F.B. Eyes (BOOK REVIEW)
F.B. Eyes
How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American
Literature
by William J. Maxwell
Princeton
University
Press
Hardcover, $29.95
384 pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 978-0-691-13020-0
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“Drawing
on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the
Bureau’s intimate policing of African American poems, plays, essays, and
novels. Starting in 1919… secret FBI ghostreaders monitored the latest
developments in African American letters…
These
ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own.
The official aim… was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, FBI surveillance
came to influence the creation and public reception of African American
literature in the heart of the 20th Century...
Illuminating
both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing
can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a
long-hidden dimension of African American literature.”
--
Excerpted from the Bookjacket
Allen Ginsberg’s epic
poem “Howl” begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro
streets at dawn…” I couldn’t help but recall that iconic line while reading F.B.
Eyes, a damning expose’ by William J. Maxwell illustrating the FBI’s long
history of monitoring, policing and infiltrating the ranks of African-American
writers.
For
decades, from the Harlem Renaissance of the Twenties clear through to the Black
Arts Movement of the Seventies, J. Edgar Hoover not only closely monitored the
movements and work of black authors but employed agents to create and promote
content as a counterintelligence measure.
These
revelations are rather disturbing to me, as a Black Literature
major-turned-aspiring novelist who failed to get either of my books published
after getting a masters degree from an Ivy League institution. It never
occurred to me way back then that the reason for all the rejections from
publishers might have had more to do with interference on the part of
government spies than the quality of the work itself.
However, the degree
of FBI interference chronicled here is nothing short of shocking, between the
abuses of power and infringements of Constitutional rights. This
meticulously-researched opus reveals the Bureau to be a diabolical outfit
dedicated to the destruction of the African-American intelligentsia by any
means necessary.
For example, we learn
that after Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater (BART) in
Harlem in 1965, Hoover
planted moles in the group to ensure the organization’s early demise. He even
had the temerity to allow a white Assistant Director, William Sullivan, pose as
black while ghostwriting everything from best-sellers to letters threatening
the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A daunting discussion
of the FBI’s chilling effect on the writing careers and private lives of members
of the black literati.
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