Black Panthers were a delicate organization. In the Cohendet footage, the interviewer is dismayed when he insists that the BPP would have floundered even without the FBI infiltration. I agree with this assessment. The leaders often had criminal records before they became political activists. The FBI harassment was sometimes minor, but it lead to bitter, sometimes violent, disputes.** The BPP was simply a group incapable of resolving its internal problems in a constructive way. Given what I know about them from reading both the friendly and skeptical literature on them, I’m convinced that the BPP had a short shelf life from the start.

If this is your topic, the interviews are worth tracking down.

* BTW, I am not knocking all police arrests. There were clearly some folks who were violent and need to be locked up.

** Interesting example: The FBI had a habit of circulating slanderous flyers and spreading rumors about various BPP activists. One of them targeted a woman in the New York BPP chapter. When told about this many years later, she reported that she was  indeed ostracized, but had no idea why. She had never seen the flyer about her. This surprised me. Who would abandon their friend because of a nasty flyer found on a subway or park bench? Wouldn’t you show the flyer? If that’s how the rank and file act, the organization isn’t going to be around long.