Hoover’s memo offers us a troubling glimpse of a forgotten dimension
of COINTELPRO, one that has escaped notice for decades: the FBI’s war on
black-bookstores. In addition to Hoover’s memo, I uncovered documents
detailing Bureau surveillance of black bookstores in a least half a
dozen cities across the U.S. in conducting research for my book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs.
At the height of the Black Power movement, the FBI conducted
investigations of such black booksellers as Lewis Michaux and Una Mulzac
in New York City, Paul Coates in Baltimore (the father of The Atlantic national
correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates), Dawud Hakim and Bill Crawford in
Philadelphia, Alfred and Bernice Ligon in Los Angeles, and the owners of
the Sundiata bookstore in Denver. And this list is almost certainly far
from complete, because most FBI documents pertaining to currently
living booksellers aren’t available to researchers through the federal
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The FBI’s reports on black booksellers were highly invasive but often
mundane. The FBI reports note phone calls from Coates’s number to his
former comrades in the Black Panther Party—but also to Viking Press and
the American Booksellers Association. Agents in New York reported an
undercover source’s questionable claim that the Lewis Michaux “was
responsible for about 75 percent of the antiwhite material” distributed
in Harlem, but another report conceded that he was “no longer very
active in Black Nationalist activity as he is getting old.” In
Philadelphia, agents traced a car’s license plate at a Republic of New
Africa convention to Dawud Hakim, but not long afterwards they quoted
sources stating that the RNA was “now defunct in the Philadelphia area”
and that Hakim “has not shown interest in any Black Nationalist
Activity.”
While perhaps not surprising, it is deeply disturbing that Hoover and
the FBI would carry out sustained investigations of black-owned
independent bookstore across the country as part of COINTELPRO’s larger
attacks on the Black Power movement. But Hoover’s order that agents
track these stores’ customers represented not just an attack on black
activists, but also an absolute contempt for America’s stated values of
freedom of speech and expression. Any citizen who stepped into a
black-owned bookstore, it seemed, risked being investigated by federal
law enforcement.
-- Joshua Clark Davis, "The FBI's War on Black-Owned Bookstores" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).