THE SMOKING GUN STILL IN HAND: SPYING ON, AND CENSORSHIP OF WRITERS OF CONSCIENCE
Claude McKay
New documents show the FBI spied on ‘notorious negro’ writers for decades
Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.
Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay . The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.
Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each.
“I suspected there would be more than a few,” said Maxwell. “I knew Hoover was especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, leftwing politics, and literary potential. But I was surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and ‘filed’ nearly half of the nationally prominent African American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau, and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the nationalist Black Arts movement). In this, I realised, the FBI had outdone most every other major institution of US literary study, only fitfully concerned with black writing.”
Maxwell’s book about his discovery, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, is out on 18 February from Princeton University Press . It argues that the FBI’s attention was fuelled by Hoover’s “personal fascination with black culture”, that “the FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature”, and that “African American literature is characterised by a deep awareness of FBI ghostreading”.
Princeton said that while it is well known that Hoover was hostile to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, Maxwell’s forthcoming book is the first exposé of “the extent to which the FBI monitored and influenced African American writing” between 1919 and 1972.
Taking its title from Richard Wright’s 1949 poem The FB Eye Blues, in which the Native Son novelist writes that “every place I look, Lord / I find FB eyes / I’m getting sick and tired of gover’ment spies”, the work also posits that for some authors, suspicion of the surveillance prompted creative replies.
Digital copies of 49 of the FBI files have been made available to the public online. “The collected files of the entire set of authors comprise 13,892 pages, or the rough equivalent of 46 300-page PhD theses,” Maxwell writes in the book. “FBI ghostreaders genuinely rivalled the productivity of their academic counterparts.”
The academic told the Guardian that he believes the FBI monitoring stems from the fact that “from the beginning of his tenure at the FBI … Hoover was exercised by what he saw as an emerging alliance between black literacy and black radicalism”.
“Then there’s the fact that many later African American writers were allied, at one time or another, with socialist and communist politics in the US,” he added, with Wright and WEB Du Bois both becoming Communist Party members, Hughes a “major party sympathiser”, and McKay “toasted by Trotsky and published in Russian as a significant Marxist theorist”.
The files show how the travel arrangements of black writers were closely scrutinised by the FBI, with the passport records of a long list of authors “combed for scraps of criminal behaviour and ‘derogatory information’”, writes Maxwell. Some writers were threatened by “‘stops’, instructions to advise and defer to the Bureau if a suspect tried to pass through a designated point of entry” to the US.
When McKay went to the Soviet Union, a “stop notice” instructed that the poet should be held for “appropriate attention” if he attempted to re-enter the US. In Baltimore, writes Maxwell, FBI agents “paraded their seriousness in a bulletin sent straight to Hoover, boasting of a clued-in ‘Local Police Department’ on the ‘lookout’ for one ‘Claude McKay (colored)’ (23 Mar. 1923)”.
They also reveal how, with the help of informers, the agency reviewed works such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man before publication.
“What did the FBI learn from these dossiers? Several things,” said Maxwell. “Where African American writers were travelling, especially during their expatriate adventures in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What they were publishing, even while it was still in press.” In the 1950s, he said, the FBI aspired to “a foreknowledge of American publishing so deep that literary threats to the FBI’s reputation could be seen before their public appearance”.
The bureau also considered “whether certain African Americans should be allowed government jobs and White House visits, in the cases of the most fortunate”, and “what the leading minds of black America were thinking, and would be thinking”.
But, he added, “the files also show that some FBI spy-critics couldn’t help from learning that they liked reading the stuff, for simple aesthetic reasons”.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
What has come to light about J.Edgar Hoover – that he was not only a closeted homosexual but also a passing (for white) person of color – makes the damage he has done to so many lives in America all the more thought-worthy. Is this the havoc that sexual repression and racism can cause: in this case, tremendous suffering, fear, anguish, all from one stunted and twisted individual? Another realization is that the surveillance of the work of writers and artists of conscience has not ended, but goes on in various locales and situations to this day. That mainstream media is responsible for killing the art, and distorting and disparaging work that is critical of American “politics” or “politricks” as Dick Gregory or Malcolm X might describe it. This is why books that might otherwise be bestsellers – if they fail to toe the prescribed line in specific areas – are attacked, ridiculed, and consigned to the bottom of the review list, if noted at all. This is why one’s political views, if they are deemed “incorrect” by assigned gatekeepers, can mean oblivion, or the threat of it. As an irate reader wrote of me, regarding my work in defense of Palestinians: We will see to it that your books become landfill. Which wasn’t quite as sobering as reading that another “journalist” came down on the side of my actual murder. In what do I place hope for my country’s moral salvation? Only in the awareness of the people to recognize, identify and act on whatever attempts to distort or destroy intelligence that could be of help to our social and spiritual, and now physical, survival.-AW
THE SMOKING GUN STILL IN HAND: SPYING ON, AND CENSORSHIP OF WRITERS OF CONSCIENCE
February 2015
THE SMOKING GUN STILL IN HAND: SPYING ON, AND CENSORSHIP OF WRITERS OF CONSCIENCE
Claude McKay
New documents show the FBI spied on ‘notorious negro’ writers for decades
ALISON FLOOD, THE GUARDIAN
09 FEB 2015 AT 12:58 ET
Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.
Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay . The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.
Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each.
“I suspected there would be more than a few,” said Maxwell. “I knew Hoover was especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, leftwing politics, and literary potential. But I was surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and ‘filed’ nearly half of the nationally prominent African American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau, and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the nationalist Black Arts movement). In this, I realised, the FBI had outdone most every other major institution of US literary study, only fitfully concerned with black writing.”
Maxwell’s book about his discovery, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, is out on 18 February from Princeton University Press . It argues that the FBI’s attention was fuelled by Hoover’s “personal fascination with black culture”, that “the FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature”, and that “African American literature is characterised by a deep awareness of FBI ghostreading”.
Princeton said that while it is well known that Hoover was hostile to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, Maxwell’s forthcoming book is the first exposé of “the extent to which the FBI monitored and influenced African American writing” between 1919 and 1972.
Taking its title from Richard Wright’s 1949 poem The FB Eye Blues, in which the Native Son novelist writes that “every place I look, Lord / I find FB eyes / I’m getting sick and tired of gover’ment spies”, the work also posits that for some authors, suspicion of the surveillance prompted creative replies.
Digital copies of 49 of the FBI files have been made available to the public online. “The collected files of the entire set of authors comprise 13,892 pages, or the rough equivalent of 46 300-page PhD theses,” Maxwell writes in the book. “FBI ghostreaders genuinely rivalled the productivity of their academic counterparts.”
The academic told the Guardian that he believes the FBI monitoring stems from the fact that “from the beginning of his tenure at the FBI … Hoover was exercised by what he saw as an emerging alliance between black literacy and black radicalism”.
“Then there’s the fact that many later African American writers were allied, at one time or another, with socialist and communist politics in the US,” he added, with Wright and WEB Du Bois both becoming Communist Party members, Hughes a “major party sympathiser”, and McKay “toasted by Trotsky and published in Russian as a significant Marxist theorist”.
The files show how the travel arrangements of black writers were closely scrutinised by the FBI, with the passport records of a long list of authors “combed for scraps of criminal behaviour and ‘derogatory information’”, writes Maxwell. Some writers were threatened by “‘stops’, instructions to advise and defer to the Bureau if a suspect tried to pass through a designated point of entry” to the US.
When McKay went to the Soviet Union, a “stop notice” instructed that the poet should be held for “appropriate attention” if he attempted to re-enter the US. In Baltimore, writes Maxwell, FBI agents “paraded their seriousness in a bulletin sent straight to Hoover, boasting of a clued-in ‘Local Police Department’ on the ‘lookout’ for one ‘Claude McKay (colored)’ (23 Mar. 1923)”.
They also reveal how, with the help of informers, the agency reviewed works such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man before publication.
“What did the FBI learn from these dossiers? Several things,” said Maxwell. “Where African American writers were travelling, especially during their expatriate adventures in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What they were publishing, even while it was still in press.” In the 1950s, he said, the FBI aspired to “a foreknowledge of American publishing so deep that literary threats to the FBI’s reputation could be seen before their public appearance”.
The bureau also considered “whether certain African Americans should be allowed government jobs and White House visits, in the cases of the most fortunate”, and “what the leading minds of black America were thinking, and would be thinking”.
