Federal attention to US Muslims historically began as anti-Black surveillance

Evidence

By the 1920s, this federal silence toward domestic Muslims began to change. The second section of the chapter examines the growth of Islam in various organizational guises during the interwar period, showing how Muslim American groups such as the Moslem Welfare Society of Sunni Muslim missionary Satti Majid, the NOI, and the Moorish Science Temple became targets of the FBI’s RACON, a wartime investigation that attempted to collect all-known instances of “Foreign-Inspired Agitation among the American Negroes.” … In the context of the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, the NOI, above all other Muslim groups, became the focus of FBI surveillance, disinformation campaigns, and counterintelligence activities. A conclusion examines the reverberation of the Black Muslim Scare in the post-9/11 period. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 351

Categorization

• XREF: The FBI conflating Islam with Black political agitation echoes how the reader’s project treats Islamophobia as bound up with race and the frightened white subject, not with Islam per se.
• SEED: The ‘Black Muslim Scare’ as a direct predecessor of the post-9/11 apparatus is a sharp through-line for an essay on how the US security state weaponizes Islam against Black organizing.