Nearly six decades after Malcolm X was gunned down in front of his family, his daughters are pursuing justice with a federal lawsuit that accuses the NYPD, FBI, and CIA of contributing to his death.
By Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com Louisiana’s governor in the mid-1960s doled out privately raised money to Ku Klux Klan members in hopes of avoiding racial violence, FBI records show. The Advocate reports that Klan members were promised money after the 1964 gubernatorial election in exchange for peace. FBI agents believed that Gov. John J. McKeithen, who…
By Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com Richard Masato Aoki, widely considered a hero among activists and liberal political groups in the San Francisco area, was an FBI informant who filed more than 500 reports about activists with the bureau. The Mercury News reports that newly revealed FBI documents show for the first time the extent that Aoki…
By Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The song “Louie Louie,” which turns 60 years this year, may not be as popular today if not for the FBI’s obsession with it during the 1960s. The Tampa Tribune recalls the bureau’s countless hours spent trying to find something profane in the lyrics. “Agents at the Tampa FBI office…
By Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com Few people in law enforcement played as key a role as John Doar in protecting civil liberties of African Americans. A top civil rights lawyer for the Justice Department in the 1960s, Doar died Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. He was 92 and had congestive heart failure in New York. Doar…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The FBI produced fake newspapers in the 1960s and ’70s to combat anti-war sentiment, the Austin Chronicle reports. The newspapers, which were recently discovered in a cache of declassified documents, included a campus newspaper at Indiana University Bloomington, called the Rational Observer. “[They are] one of the ‘smoking guns’ that activists who…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and fought against legislation protecting black people, received secret FBI records about the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the Associated Press reports. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who died in June 2010, suspected Communists and others…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Shades of Mississippi in the 1960s? The FBI has opened a civil rights investigation into the death of a black man who Mississippi authorities say was intentionally run down and killed by a white teenager in a pickup truck in June near a Jackson hotel, the Associated Press reports. Deborah Madden,…
