Preliminary Programme

Between September 1964 and April 1971 the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three pronged attack. It describes how the FBI covertly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations, before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, covertly provided by the FBI to liberal southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity, to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank and file Klan members. FBI agents and their informants covertly circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.
In so doing, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE operations prompted white southerners, including some Klansmen, to re-define their understanding of concepts such as "subversion" and "extremism." When Americans employed such concepts during this period, they were also, implicitly, proposing relationships between subversives, and extremists, to a more general political consensus. Yet they also contested the exact meaning of this terminology. They helped to shape notions of political consensus, by defining limits of inclusion and obscuring division within those limits. Between 1964 and 1971, then, a great variety of social groups attempted to establish certain meanings and to de-legitimize alternative ones, in order to formulate consensus and maintain governance. Political constituencies, in turn, interpreted and redefined countersubversive and counter-extremist rhetoric, creating the dynamic process that defined the rhetoric of ‘moderate’ political discourse during the decade. One outcome of this struggle for terminological control was that by the late-1960s, most white southerners, and even some ex-Klansmen, came to agree that the Ku Klux Klan was an "extremist" conspiracy, a conspiracy that should be suppressed in the interest of domestic tranquillity. (Show less)