As an organizer, strategist, orator, and writer, Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was one of the most influential civil rights leaders of his time. His skill at planning protest demonstrations and his insights as a social and political analyst earned him the respect of movement insiders, while his role as behind-the-scenes advisor to both A. Philip Randolph and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. allowed him to help shape the course of the modern civil rights struggle for several decades. The publication of UPA’s microfilm edition of The Bayard Rustin Papers enables researchers and scholars of American race relations to assess Rustin’s remarkable career during the nearly half-century that he spent in the civil rights movement.

In 1942, Rustin, a pacifist employed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and James Farmer organized local nonviolent direct-action groups that coalesced the following year to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rustin’s efforts at organizing demonstrations and sit-ins along Gandhian lines reached a climax in 1947, when he participated in an interracial group that sought to test a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in interstate travel. This forerunner of the 1961 Freedom Rides was called a Journey of Reconciliation. Sponsored by CORE, the small band traveled as an integrated group on public transit systems in the states of the upper South. On six occasions members of the group were arrested, and in North Carolina Rustin himself was sentenced to a chain gang for his participation in the venture.

During the 1950’s, while maintaining a low profile, Rustin quietly established his fabled reputation among civil rights activists as one of the most effective and courageous strategists of the civil rights movement. In 1955-1956, he worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott, instructing King in the Gandhian methods of nonviolent direct action. Throughout the 1950’s, he was involved in nearly every important civil rights campaign. During this period his talents were tapped by a variety of groups, including CORE, the Sourthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resistor’s League, as well as by A. Philip Randolph. Often given extensive leave from his post as executive secretary of the War Resistor’s League to work on various civil rights projects, Rustin drew up in 1956 the organizing plan that King used to create the SCLC and, in 1960, acting on behalf of King and Randolph, he organized civil rights demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

In addition, from 1955 to 1960, Rustin served as chief adviser to King on strategy and issues. Acting as liaison between Randolph and King, in 1957 he organized the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, and in 1958 and 1959 he coordinated the National Youth Marches for Integrated Schools, which pressed for full enforcement of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Finally, it was Rustin who urged Randolph in 1963 to call for a mass march on Washington and it was Rustin, in his capacity as deputy director, who was the real organizer and strategist of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The extensive files on the 1963 March on Washington that appear in The Bayard Rustin Papers exemplify the research potential of the collection. At Randolph’s request, Rustin handled all of the logistical and technical preparations that had to be in place if the event were to proceed smoothly. Rustin’s files dealing with the march allow the researcher to explore this pivotal event in unsurpassed detail, as correspondence, memoranda, and position papers delineate the issues involved, the plan of operation, the mobilization of labor unions and religious groups in support of the march, and political maneuvering with Congress, the President, and within the movement itself.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a leading civil rights figure and among the most heroic of the movement’s activists. She spearheaded black voter registration in the Delta and was a leader and moving force behind the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), an outspoken black labor leader, is perhaps best remembered as the organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He was elected a vice president of the AFL-CIO in 1955. The FBI’s first interest in Randolph came in 1922 at his request: he had received a death threat in the mail which included a severed black hand. This file includes memos and correspondence, most dating from the 1940s with some coverage into the early 1960s.

Born Elijah Poole in 1897, "the Messenger of Allah" assumed leadership of the movement later known as the Nation of Islam in 1934. The file contains material the FBI collected to show immoral, subversive, or criminal activity in order to discredit him as a leader of the Nation of Islam.

Approximately 9,000 pages of documents have been released since the original file was published, including memoranda from the FBI and its Special Agents in Charge, from 1953 to 1971. Memoranda are supplemented by telegrams, teletyped messages, and newspaper clippings concerning Malcolm X's activities from his release from prison until his assassination in 1965. This new file documents his involvement on behalf of the Nation of Islam, his relationship with the Socialist Workers Party and the May 2nd Committee, newspaper articles relating to Malcolm X, his break with Elijah Muhammad, his establishment of the Muslim Mosque, Inc., his founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and memos about the motion picture on Malcolm X.

Roy Wilkins, a prominent member of the NAACP, served as acting secretary and later as executive secretary. He was a key figure in the prevention of Communist infiltration of the NAACP. Provided is information on Wilkins’s connections to such figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Paul Robeson. The file is also rich in Black Panther Party documents critical of Wilkins.

The first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall was an architect of the Civil Rights movement. He served as the chief counsel for the NAACP from 1938 to 1961. He argued more than thirty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, culminating with the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that made segregation in public schools illegal. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court.

This file contains information on Marshall’s civil rights activities in Texas during the 1950s and his allegations of harassment by Texas rangers and the Texas attorney general. Material reproduced here includes hate mail received by Marshall, background checks on Marshall and his supposed communist sympathies, and details on the FBI’s surveillance of Marshall. The file also details Marshall’s acrimonious relationship with the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.

NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois was investigated by the FBI for suspected Communist ties. In 1951, the Peace Information Center he was running was indicted as a suspected Communist "front" organization. The file contains coverage on this event and spans the entire decade. The last section of the file consists of newspaper clippings about Du Bois.

The entry of the United States into the First World War precipitated a dramatic increase in government surveillance of American citizens. The surveillance system included the military, the postal service, and above all the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI. Among the chief subjects of the domestic spying operation were black Americans, whose collective aspirations and demands were on the rise. This confluence of wartime (and, later, Red Scare) surveillance with black assertiveness is comprehensively documented in this important collection.

