Anonymous government-funded researchers fed the Times a fabricated Black revolutionary threat

Evidence

Uptown, community organizer Jesse Gray organized a block-wide rent strike and staged the World’s Worst Fair. The banner WE DO NOT NEED A WORLD’S FAIR—WE NEED A FAIR WORLD! hung like a Pop Art caption from fire escape to fire escape across East 117th Street. More ominously, Grey had also issued a call for “one hundred skilled black revolutionaries who are ready to die.” Whether or not any answered the call, Grey’s pronouncement likely fed the fantasy that, as reported on the front page of the May 6, 1964, New York Times based on a tip from an anonymous “researcher” for the government-funded HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities) organization, a shadowy Harlem group called the Blood Brothers, said to be composed of youth gang members and led by dissident Black Muslims, was engaged in killing whites. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 543

Categorization

• QUESTION: Was the Blood Brothers story later exposed as a hoax, and what role did HARYOU play in shaping the official narrative of Black radicalism?
• SEED: The state’s own research apparatus manufacturing the ‘domestic terrorist cell’ it then used to justify suppression is a strong angle on how counterculture threats got invented before they existed.
• XREF: connects to: The Times framed peasant communists as stupid folk needing fascist remedy — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1723