The FBI labeled civil rights activism as disloyalty in wartime surveillance

Evidence

The surveillance of black Muslim groups was part of a much larger effort meant to track the potential rise of what FBI director J. Edgar Hoover feared were disloyal African Americans. From June 1942 to August 1943, the FBI conducted a massive investigation, later code-named RACON, that surveyed the full range of African American political dissent. One of Hoover’s concerns was that “scheming peddlers of foreign ‘isms’ ” were leading “malcontent” black Americans toward Communism and other putatively anti-American ideologies. The scope of the investigation was broad and the FBI defined disloyalty to United States to include support for the A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement and other civil rights activism. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how scrutiny of minorities is framed through nationalist security concerns, echoing the Moroccan-diaspora citizenship chapters and the book’s treatment of measuring belonging.