The FBI’s Secret Civil Rights Files, Part 1

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here [2], Part 3 here [3])

Earlier this month President Trump instructed the National Archives to release hundreds of previously-sealed documents which pertained to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Included among these documents were two FBI files which, curiously enough, have little to do with the Kennedy assassination but could have great bearing on the current struggles of the Dissident Right. In 1994, the National Archives JFK Task Force marked both of these documents for “total denial” of their release (the other two options were “release in full” and “release in part”). Why these documents were kept secret and why they now have become available remains a mystery. Much less mysterious, however, is how the Dissident Right can use these documents to further their cause.

The first of these files, “Racial Violence Potential in the United States This Summer [4],” appears attached to a cover letter sent from J. Edgar Hoover to CIA director Richard Helms on May 26, 1967. In it, Hoover expresses concern that in the upcoming summer, cities with large Negro populations would erupt in violence. He also mentions Civil Rights Movement icons Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael as “extremists” who were fanning “the flames of racial discord” and “embracing the communist tactic of linking the civil rights movement with the anti-Vietnam-War protest movement.”

The entire document clearly, if inadvertently, supports the notion that “Diversity + Proximity = War [5]” so often promoted by Chateau Heartiste and other Dissident Right sites.

Sporadic youth-led riots throughout the country must be expected this summer and every summer for the next decade, Bruce Coles, Program Director for the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Association, told House Education Subcommittee. The continuing tumult, according to Coles, can be traced to a conflict between the promises of an affluent society and society’s limited ability to spread that affluence around. Unable to get jobs and rise out of the slums, the youngsters — mostly teen-age Negro boys — simply “blame whitey and raise hell,” he said.

The 70-page document assesses the cities most likely to erupt in violence, and was indeed prescient given that 159 race riots did take place during the “Long Hot Summer of 1967 [6].” The riots became deadly in larger cities such as Detroit (16 killed), Newark, N.J. (26 killed), and Milwaukee (4 killed) as well as smaller ones such as Cairo, Illinois which also left 4 dead. All told, the race riots of 1967 killed over 76 people, injured over 21,000, and led to over 11,000 arrests. And this was sandwiched between three previous summers of racial strife and a couple more which would follow the same revolting program.

Of course, the source of all this unrest was black-white race relations, or, rather, black-on-white resentment, which never seems to need solid reasons to manifest itself. In fact, any reason will do. Early in the report, the authors point to “hot weather” and “crowded, depressed conditions in ghettos” as potential reasons. They also attribute less-than-tangible reasons such as “restiveness” and “alienation” and “the combustible temper of the times,” as if these things can be quantified. They also discuss the agitation and propaganda of the communists and similar extremist rabble-rousers always looking for an opportunity to promote their dubious agendas. King, Charmichael, Floyd McKissik, Cassius Clay, and Dick Gregory get called out by name. More common reasons such as poverty, unemployment, and underemployment predictably claim some space in the report as well.

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You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s novel Charity’s Blade here. [8]

On page two, one Ernest Chambers, a black militant, is quoted ascribing yet another reason for the racial tensions, the most ridiculous one yet. “Violence is the only way left to the black man to achieve his manhood in America.” According to Chambers, it’s up to whites to prevent racial tensions, presumably by making it easier for black men to achieve their manhood, whatever that means. Another reason amounts to crass extortion as a District of Columbia Commissioner claimed that racial tensions would likely occur in the summer “unless funds for recreational programs for school children are approved.”  We all know what this means. Yeah, it’s a nice little city you have here. It would be an awful shame if something were to happen to it. Catch my drift, honky?

Makes you wonder how people kept from rioting in the days prior to publicly-funded recreational programs for school children.

In chess, they say that if you keep changing your strategy, that’s a good indication that you really don’t have one. Transposing that dictum to the issue at hand, if you keep changing your reasons for rioting, then that probably means you don’t have any reasons at all. All the reasons listed could be ascribed to whites or any other race of people throughout history and still no rioting at the obscene rates we saw in the Long Hot Summer of ’67 would manifest. These reasons, in other words, are weak reasons, and are used both in this report and in the Kerner Report [9] which followed as transparent excuses for bad behavior.

Reminds me of the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story:

The trouble is he’s lazy!
The trouble is he drinks!
The trouble is he’s crazy!
The trouble is he stinks!
The trouble is he’s growing!
The trouble is he’s grown!
Krupke, we got troubles of our own.

So why do blacks riot so much? Maybe it’s because as a group, they’re not terribly bright, they’re violent, and they lack sufficient impulse control. Or maybe they just really like rioting? But in either case, the desire is there, which makes it easy for them to latch onto the flimsiest excuse in order to start busting heads. There is nothing in this report that says this conclusion isn’t true. And an awful lot that says it is.

Page four gets down to the heart of the problem. “Events have unmistakably shown that any municipality in the country with a Negro population is susceptible to a racial outbreak.” Isn’t this an eloquent argument in favor of ethno-nationalism and White Nationalism in particular? If you wish to prevent racial violence, wouldn’t it make sense to keep the races apart? Wouldn’t it make sense to wish to live wherever there is no Negro population, as the report calls it? It’s also interesting how the report’s authors describe racial violence as if it were a disease. If the Negro population is the one constant during every “outbreak” of this disease, perhaps we should quarantine the Negroes? That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?

There is one paragraph which I think needs to reproduced in its entirety because it so clearly reveals how the pathologies behind the racial unrest of the 1960s have not changed one bit:

But there is one aspect of racial violence that can be predicted with some precision: the pattern it will follow. In virtually every instance where major riots have broken out in Negro communities in recent years, the pattern and sequence of events have been identical: the escalation of an initial minor episode involving police action; a rapidly growing crowd and mounting excitement and hysteria fomented by troublemakers, extremists, and subversives; overt hostility towards the police, accompanied by wild charges of “police brutality”; the explosion of blind, irrational mob fury and action; street fighting between Negroes and police; hurling of rocks, bricks, bottles, fire bombs, and other objects; looting, vandalism, and arson; and, finally, summoning of police reserves and frequently the National Guard to restore law and order.

After fifty years of racial integration, affirmative action, Left-wing cultural control, and social engineering it must be both frustrating and gratifying for us on the Right to be given proof that we had been correct all along. Nothing has changed. Integration didn’t work then, just like it doesn’t work now. Like a recently-discovered time capsule, “Racial Violence Potential in the United States This Summer,” offers a clear glimpse into the past and what see reflected back to us is our present and, God help us, our future.

On September 20, 2016, a black man named Keith Lamont Scott [10] was shot and killed in Charlotte, North Carolina by a city police officer. This sparked two nights of rioting in which one person was killed and numerous others, including police officers, were injured. If you follow the course of events described in the linked article and compare it to the above paragraph from the 1967 report, you find them eerily similar. Blacks riot because they want to riot. Never mind that state investigators later found that the officer had acted lawfully and that Scott had been armed at the time of the shooting. Never mind that the officer who shot Scott, one Brentley Vinson, is also black. Blacks riot because they want to riot, and it doesn’t take much to set them off.

Other than Vinson’s race (which would presumably give the blacks of Charlotte reason not to riot), how is the Charlotte riot dissimilar in any meaningful way from the race riots of 1967? Or 1966? Or 1968? Answer: it’s not, and despite fifty years of painful effort, sacrifice, and expense, we have gotten exactly nowhere. This is an embarrassing fact we need to shove down the throats of any leftist, liberal, and cuck we encounter who try to find excuses for behavior which is both logically and morally inexcusable. We can also use this document to show how racial violence is not only an inevitable result of sharing a society with large black populations; it’s also something we shouldn’t have to settle for. Things don’t have to be this way.

By releasing this document to the public, the President of the United States has given us an opportunity, and we should take it.

In Part 2, we will discuss the second Civil Rights Era file Donald Trump released this month: “Martin Luther King, Jr., an Analysis.” Stay tuned.