But, he added, “the files also show that some FBI spy-critics couldn’t help from learning that they liked reading the stuff, for simple aesthetic reasons”.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
Lorraine Hansberry
What has come to light about J.Edgar Hoover – that he was not only a closeted homosexual but also a passing (for white) person of color – makes the damage he has done to so many lives in America all the more thought-worthy. Is this the havoc that sexual repression and racism can cause: in this case, tremendous suffering, fear, anguish, all from one stunted and twisted individual? Another realization is that the surveillance of the work of writers and artists of conscience has not ended, but goes on in various locales and situations to this day. That mainstream media is responsible for killing the art, and distorting and disparaging work that is critical of American “politics” or “politricks” as anther Gregory or Malcolm X might describe it. This is why books that might otherwise be bestsellers – if they fail to toe the prescribed line in specific areas – are attacked, ridiculed, and consigned to the bottom of the review list, if noted at all. This is why one’s political views, if they are deemed “incorrect” by assigned gatekeepers, can mean oblivion, or the threat of it. As an irate reader wrote of me, regarding my work in defense of Palestinians: We will see to it that your books become landfill. Which wasn’t quite as sobering as reading that another “journalist” came down on the side of my actual murder. In what do I place hope for my country’s moral salvation? Only in the determination of the people to recognize, identify and act on whatever attempts to distort or destroy intelligence that could be of help to our social and spiritual, and now physical, survival.-AW
CLAUDE MACKAY (Spanish Translation by Mañuel Garcia Verdecia)
U.S. NEWS
Nuevos documentos muestran que el FBI espió a conocidos escritores negros durante décadas.
Alison Flood, The Guardian
9 de febrero de 2015, 12:58 Hora del Este.
Documentos del FBI recientemente desclasificados revelan el modo en que la agencia federal norteamericana dirigida por J Edgar Hoover siguió las actividades de docenas de destacados escritores afro-americanos durante décadas, dedicando miles de páginas a pormenorizar sus actos y criticar su obra.
El académico William Maxwell fue el primero en dar con la dimensión de la vigilancia cuando presentó una solicitud de libre acceso a la información respecto al archivo de Claude McKay en el FBI. El escritor de origen jamaicano fue una figura fundamental del Renacimiento de Harlem, autor del soneto “If We Must Die” (Si debemos morir), que se supone recitara Winston Churchill, y Maxwell estaba preparando una edición de su poesía completa. Cuando el expediente llegó del FBI, se extendía a 193 páginas y, dijo Maxwell, reveló que “el Buró había leído atentamente y perseguido agresivamente a McKay”, al que describía como un “notable revolucionario negro”, “por toda el área del Atlántico y hasta Moscú”.
Maxwell, profesor adjunto de estudios ingleses y afro-americanos en la Universidad de Washington en San Louis, decidió investigar más profundamente, sabiendo que otros investigadores habían hallado expedientes de muy conocidos autores negros tales como Langston Hughes y James Baldwin. Él presentó 106 solicitudes de libre acceso a la información al FBI acerca de lo que describe como “significativos modernistas de origen afro”. De esos escritores 51 tenían archivos que oscilaban entre las 3 hasta las 1 884 páginas cada uno.
“Sospechaba que habría más que unos pocos” dijo Maxwell. “Sabía que Hoover estaba especialmente impresionado y preocupado por las activas encrucijadas de la protesta negra, la política de izquierda y el potencial literario. Pero quedé sorprendido al conocer que el FBI había leído, controlado y expedientado a casi la mitad de los autores afro-americanos de relevancia nacional, siguiéndolos desde 1919 (el primer año de Hoover en el Buró y el primer año del Renacimiento de Harlem) hasta 1972 (el año de la muerte de Hoover y de la cumbre del movimiento de arte negro). En esto, me percaté, el FBI había superado a cualquier otra institución de estudios literarios en los EE.UU., únicamente interesadas en la literatura negra.”
El libro de Maxwell sobre su descubrimiento, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Los ojos del FBI: de cómo los lectores fantasmas de J Edgar Hoover persiguieron la literatura afro-americana), debe salir el 18 de febrero por Princeton University Press. El mismo argumenta que la atención del FBI estaba incitada por la “fascinación personal de Hoover hacia la cultura negra”, que “el FBI es quizás el crítico olvidado más dedicado e influyente de la literatura afro-americana” y que “la literatura afro-americana se caracteriza por una profunda conciencia de la lectura fantasma del FBI”. La editorial Princeton declaró que mientras es bien conocida la hostilidad de Hoover hacia Martin Luther King y el movimiento por lo derechos civiles, el libro de Maxwell pronto a salir resulta la primera revelación de “el grado en que el FBI controló e influenció la literatura afro-americana” entre 1919 y 1972.
El libro toma su título del poema de Richard Wright “The FB Eye Blues” (El blues de los ojos del FBI) en el que el novelista de Hijo nativo escribe que “en cada lugar que miro, Señor/ encuentro los ojos del FBI/ estoy harto de los espías del gobierno”, la obra también postula que, en algunos autores, la sospecha de esta vigilancia estimuló respuestas creativas.
Copias digitales de 49 de los archivos del FBI se han puesto a disposición del público en la red. “Los archivos completos de todo el conjunto de autores comprende unas 13,892 páginas o el equivalente aproximado de 46 tesis de doctorado de unas 300 páginas”, escribe Maxwell en su libro. “Los lectores fantasmas del FBI rivalizaron realmente con la productividad de sus homólogos académicos”.
