FBI COINTELPRO Launches Black Nationalist Hate Groups Program Targeting Civil Rights Leaders

On August 25, 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized the expansion of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to create a new initiative targeting “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups.” This program represented a systematic effort by the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” civil rights organizations and their leaders through surveillance, infiltration, psychological warfare, and illegal disruption tactics. The FBI had been monitoring civil rights leaders since the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, but the 1967 expansion marked an intensification of efforts to destroy the movement from within, using the full power of federal law enforcement against American citizens exercising constitutional rights.

The program’s targets included Martin Luther King Jr., whom the FBI had been wiretapping since 1963 under authorization from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Despite finding no evidence of communist infiltration—the ostensible justification for surveillance—the FBI actually ramped up its harassment of King. In November 1964, FBI Deputy Director William C. Sullivan orchestrated an anonymous package sent to King containing audio recordings allegedly of his sexual encounters and a letter clearly intended to blackmail him into committing suicide before he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The letter, discovered during the 1975 Church Committee investigations, stated: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is… You are done. There is but one way out for you.” This wasn’t law enforcement—it was a federal agency attempting to drive a nonviolent civil rights leader to suicide.

In February 1968, one of COINTELPRO’s stated goals was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement,” explicitly naming Dr. King as a candidate for neutralization. The FBI particularly targeted the Black Panther Party, which Hoover called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” in 1968, just two years after its founding. The FBI infiltrated the Party with informants, subjected members to repeated harassment, sent anonymous letters encouraging violence between street gangs and the Panthers that resulted in multiple killings and beatings, and worked with local police to conduct raids that killed Panthers members. The program continued until 1971, when the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and released documents exposing COINTELPRO to the public. The subsequent Church Committee investigation in 1975 revealed the full scope of FBI abuses: systematic surveillance without warrants, infiltration of legal organizations, disruption of constitutionally protected activities, and illegal tactics designed to destroy movements advocating for civil rights. COINTELPRO demonstrated that the institutional corruption opposing civil rights extended to the highest levels of federal law enforcement, with the FBI using counterintelligence tactics developed for foreign adversaries against American citizens, revealing how security agencies could be weaponized to suppress democratic movements and protect existing power structures through systematic violations of constitutional rights.