FBI spied on, criticized black writers for half a century

From 1919 to 1972, the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept an eye on prominent African-American writers, spending considerable effort to document and critique their work. This revelation comes from newly declassified documents about the early years of the agency uncovered by William Maxwell, a professor at Washington University in St Louis.

"I knew [FBI chief J. Edgar] Hoover was especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, left-wing politics, and literary potential," says Maxwell. "But I was surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and 'filed' nearly half of the nationally prominent African American authors... the FBI had outdone most every other major institution of U.S. literary study, only fitfully concerned with black writing."

In one file on Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay, for example, the FBI labeled the writer a "notorious Negro revolutionary," and kept track of him even as he traveled abroad to Russia and the U.K.

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