Judas and the Black Messiah’s Stark Binaries
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/judas-black-messiah-review
In the summer of 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued the first in a series of memos outlining how the bureau would deal with what it deemed “black nationalist hate groups.” The memos, sent to the FBI offices participating in Cointelpro, the bureau’s covert (and illegal) counterintelligence program, are as infuriating and terrifying as they are outlandish. They claimed that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were “violence-prone.” They declared that the FBI must prevent “a true black revolution” and likened a potential coalition of domestic Black political groups to Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. They even posited that Martin Luther King Jr. and Elijah Muhammad were peers, as if there were no substantial differences in their outlooks and tactics. The memos were more a racist projection than a work of intelligence.
