Organizing dissenting voices, linking up with other non-violent civil disobedience groups, feeding and educating young Black children in poverty-stricken communities - and yes, accepting American citizenship by acknowledging the Second Amendment to keep and bare arms - all of this brought the wrath of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program against the activities of the Black Panthers.

The FBI’s covert action program against American citizens targeted groups and individuals with the intent to “neutralize” them and their activities.  Begun in 1956, the covert programs’ goal was to protect security and to protect American citizens from domestic and foreign threats. According to the Final Report on the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate — April 23, 1976), the targets included the Communist Party, USA, the Socialist Workers Party, and Black Nationalist-Hate Groups (67-71).  The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a non-violent organization was included under the label “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups". The Black Panther Party, listed under the former label, received the most attention from the FBI’s covert operations. 

Covert action is a term for the FBI’s programs “against American citizens". In other words, these subversive activities impinged on the civil liberties of American citizens. “The programs were to prevent violence by deterring membership in the target groups, even if neither the particular member not the group was violent at the time,” the report said.  Furthermore, the techniques used in these surveillance activities “would be intolerable in a democratic society,” according to the Report, “even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activities.”  COINTELPRO worked from an “unexpressed” premise: the law enforcement agency has “the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”

Few Black nationalists and other similar groups have “advocated violence against white-owned property, the subversion of authority, or the seizure of state power,” according to Manning Marable (quoted in Black Panthers Reconsidered). Advocacy of armed self-defense has a precedence in the Black liberation struggle, as Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jefferies point out in Black Panthers Reconsidered.  The Black Panthers’ advocacy for armed self defense follows in the footsteps of Martin Delany, Maria W. Stewart, David Walker, and others.  Yet, Black Panther members were spied on, lied on, and gunned down as a matter of U.S. security.  

It should come as no surprise that covert actions have resumed and expanded to include any activity of dissent.  Anyone who opposes unjust conditions by attending meetings or rallies or anyone opposed to U.S. aggression in Iraq and other “new colonial” countries could be subject to the intimidation of the NSA’s secret eavesdropping programs.  The Bush administration is about the business of completing the job begun in1956 to squash all forms of dissent. The dissemination of fear is everywhere.  Fear terrorists who are everywhere and anyone.  Doubt your ability to effect change by challenging the government.  Stay home; worry about yourself and your own family.  Don’t worry about KBR’s contract to build more prisons for the criminal and terrorist in a nation with the largest prison population in the world.  A cell will not be waiting for you! Homelessness will not be your fate if your job is outsourced or you never locate a job.  Your children are being tested to state of numbness, but they will attend college — you believe. Spying on “bad” people is necessary to maintain — what?  Freedom? Democracy? 

New York Times’ reporter, Jim Dwyer’s report entitled, “City Police Spied Broadly before G.O.P. Convention" is more evidence of systematic, indeed, structural activities by the U.S. government to prohibit any dissent on the part of its citizens.  The civil liberties of all citizens are at stake.  Grassroots activity and protest is under attack. 

According to Dwyer’s March 26, 2007 article, the New York City police department’s R.N.C. Intelligence Squad conducted uncover activities for a year before the Republican National Convention, held in that city in 2004.  Agents filed daily reports on “street theatre companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies.”  Federal judges gave the go ahead to the NYPD in 2003 to “investigate political organizations for criminal activities.”

One group Dwyer mentions is described as a “satirical performance troupe”—Billionaires for Bush.  What criminal activities do they engage in, you ask?  Citing the police reports, this group, dressed in “tuxedos and flapper gowns,” mocks “the current president and political policies”!  Most important, this group, according to the police reports, raises “funds for expansion and support of anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.” Terrible! Another group planning an event for the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday in 2004 received a R.N.C. report that referred to their “protest against ‘the R.N.C., the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.”

If presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is cognizant of Black American history, he should hear in these reports U.S. regression rather than progression toward a truly democratic society that would support dissent by American citizens. If dissent now includes not only protest but grassroots activities to challenge the divesting of domestic programs for health care, education, employment and job training, then Obama, who began his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, should be the loudest voice in opposition to the NSA domestic spy programs.  

He should speak to a man who, at 71, is still active as a grassroots organizer and elder of the protest movement.  Co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale, still advocates for self-defense — self-defense through grassroots organizing of disadvantaged youths.  Last month, I attended Seale’s lecture in Madison, Wisconsin at Edgewood College where he addressed mostly young Black high school and college students.  He reminded these young people that he and other first Black Panthers were “college students” and “avid readers". He had “two years of law school before forming the Party,” Seale told the audience.  “We were about change, the continuous democratic process” of “raising consciousness, community empowerment, and defending ourselves.”

I looked at the young Black people in the audience and remembered how I learned grassroots activism from trailblazers.  It was my “education", my inheritance — as resistance to injustice is a right of any human being who is subjected to oppressive tactics.  I was one of the youth recruited by Operation Breadbasket when I was a teenager in 1969.  Most of us young people were familiar with the Black Panther community programs and their newspaper.  I hoped those young people in the audience understood that the conditions of oppression was not acceptable, no matter the high-tech forces employed to shove them further down, hovering in fear. 

In a follow up phone interview, Seale admitted that those in the struggle were “up against a wall". Legislation and policies “to deal with domestic programs,” he said, are absent during this current administration. Grassroots programs, however, benefit the young, forgotten by the Bush administration and politicians alike.  His work with college students at Temple University and students in Denver, Colorado produced sustainable college courses that will connect students to community issues and community activism. 

And there is more! Seale’s youth programs for high school students in inner cities empower young people challenged by despair and hopelessness.  One Philadelphia initiative involves some 50 students in a jobs program who learn skills in renovating housing for the poor. Groups of six to seven young people learn the skills to build porch decks, create dry wall, and paint walls.  A mentoring program brings together these high school students with other programs focusing on engineering and environmental issues. 

In Oakland, California, the Eastside Arts Alliance, after three years of empowering young people, celebrated the opening of a new building to accommodate 100 young people who will create “their own documentaries” under the tutelage of professional filmmakers.  Along with teaching these youth to document the Black experience in inner cities, the Eastside Arts Alliance will also provide them and other youth with a place to “dance, rap, and meet".  Ultimately, the work of this center is to “evolve entrepreneurship for the young people,” Seale said.  But it will also “raise funds for environmental youth programs.” As a result, one program at the Eastside Arts Alliance will wed environmental issues with the creative (artistic) insights of these young people, some of whom will be fortunate to acquire skills in manufacturing, producing, and installing solar panels.  The Eastside Arts Alliance project is a “conscious raising,” Seale explained, to “unify the people through culture and the arts.”  These young people learn that they are culturally linked to others and share with others, human, creative potential for change. 

These programs are examples, said Seale, of "tangible, practical, and progressive programs that make human sense.” Ultimately, Seale wants these programs to stand “as shining examples of what the politicians are not doing.”

In Ottawa, Canada last month, the Canadian government refused entry to Bobby Seale.  He was to deliver the keynote address to students at the University of Ottawa, according to Can West News Service writer, Maria Kubacki, on “racism and oppression.” Politicians and law enforcement agencies must recognize in Seale’s youth programs a threat to the ordering of subjugation. But Seale is still going forward. He needs more of us standing up and resisting alongside him — high-tech spying or not. 

Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.