A valuable spotlight on the "dark counterpoint" to the history of
the civil rights struggles - the government's racist spy and smear
campaigns. In the 30 years since the Poor People's Campaign
(initiated by Martin Luther King Jr. before his assassination)
arrived in Washington, such an ambitious economic rights movement
has come to be unthinkable. McKnight (History/Hood Coll.), in this
economical account, tells the story of the campaign's brief rise
and fall, with special attention to the FBI's extensive
surveillance of it (as well as of all civil rights activities). But
this isn't just a specialized study of the FBI operations; it
functions handily as an account of the movement and of the
contemporaneous Washington politics of poverty, precisely because
both were so saturated by FBI activity. (For the benefit of
law-and-order senator John McClellan, the FBI even spied on the
Kerner Commission appointed by President Johnson to study the
origins of urban riots.) McKnight clearly traces the evolution of
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spying and smear campaign against black
leaders from its variation on the red-baiting theme to the creation
of a "black menace" in its own right. The book is weakest in
attempting to establish the actual contribution of FBI sabotage to
the Poor People's Campaign's failure. As McKnight himself explains,
congressional and presidential politics and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference's own decision to devote its efforts to
running a shantytown in Washington doomed the campaign. But
regardless of the surveillance's effect on the campaign's success,
McKnight reveals it to have been, without much exaggeration, of a
scope and intensity to rival the most accomplished police states.
Had the campaign not collapsed, it's hard not to imagine, after
reading this, that the FBI would have tried its best to do the job
itself. (Kirkus Reviews)
In "The Last Crusade, " Gerald McKnight examines the Poor People's
Campaign, the last large-scale demonstration of civil rights-era
America, and the systematic efforts of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
and his executive officers to subvert King's ambitious effort to
force the federal government to live up to its promises of a Great
Society. The book also looks at King's last days as he helped
Memphis sanitation workers in their labor-cum-civil rights struggle
with a recalcitrant and racist city government. Although there is
no persuasive evidence that the FBI and the Memphis police
conspired to assassinate King, McKnight marshals evidence to show
that neither agency was blameless.The conventional view of the Poor
People's Campaign is that it was a self-inflicted failure. The
blame rested squarely on the shoulders of the second-raters of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference who failed to fill the
leadership vacuum after King's assassination. But, as McKnight
shows, there was a hidden, dark counterpoint to the accepted
version--namely, the triumph of the 1960s American surveillance
state and its repressive power and flagrant violation of protected
freedoms. In fact, whatever the FBI wanted to do to disrupt the
Campaign, it did, aided and abetted by local police agencies and
elements of the federal government, including military
intelligence.
General
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