According to a shocking new report by The Nation, former Black Panther Party members have insisted that they are still being monitored by the FBI even though COINTELPRO was terminated back in 1971. COINTELPRO, which stands for Counterintelligence Program, was a covert operation started by the FBI in 1956.
Though COINTELPRO was devised to “neutralize” individuals and organizations considered a threat to national security, the program widened in the 1960s to zero in on civil rights organizations and Black liberation groups like the Black Panthers.
COINTELPRO dismantled social justice movements through illegal and unethical strategies like surveillance, infiltration and ultimately harassment. One member in particular, Cleo Silvers, stated that the FBI harassment she previously endured decades ago still occurs.
Silvers participated in the Lincoln Hospital Takeover, which took place in the South Bronx in 1970. Activists, including Black Panthers like Assata Shakur, occupied the hospital to demand better care for patients. Following the takeover, Silvers helped coordinate a door-to-door program with the civil rights organization Young Lords to test folks for lead and tuberculosis.
This caused Silvers and her peers to become targets of the FBI. According to attorney Bob Boyle, Silvers’ name appears numerous times in 110,000 pages of declassified FBI files on the Black Panthers.
Silvers told The Nation that FBI agents have reached out to her bosses and gotten her fired from several jobs, sometimes using federal grants that nonprofits needed to function as leverage.
One of the people Silvers named as her former supervisor vehemently denied to the outlet that this had ever happened. COINTELPRO’s most infamous operation was the 1969 assassination of Fred Hampton, a Chicago Black Panther leader, during a police raid that involved the FBI.
Frederika Newton, his widow, told The Nation that she still operates under the assumption that she’s being surveilled. Newton currently resides in Oakland, California, where she works as president of the Dr. Huey P Newton Foundation. Its mission is to preserve her late husband’s legacy and correct disinformation about the Panthers.
Though these claims have yet to be verified, The Nation obtained documentation last year that former Panthers member Malik Rahim was, in fact, being targeted.
Rahim founded Common Ground after Hurricane Katrina, a nonprofit organization that helped survivors. The publication accessed documents showing that in 2006, the New Orleans Joint Terrorism Task Force — led by the FBI — opened a “threat assessment” against Rahim and Common Ground.
It believed the organization employed “anti-government propaganda” and theorized about its possible terrorist activities. Brandon Darby, who co-founded Common Ground with Rahim, was later revealed to be an FBI informant.
The fact that Rahim, Newton and Silvers are still haunted by “paranoia” was one of the main goals of the FBI. The effects of COINTELPRO persist, regardless of the program’s targets are actually being surveilled or not.