The FBI treated civil rights activism as disloyalty during World War II.

Evidence

But large-scale efforts to track and eventually repress African American Muslim groups did not occur until World War II. 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. … 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

• QUESTION: Hoover’s equation of civil rights activism with disloyalty suggests American Islamophobia was partly a displacement of state fear of Black political organizing — worth tracing how this frames the ‘frightened subject’ as the state itself.
• XREF: Directly parallels the ‘relocating the problem from them to us’ pivot in Beydoun/Grosfoguel — the fear belongs to the FBI, not to the Muslims. — connects to: The FBI operated a documented program undermining civil rights leaders — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 153