Armies of Negroes

“I have seen [slavery] hanging over [this country] like a black cloud for half a Century,” John Adams wrote another former chief executive, Thomas Jefferson, on February 3, 1821, when commenting on the Missouri crisis. “If I were as drunk with enthusiasm as Swedenborg or Westley, I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in Armour. I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forceing no measure against your judgements. What we are to see, God knows, and I leave it to him, and his agents in posterity.” ¹

Some twenty-six presidents and 120 years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed pretty much the same sentiments. Jim Crow formed Roosevelt’s dark cloud; and though certainly less drunk with enthusiasm than his wife, this uncomprehending president’s nightmares may well have featured visions of A. Philip Randolph and armies of African Americans marching through the streets of Washington to demand a fair chance at defense jobs in the nation’s suddenly booming factories. Troubled if not terrified by the prospect of the white South bolting the New Deal coalition if he pushed even gently in the direction of racial justice, Roosevelt generally left civil rights in the hands of that region’s gentlemen and God’s agents in posterity. Only FDR’s God turned out to be J. Edgar Hoover, ably assisted by special agents assigned to gather Negro Question data for the posterity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s domestic intelligence files. If Eleanor Roosevelt served as her husband’s conscience on matters of race, in practice the president relied on the FBI director and the pop eugenics that made up the bulk of the material collected and submitted to the White House.

Alongside that imagery connecting the second president to the thirty-second lies a more surprising tie between the third president and the first FBI director (from 1908 to 1935 the nation’s first national police force was simply called the Bureau of Investigation, so technically Hoover was first). In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson wrote of the peculiar institution’s crimes and the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained,” predicting that slavery’s bitter legacy would render the race permanent subversives. Hoover certainly agreed with Jefferson here. Especially in wartime. Beginning with the First World War and rising up again during World War II and then Vietnam, the FBI ranked blacks alongside Communists and criminals as generic subjects of government interest.

This was true not only for black leadership but the race as a whole. The notion that second-class citizens had second-class loyalties was as common among responsible elected officials in the White House and Congress as it was among Hoover’s crew. Vietnam-era harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., and mind-boggling COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) operations aimed at neutralizing Black Panthers have received the most attention in the public and scholarly press since an amended Freedom of Information Act first allowed access to bureau files two decades ago. Yet the parallel story of community surveillance is no less compelling or numbing.

It is comforting but profoundly misleading to dismiss FBI abuses by reference to the phobias and all-American intolerance of a single man. During the Roosevelt era and especially the World War II years there is exactly as much evidence (none) that Hoover and his bureaucracy functioned as a rogue elephant on civil rights as there is that the director was a closet transvestite who favored pumps and feather boa. FBI agents spied on black people from Harlem to El Paso because even the most wholesome New Dealer expected and encouraged them to do so. Mrs. Roosevelt herself did not...