El académico le expresó a The Guardian que cree que el monitoreo del FBI parte del hecho de que “desde el inicio de su puesto en el FBI… Hoover estuvo preocupado por lo que veía como una alianza emergente entre la literatura y el radicalismo negros”.
“Luego está el hecho de que muchos escritores afro-americanos posteriores se aliaron, en un momento u otro, con las políticas socialistas o comunistas en los EE.UU.”, añadió él, con Wright y WEB Du Bois que se hicieron miembros del Partido Comunista, Hughes un “destacado simpatizante del partido” y McKay “celebrado por Trotsky y publicado en ruso como un significativo teórico marxista”.
Los archivos muestran el modo en que los trámites de viaje de los escritores negros se examinaron muy de cerca por el FBI, con un registro de pasaportes de una larga lista de autores “rastreada en busca de indicios de conducta criminal e ‘información infamante’,” escribe Maxwell. Algunos escritores fueron amenazados de “detención”, instrucciones de aconsejar y dar parte el Buró si algún sospechoso intentaba atravesar un punto designado de entrada” a los EE.UU.
Cuando McKay fue a la Unión Soviética, un “aviso de detención” indicaba que el poeta debía retenerse para “atención apropiada” si intentaba volver a entrar en los EE.UU. En Baltimore, escribe Maxwell, agentes del FBI “hicieron ostentación de su seriedad en un comunicado enviado a Hoover, alardeando de un bien informado ‘Departamento de Policía Local’ a la caza de un ’Claude McKay (de color)’(23 de marzo de 1923)”.
También revelan cómo, con la ayuda de informantes, la agencia revisó obras como A Raisin in the Sun (Una pasa al sol) de Lorraine Hansberry y El hombre invisible de Ralph Ellison antes de su publicación.
“¿Qué supo el FBI con estos dossiers? Varias cosas”, dijo Maxwell. Adónde viajaban los escritores afro-americanos, especialmente durante sus aventuras de expatriados en Europa, África y América Latina. Lo que estaban publicando, incluso mientras estaba en la imprenta”. Por los años de 1950, dijo, el FBI aspiraba a tener “un conocimiento previo de las publicaciones estadounidenses tan profundo que las amenazas literarias a la reputación del FBI pudieran verse antes de su aparición pública”
El Buró también consideró “si a algunos afro-americanos debía permitírseles puestos gubernamentales y visitas a la Casa Blanca, en los casos de los más afortunados” y “lo que las mentes principales de la América negra estaban pensando y pensarían”.
Sin embargo, añadió, “los expedientes también muestran que algunos críticos espías del FBI no pudieron evitar reconocer que les gustaba leer el material, por razones estéticas”.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
Lo que ha salido a la luz sobre Edgar J Hoover (que era un a homosexual encubierto pero también una persona de color haciéndose pasar por blanco) hace que el daño que ha ocasionado a tantas vidas en los Estados Unidos resulte más digno de reflexión. ¿Es este el estrago que la represión sexual y el racismo pueden causar, en este caso, sufrimiento, miedo, angustia espantosos, todo proveniente de un individuo atrofiado y retorcido? Otra conclusión es que la vigilancia del trabajo de los escritores y artistas de conciencia no ha terminado, sino que continúa en otros escenarios y situaciones hasta el día de hoy. Que los medios dominantes son responsables por matar el arte y distorsionar y menospreciar la obra que es crítica de la política estadounidense o los “politrucos” como Dick Gregory o Malcolm X la describieran. Por ello libros que, por lo demás, podrían ser éxitos de venta (si incumplen con acatar la línea prescrita en áreas específicas) se ven atacados, ridiculizados y relegados a lo último de las listas de reseñas si es que acaso se hacen notar. Es por esto que las visiones políticas, de ser consideradas “incorrectas” por los porteros designados, pueden significar el olvido o la amenaza del mismo. Tal y como un lector airado escribió de mí, respecto a mi labor en defensa de los palestinos: “Nos ocuparemos de que sus libros vayan al basurero”. Lo cual no fue tan aleccionador como el leer que otro “periodista” trató el aspecto de mi asesinato real. ¿Dónde pongo la esperanza de la salvación moral de mi país? Solo en la determinación de la gente de reconocer, identificar y actuar sobre cualquier intento de distorsionar o destruir la inteligencia que pueda servir de cualquier ayuda a nuestra supervivencia social, espiritual y, ahora, física. A.W.
