Spying on students : the FBI, Red Squads, and student activists in the 1960s South / Gregg L. Michel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Michel, Gregg L., author.

Series:

Making the modern South

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Southern States--Race relations.

Southern States.

United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation--History--20th century.

United States.

College students, White--Political activity--Southern States--History--20th century.

College students, White.

Domestic intelligence--Southern States--History--20th century.

Domestic intelligence.

Police patrol--Surveillance operations--History--20th century.

Police patrol.

Student movements--Southern States--History--20th century.

Student movements.

Physical Description:

xiii, 277 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2024]

Summary:

"Gregg Michel's Spying on Students focuses on the law enforcement campaign against New Left and progressive student activists in the 1960s South, particularly white student activists, whom scholars have often overlooked in studies of the era. White southern students worked alongside their Black peers in the civil rights struggle, drove opposition to the Vietnam War in many communities, and often embraced the counterculture's rejection of conventional norms. Their racial identity marked them as curiosities to some, allies to others, and worrying threats to those in power. African Americans in the South bore the brunt of police surveillance and harassment; white student activists did not suffer comparable abuse. However, Michel suggests that local, state, and national law enforcement agencies nonetheless subjected white students to wide-ranging, intrusive, and illegal surveillance, highlighting the regime's pervasiveness. By focusing on white southern students, Michel provides fresh insights into the destructive, broad-based, weaponized surveillance tactics deployed by state actors in their drive to suffocate dissent in the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including formerly secret FBI files obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and case files from lawsuits over surveillance operations, Michel demonstrates that law enforcement officials at all levels of government brought the full power and weight of their offices against white activists. They spied on their conversations, infiltrated their meetings, [sowed] discord with their families and schools, and assiduously worked to weaken their groups and derail their actions. Official efforts to surveil and repress student activism reflected authorities' fear of dissent by white students at a time when southern racial norms were under assault and the war in Vietnam was exposing the shibboleths of American exceptionalism as hollow. As white students revolted elsewhere, most notably at Berkeley and Columbia, officials sought to avoid such disruptions in the South. From their perspective, southern white students threatened domestic tranquility, just as Black Power advocates, West Coast hippies, and northern antiwar radicals did, and therefore warranted monitoring. Existing scholarship on surveillance of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s makes, at most, only glancing reference to white southern activists. While many important books have focused on the FBI and its domestic counterintelligence program 'COINTELPRO,' they concentrate on Black civil rights activists in the South and antiwar radicals elsewhere in the country. Additionally, scholars have written little about police surveillance in the South. Spying on Students is thus the only book-length treatment of law enforcement efforts to disrupt and derail progressive white activism in the South in the era. It makes several vital interventions in the scholarship on the surveillance state and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its southern focus presents a unique perspective on the war on dissent. The study demonstrates the existing racial order's fragility and the state actors' paranoia by documenting the authorities' sustained surveillance of white students there. Additionally, Michel reveals the vital role police domestic intelligence units played in disrupting leftist activism in the region. Often working in collaboration with the FBI, police drew on their local knowledge to undermine the activism on their communities' campuses. Spying on Students further complicates the narrative of the era by showing white southern students as something other than opponents of social change or as indifferent to the movements of the Sixties. The counterintelligence operations deployed against white students in the South show that young whites were politically engaged and that authorities considered them a dangerous menace"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Federal surveillance

State surveillance

Memphis

Nashville.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Michel, Gregg L. Spying on students.

ISBN:

9780807182222

0807182222

OCLC:

1420353688

Publisher Number:

90100029952