At the center of this collection are the enormous surveillance files of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation under Directors A. Bruce Bielaski, William J. Flynn, William J. Burns, and their young and able assistant, J. Edgar Hoover. From all of the bureau case files covering black groups, periodicals, and individuals between 1917 and 1922, every relevant file concerning black political (as distinct from commonly criminal) activities has been included in this collection.

Scolars will find such grassroots activity as politically motivated draft evasion; suspected and actual violations of the Espionage Act by black intellectuals, journalists, and clergy (even from the most remote rural regions); alleged voter fraud, particularly among northward migrants; as well as volumnous bureau files on such prominent black radicals and dissenters as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Cyril Briggs, and their associates in such organizations as the NAACP, UNIA, and others. Also included in this collection are extensive files on such publications as the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American Crisis, and Messenger.

After the bureau files, the most significant black surveillance records are those of the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, the principal competitor to Hoover’s General Intelligence Division in the field of antiradicalism. Its domestic thrust ranged from responsibility for security of domestic military bases and surveillance of antidraft activities to monitoring the spread of dissident and radical publications throughout the armed services.

In addition, eight other record groups have been utilized in an effort to present a comprehensive picture: the Department of State, the U.S. Shipping Board, the Censor’s Office of the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Justice, the Panama Canal Commission, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the U.S. District Courts and Circuit Courts of Appeal.

Major topics of the files include censorship of militant publications; the Black Star Line and racial tension among black American workers in the Canal Zone; the Pan-African Congress, with W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter; complete transcripts of the Marcus Garvey mail fraud trial and appeals, resulting in Garvey’s imprisonment and ultimate deportation; and records of state and local authorities, as well as of private investigatory and patriotic groups.

Part I of The Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI File

The first installment of The Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI File allows researchers to track the bureau’s pursuit of King almost day by day, as reports flow in from FBI field offices in New York, Atlanta, and other cities; as top FBI executives write to each other about ways to expand their blanket-like coverage on King; and as reports summarizing the bureau’s information on King and the civil rights movement flow outward to the White House, the Pentagon, and other federal offices.

This important research collection supplied significant details on King’s planning of civil rights protests in such Southern hot spots as Birmingham and Selma, on his tension-ridden 1966 foray into the segregated ghettos of Chicago, and on his controversial 1967 decision to vocally oppose the Vietnam War policies of President Lyndon Johnson. It also maps the planning of King’s final great crusade, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which was about to get underway when King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

The FBI’s declassified documents that are contained in the two parts of The Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI File allow the reader to follow the development of King’s own career and civil rights activities in a way never before possible. Taken as a whole, this publication makes available to researchers in history, political science, sociology, and law a crucially important documentary record on one of the central leaders and one of the central issues of our time.

Part II: The King-Levison File

Now available for the first time, The King-Levison File contains 9,000 pages of newly released FBI documents on Martin Luther King, Jr. Included in the file are numerous verbatim transcripts of conversations between King and one of his most trusted confidants, Stanley Levison, as well as conference calls involving many other civil rights leaders. This publication provides an unmatched source of primary research materials-much of it in King’s own words-on the civil rights movement, King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, and King’s reactions to the radical and social strife throughout the United States that marked the last years of his life.

In 1962, highly valued informants within the top ranks of the American Communist party told the FBI that one of Martin Luther King’s closest confidants, New York lawyer Stanley Levison, was a long-time Communist functionary. From that point on, bureau agents began closely monitoring King’s activities, placing wire-taps on his home and office phones and on the phones of close associates such as Levison. Although the FBI’s intention was to harm King’s public reputation and destroy his political influence, its heavy-handed pursuit of King, ironically enough, produced an invaluable historical record of the day-to-day thoughts and endeavors of America’s foremost civil rights leader, a man whose hectic life did not allow him the time to put on paper many of the important ideas and concerns that the omnipresent agents of the FBI noted.

Since Levison was one of the few persons to whom King could truly speak his mind-as well as voice occasional doubts and despair over the progress of the civil rights movement-these files shed light not only on King’s many civil rights activities and his involvement in related causes, but on his personal feelings toward, and reactions to, the tumultuous events of the 1960s.

Because the fruits of wiretaps that the FBI placed on King’s own home, office, and hotel rooms are under a court order that will keep their contents sealed until at least the year 2027, no verbatim transcripts of these wiretaps can be made public. However, because The King-Levison File originates from wiretaps that the FBI placed on Stanley Levison’s home and office phones, verbatim transcripts of conversations between King and Levison, as well as conference calls involving other civil rights leaders, are now available to scholars for the first time.

The King-Levison File includes, in the civil rights leader’s own words, much valuable information on such issues as King’s consideration of a symbolic 1968 campaign for President; political infighting within the top echelon of the civil rights leadership; the worsening of relations between Dr. King and President Johnson; concerns over financing the civil rights movement; and King’s reactions to the 1960s.

Reproduced here are records of the New York State Supreme Court, New York City. They contain:

• Full testimony of all witnesses in the 1966 trial, including that of two witnesses who spoke in secrecy to hide their identities.
• Discussions between the judge and attorneys.
• Preliminary motions, summations, the court’s charge, the verdicts, and the sentences.
• A confession made years after the trial by Talmadge Hayer, one of the men originally convicted.

The printed guide contains an introduction and a detailed listing of roll contents, including the names of witnesses and the dates they testified.