Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

Chapter 12 concerns J. Edgar Hoover, the eventual director of the FBI and famed persecutor of civil rights leaders. His first job at the Library of Congress was under President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was an ardent segregationist. Under Wilson’s tutelage, Hoover also became a dedicated white supremacist. In 1917, Hoover was tasked with running the “Radical Division,” an espionage agency that surveilled, investigated, and interrogated suspected “disloyal” Americans.

After World War I ended, the almost 400,000 Black Americans who served in the armed forces returned to America unwilling to accept the same oppression in which they had been raised. Hoover and Wilson started to surveil the Black American men who returned, and they supported the now-familiar racist backlash against Black assertion of rights. Now the deputy Head of the Bureau of Investigation, Hoover targeted, persecuted, and even deported Black revolutionaries regularly. This did not, however, stop freedom fighters and organizers from agitating for civil rights. In 1961, Hoover was alarmed by the sophistication of the Freedom Riders, protestors who deliberately broke bus segregation rules. Though bus segregation was federally outlawed, the South refused to enforce the laws, allowing racist bus lines to continue to segregate. Freedom Riders organized highly visible rule-flouting, with interracial couples sitting together. This tame form of protest was met with firebombs and mass violence in Anniston, Alabama, in 1961. The protestors were saved by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, “the Blackest, bravest hero of them all” (294). An accomplished civil rights leader, Shuttlesworth was no stranger to violence or bombs and protected the Freedom Riders to their next stop in Birmingham, where more white mob violence waited. Eventually, the Freedom Riders were arrested and sent to jail. Over time, it became clear even to the public that Hoover and the FBI were targeting, attacking, and framing Black leaders, particularly the Black Panthers.

Convinced that evidence of Hoover’s harassment of Black people must exist,  John C. Raines, a former member of the Freedom Riders, broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole documents. These documents would reveal that Hoover had engaged in a 50-year-long investigation and surveillance project called COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program that explicitly targeted every Black civil rights leader.

Chapter 12 Unit Review

The quiz concerns the veracity of particular conspiracy theories, the number of foreign communist agents Hoover eventually discovered, and the traits of Hoover himself. The activity directs the reader to write an essay describing the worst-case scenario white people could imagine civil rights leaders were trying to bring about.

This chapter covers the continuing persecution of Black Americans at the hands of the police and the prison system. Harriot argues it is a whitewashed, fantastical version of American history that purports that individual bad actors commit acts of racism, which Black people peacefully protest, then the rest of America sees the “error of its ways” and changes permanently for the better (310). In reality, civil rights progress is only reliably achieved through self-defense and resistance. Essie Harris, a civil rights leader in North Carolina, joined politics after he got in a gunfight with the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1860s. He killed several of the Klansmen and scared off the rest. Likewise, John Mitchell Jr., a Black “polymath” living in Richmond, Virginia, pushed for armed self-defense in his newspaper. He advocated for Black people to protect themselves against lynching by being armed and ready to fight to the death. When racists threatened his life if he returned to their town, he came back to the site of their lynching and waited for them with two pistols in his hands. They never showed up.

The Coatesville Call to Arms occurred after a Black man was accused of attacking a 14-year-old white girl in 1919. Black community members, remembering a lynching in 1911 for which the perpetrators were acquitted, armed themselves and marched on the town jail. After being assured that no one had been arrested, the group stormed City Hall just to be sure. After the “Call to Arms,” there was never another lynching in Pennsylvania.

Robert F. Williams, a Marine, formed the Black Guard in 1955 after finding out that more than half of the residents of his hometown belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. The Black Guard was a militia that violently resisted the white supremacists, protecting NAACP members in a “Wild West-style shootout” (317). Later in his life, Williams noted proudly that no Black person under the protection of the Black Guard lost their life to racial violence.

Even religious leaders advocated for armed resistance. After arson destroyed five churches, a Masonic hall, and a community center in Jonesboro, Louisiana, religious groups combined forces to found the Deacons for Defense and Justice. When students picketed for integration at a high school, the police ordered the fire department to blast them with fire hoses. Once the Deacons turned up with loaded shotguns, however, they backed off. The Deacons were so intimidating that the Ku Klux Klan of Louisiana avoided antagonizing them.

For their efforts, the Deacons and other groups were targeted by Hoover’s COINTELPRO for surveillance. In 2017, the FBI warned against a new group of “terrorists” they call Black Identity Extremists, or BIEs. However, “more than five years later, the FBI still cannot list a single murder caused by a Black Identity Extremist” (319).

Chapter 13 Unit Review

The quiz covers aspects of armed self-defense, the particular weapons of Black Americans who died practicing self-defense, and examples of a nonviolent white national movement. The activity instructs the reader to list protest methods, tactics, or movements toward racial equality that were embraced by white Americans in real-time.

Supplement: “All-The-Way-Free”

This supplement is a letter to the author’s cousin Tyran, who was incarcerated at the time of the book’s publication. Harriot admits that he still thinks of Tyran as free and often forgets that he is in prison. He reminisces about their time with their wealthy but overbearing Aunt Jannie, who forbade them from going outside. Jannie was trying to protect them, but the boys still ran away to their Uncle Rob’s house. Jannie asked them why they would run away from such a luxurious, comfortable place. Tyran answered that they weren’t “all-the-way free.”

Though emancipation might be seen as “all-the-way free,” Harriot states that, in reality, Black people can still be enslaved through mass incarceration. Prisons quickly started using their prisoners for free labor, and Jim Crow made it practically illegal to be Black and unemployed, even requiring every Black person to “be in the regular service of some white person or former owner” or else face a prison sentence (327). Convict leasing quickly became a profitable enterprise. Though convict leasing was made illegal, the War on Drugs in the 1970s soon accomplished the same task, feeding industries that stock prison commissaries and charge bail fees. Harriot ends by reflecting that Tyran is the closest thing he has to a brother, and how even though he isn’t in prison, neither of them is “all-the-way-free.”

Chapter 13 Unit Review 2

This quiz concerns the mass incarceration system as a replacement for slavery, the US’s high incarceration rate, and the entities that profit from mass incarceration. The activity asks the reader to give a single logical, evidence-based reason why Black Americans are jailed at higher rates than white Americans.