Book Review: F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J. Maxwell
Publication Date: Jan 04, 2015
List Price: $29.95
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780691130200
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Parent Company: Princeton University
Read a Description of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
Book Reviewed 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.
Gil Noble’s Documentary on the intentional destruction of Black America by the FBI
Sullivan wrote under numerous aliases and for real people like Dr. Samuel Riley Pierce whom Hoover was trying to promote as alternatives to actual black leaders.