What Jones and Douglas didn’t know at the time was that Sams was an FBI agent. A second visit to Halifax followed weeks later, by two other Panthers, T.D. Carmichael’s arrival followed his attendance at the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, where he delivered a speech and built connections with prominent Black organizers such as Burnley “Rocky” Jones and Rosie Douglas, based in Halifax and Montreal, respectively. Higgitt was likely citing a visit to Halifax by the “honourary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party, Stokely Carmichael, in October 1968. Photo courtesy of McGill University Archives. Stokely Carmichael delivering a speech before the Congress of Black Writers in October 1968. Three quarters of the pages were withheld in full. Black Panther members have been actively engaged in attempts to gain control of civil-rights leadership in the Halifax and area Negro community.” Higgitt’s report is a part of a 2,000-page file titled “General Conditions And Subversive Activities Amongst Negros, Nova Scotia.” A heavily redacted version was released to the Canadian Press in 1994 by CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) under the Access to Information Act. In a secret report to Ottawa headquarters in December 1968, director-general of RCMP security and intelligence William Higgitt reported that “U.S. Canadian COINTELPROīy the late 1960s, the FBI and RCMP had coordinated their surveillance of members of the Black Power movement who were crossing the border from the United States into Canada. This includes the RCMP’s role in the warfare of COINTELPRO. Rather than relying on Canadian government sources for records that remain overly censored, researchers can look to records held by NARA for historical details of Canadian state security from a U.S. government implemented an automatic declassification system – meaning that any records that concern relations between the United States and a foreign government (like Canada) qualify for declassification after 25 years, with few exceptions. Researching Canadian state security south of the border, however, presents an entirely different scenario. As a result, accountability from the Canadian government for these abuses is entirely absent from policy discourse. Despite the RCMP collaborating with the FBI and undertaking similar acts of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and racial terror, Canadian historical archives that detail the RCMP’s role in COINTELPRO are heavily classified and censored. SABOTAGING VAULT 101 FULLThe legislation would allow for public use of historical COINTELPRO archives to understand the full extent of the FBI’s warfare against its own people.īut as COINTELPRO records become more accessible in the U.S., accessing equivalent records in Canada remains extremely difficult. government agencies to release all records related to the counterintelligence program. In April of 2021, member of Congress and veteran Black Panther Party member Bobby Rush proposed the COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act, a congressional bill that requires U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).īut as COINTELPRO records become more accessible in the U.S., accessing equivalent records in Canada remains extremely difficult. The file resides today, along with most other COINTELPRO volumes, as a part of the FBI historical archives at the U.S. This included targeting civil rights, Black Power, Puerto Rican independence, anti-war, and student organizations – sabotaging, infiltrating, arresting, and even assassinating their members. COINTELPRO aimed to – in its own words – “disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” leftist and progressive movements in the United States from 1956 to 1971. The Hoover memo, filed under the heading “Black Nationalist Movement – Canada,” is among thousands of internal documents of the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). These included Caribbean nationals residing in Montreal and Toronto, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), Black Panther Party supporters, and Black nationalists. Edgar Hoover, alerting the Bureau to the “black power situation in Canada.” The memo is just one example of how the FBI and RCMP were attempting to build connections between the international Black Power movement and groups they labelled as “of extreme concern” in Canada during the late 1960s and 1970s. These are the closing lines of a secret memo, written in November 1970 by FBI director J. Information developed in the racial field which is of interest to Canadian authorities must be furnished to the Bureau promptly.” “Remain constantly alert for opportunities to send our informants to Canada and give consideration to such action in all instances where warranted.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |