The FBI treated black Muslims advocating racial equality as a seditious internal threat.

Evidence

When J. Edgar Hoover learned of the MSTA, he immediately “associated these African American Muslims with racial insurgence.” The FBI viewed the group’s leaders as “fanatics” because of their advocacy of racial equality. To their mind, a group that challenged white supremacy and US imperialism was a danger to the status quo. This resulted in a widespread program of surveillance, the planting of infiltrators, and use of tactics of intimidation to disrupt the group’s activities including through the use of the law. In the state of Mississippi, the MSTA was prosecuted for violating the state’s antisedition laws. The group represented “racial enemies threatening the ability of the White race to control the government of Mississippi and that of the nation,” Johnson writes. This amounted to sedition. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 234

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Links to the chapter’s broader argument that Islamophobia is a tool of empire; parallels COINTELPRO-style repression of Black radical movements generally.
• SEED: Angle: the carceral state’s long history of criminalizing Black Muslim organizing, from MSTA to NOI to contemporary surveillance of Black Muslim activists.

Related

• The FBI conflated Black Muslim anti-racism with sedition and imperialism critique (similarity 0.91)
• Advocating racial equality was criminalized as sedition against US white supremacy (similarity 0.85)
• The FBI surveilled the Moorish Science Temple for anti-imperialist and anti-racist activism (similarity 0.85)
• Black Muslims were FBI-targeted for Islamic practice voicing anti-imperial resistance. (similarity 0.84)
• The FBI treated Black Muslims’ political Islam as a national security threat for decades. (similarity 0.84)
• Black American Islam functioned as post-Reconstruction resistance to white supremacy (similarity 0.83)
• The FBI framed Islam as dangerous to justify anti-black state suppression (similarity 0.82)
• The FBI treated black Islam as a political sign regardless of actual loyalty (similarity 0.81)
• The FBI surveilled black Muslims as seditious threats more than white Arab immigrants (similarity 0.80)
• Federal attention to US Muslims historically began as anti-Black surveillance (similarity 0.80)
• Fear of black Muslims uniting with colonized peoples drove FBI surveillance. (similarity 0.79)
• The FBI relabeled Black Muslim groups as cults to dodge religious protections. (similarity 0.79)
• The FBI treated civil rights activism as disloyalty during World War II. (similarity 0.79)
• The federal government actively manufactured hatred of and between black Muslims (similarity 0.79)
• The FBI ran secret media disinformation campaigns to discredit Black Muslim leaders. (similarity 0.78)