revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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4 . Prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from
gaining respectability, by discrediting them to three separate
segments of the community .
5 . A final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant
Black Nationalist organizations, especially among youth . 6
The FBI instructed 41 field divisions to implement COINTELPRO against
Black organizations in major cities in the United States . From the program's
inception to 1971, over 2,300 known proposals for disruptive activities
were approved by the FBI . 7
In the Fall of 1967, the FBI intensified its Black Nationalist Groups
TOPLEV Informant Program .
Local
police were encouraged by the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders .to establish intelligence programs both for their use and
to feed into a Federal intelligence gathering process .
The FBI Ghetto Informant Program, begun in 1967, had some 7,402 informants
by Spetember, 1972 . The ghetto informant originally conceived
was to act as a 'listening post', an individual who lives or works in a
ghetto area and has access to information regarding the racial situation
and racial activities in his area which he furnishes to the Bureau on a
confidential basis . The role of the ghetto informant was expanded to attend
public meetings held by so-called extremists, to
identify so-called
extremists passing through or locating them in the ghetto area and
to identify
who were the distributors of extremist literature .
The FBI targeted "key figures" and "top functionaires" for special
attention but the
scope of its security intelligence investigations was
much wider .
6FBI Letter to Field Offices, August 25, 1967 .
7Lrish L . Washington, "The FBI Plot Against Black Leaders," Essence
Magazine 9 :6 (October 1978), p . 70 .