Today In Labor History June 29, 1941: Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998), founder of the U.S. civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was a key figure in the Black Power movement, becoming honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party and, later, as the leader of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The FBI attempted to destroy him through COINTELLPRO, and succeeded in convincing Huey Newton that he was a CIA agent. This, and the Panthers’ embracing of white activists into their movement, led him to distance himself from the Panthers. In 1968, he married the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba and moved to Africa, changing his name to Kwame Ture and campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist pan-Africanism.

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Today in Labor History March 8, 1971: The Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI stole 1,000 documents from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They later released the documents to newspapers, revealing the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, harassing and attacking political dissidents in the U.S. According to Noam Chomsky, 40% of the documents were dedicated to political surveillance. James Ellroy wrote about the burglary in his 2009 novel, “Blood’s a Rover.”

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #fbi #cointellpro #NoamChomsky #JamesEllroy #novel @bookstadon

Today in labor History January 17, 1969: Black Panther Party members Bunchy Carter and John Huggins died in a shootout with the rival black nationalist Organization Us, during a meeting at UCLA. The rivalry and antagonism between the two groups was deliberately stoked by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, or counterintelligence program. The FBI even sent counterfeit death threats to members of both organizations, making it look like they originated with the other group.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #BlackPanthers #fbi #cointellpro #assassination