Month January 2022

(Washington D.C., January 17, 2022) On this King Day holiday, over 30 organizations and individuals announce the formation of a wide coalition to offer critical support for HR-2998, the COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act. The bill, introduced in the House by Representative Bobby Rush (D-Ill, 1st), in May 2021, has been co-signed by twenty-four members of Congress. The bill was assigned to the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and concurrently to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Coalition partners will initially prioritize urging Congressional Representatives to join the list of cosponsors.

COINTELPRO refers to a directive of J. Edgar Hoover, who was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 to1972. The program remained an active operation from 1957 to 1971. As a 1967 memo put it, the program was intended “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations and their groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.

In practice, neither hate and violence nor even criminal activity were necessary to attract the attention of Hoover’s FBI. This operation built on his work as an FBI agent dating back to the Palmer Raids during World War I and the persecution of the United Negro Improvement Association, including the deportation of its leader, Marcus Garvey, whom Hoover would later acknowledge had broken no federal laws. Hoover had spent his early days at the Bureau building an index of community organizers who opposed US foreign and domestic policies.

Two time Congressional candidate of the Georgia Green Party announces the launch of a new Coalition of Independent Progressives. In this video he lays out a strategy for building a slate of candidates to flip the federal and state governments across the nation.