COINTELPRO is one of those histories that sounds like an exaggeration until the records appear. The FBI used the name for counterintelligence programs aimed at domestic political organizations. The programs began in 1956 against the Communist Party USA and expanded across the 1960s to include civil-rights activists, Black nationalist organizations, the Black Panther Party, antiwar groups, Puerto Rican independence activists, socialist groups, and others.

For Black freedom movements, the danger was especially sharp. The FBI treated demands for civil rights, self-defense, anti-poverty programs, antiwar organizing, and Black political education as potential threats to national security. The Bureau's language often collapsed legitimate protest into subversion. That framing gave agents permission to watch, infiltrate, disrupt, and discredit people whose real offense was organizing outside the boundaries authorities found acceptable.

The tactics varied. Informants entered organizations and reported on members. Anonymous letters tried to create suspicion between allies. Fake communications were used to deepen conflict. Press contacts helped spread damaging stories. Leaders were harassed through surveillance, arrests, and pressure. The goal was not only to gather information. It was to interfere with political work.

Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most famous targets of FBI surveillance and harassment. The Bureau wiretapped, tracked, and tried to damage him personally. That targeting shows that COINTELPRO cannot be dismissed as a response only to armed groups or revolutionary rhetoric. King was a minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and advocate of nonviolent direct action. The Bureau still treated him as a threat.

The Black Panther Party became another major target. Founded in Oakland in 1966, the Panthers combined armed self-defense, political education, opposition to police brutality, and community programs such as free breakfast for children and health clinics. The FBI portrayed the Panthers as a severe internal threat. Local police departments and federal agents operated in a climate shaped by that framing. Informants and intelligence played roles in conflicts that damaged the organization and endangered members.

Fred Hampton's death in Chicago in 1969 remains one of the most contested and consequential examples of state violence tied to this era. Hampton, a charismatic young Panther leader, was killed during a police raid. An FBI informant had provided information to law enforcement. Later litigation and public investigation deepened scrutiny of how the raid was planned and justified. The details matter because they show the overlap between surveillance, local policing, and lethal force.

COINTELPRO came to public attention in 1971 after activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and sent documents to journalists. The files showed secret domestic operations that the Bureau had not disclosed. J. Edgar Hoover soon ended the formal COINTELPRO programs, but ending the name did not erase the practices or the questions they raised.

The Church Committee, a Senate investigation launched in 1975, documented serious intelligence abuses by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and IRS. Its findings described covert action designed to disrupt and discredit groups and individuals deemed threatening. The committee's work helped lead to reforms, including oversight changes and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those reforms mattered, but they did not settle the tension between security claims and political freedom.

COINTELPRO's history is not an invitation to see every government action as identical. It is a demand for evidence and accountability. The evidence shows that federal power was used to weaken Black organizing, shape public narratives, and invade private life. The state did not merely observe movements. It tried to change what they could become.

The deeper lesson is that democracy depends on the right to dissent without being secretly sabotaged by the government. When Black communities organize against racism, the question should not be whether the state feels comfortable. The question should be whether constitutional rights survive when the people using them are unpopular, radical, young, poor, or Black.