Bad-jacketing is a term for planting doubt on the authenticity of an individual's bona fides or identity. An example would be creating suspicion through spreading false rumors, manufacturing evidence, etc., that falsely portray someone in a community organization as an informant, or member of law enforcement, or guilty of malfeasance such as skimming organization funds. [1]
Snitch-jacketing is a variant of bad-jacketing that specifically aims to present the target as an informer.[ citation needed ]
Scholar Mark Anthony Neal writes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover used the technique against the Black Panther Party (BPP) and other Black Power organizations as part of its COINTELPRO operations. [1] Neal writes that this technique was effective in isolating key individuals, forcing them out of the organization, and that its effectiveness was enhanced by the tendency of Black Power activists to divide among "rigid racial, ideological, and increasingly gendered" lines. [1] The practice was notably used by the FBI informants to create a climate of suspicion within the Black Panther Party [2] and American Indian Movement (AIM), [3] which resulted in the murder of a number of AIM activists that had been subjected to bad-jacketing, including Pedro Bissonette, [4] Byron DeSersa [5] and Anna Mae Aquash. [6]
Jo Durden-Smith claims that this technique was used by U.S. prison guards to undermine targeted prisoners and thus make them vulnerable to manipulation. [7] [ page needed ]
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements, environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements. Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.
Jean Dorothy Seberg was an American actress. She is considered an icon of the French New Wave as a result of her performance in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless.
Kwame Ture was an American activist who played a major role in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad in the Caribbean, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. He was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party, and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).
Fredrick Allen Hampton Sr. was an American activist. He came to prominence in his late teens and early 20s in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African American, he founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots, and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. A Marxist–Leninist, Hampton considered fascism the greatest threat, saying "nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all."
The American Indian Movement (AIM) is an American Indian grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968, initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against American Indians. AIM soon widened its focus from urban issues to many Indigenous Tribal issues that American Indian groups have faced due to settler colonialism in the Americas. These issues have included treaty rights, high rates of unemployment, the lack of American Indian subjects in education, and the preservation of Indigenous cultures.
South End Press was a non-profit book publisher run on a model of participatory economics. It was founded in 1977 in Boston's South End. It published books written by political activists, notably Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Ward Churchill, Cherríe Moraga, Andrea Smith, Howard Zinn, Jeremy Brecher and Scott Tucker. South End Press closed in 2014.
The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution. The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.
Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter was an American activist. Carter is credited as a founding member of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party. Carter was shot and killed by a rival group, Ron Karenga's "Us", and is celebrated by his supporters as a martyr in the Black Power movement in the United States. Carter is portrayed by Gaius Charles in the 2015 TV series Aquarius.
The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States is a book by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, first published in 1990. It is a history of the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts to disrupt dissident political organizations within the United States, and reproduces many original FBI memos.
US Organization, or Organization Us, is a Black nationalist group in the United States founded in 1965. It was established as a community organization by Hakim Jamal together with Maulana Karenga. It was a rival to the Black Panther Party in California. One of the early slogans was, "Anywhere we are US is." "US" referred to "[us] black people", or "United Slaves", in opposition to their perceived oppressors ("them").
Richard Masato Aoki was an American educator and college counselor, best known as a civil rights activist and early member of the Black Panther Party. He joined the early Black Panther Party and was eventually promoted to the position of Field Marshal. Although there were several Asian Americans in the Black Panther Party, Aoki was the only one to have a formal leadership position. Following Aoki's death, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's records on him were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showing that, over a period of 15 years, he had been an informant for the government.
Alex Rackley was an American activist who was a member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the late-1960s. In May 1969, Rackley was suspected by other Panthers of being a police informant. He was brought to Panther headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut, held captive and tortured there for several days, condemned to death, taken to the wetlands of Middlefield, Connecticut, and murdered there.
The Black Panther Party was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
Jalil Abdul Muntaqim is a political activist and former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) who served 49 years in prison for two counts of first-degree murder. In August 1971, he was arrested in California along with Albert “Nuh” Washington and Herman Bell and charged with the killing of two NYPD police officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph A. Piagentini, in New York City on May 21. In 1975, he was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with possible parole after 22 years. Muntaqim had been the subject of attention for being repeatedly denied parole despite having been eligible since 1993. In June 2020, Muntaqim was reportedly sick with COVID-19. He was released from prison on October 7, 2020, after more than 49 years of incarceration and 11 parole denials.
Mark Everett Comfort was a community activist who worked in early Oakland grassroots civil rights movements in the 1960s, before moving to Lowndes County, Alabama.
The Ghetto Informant Program (GIP) was an intelligence-gathering operation run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1967 to 1973. Its official purpose was to collect information pertaining to riots and civil unrest. Through GIP, the FBI used more than 7000 people to infiltrate poor black communities in the United States.
Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement is a book by Americans Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, first published in 1988. It describes government campaigns to disrupt the legal political activities of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, especially through actions of the FBI.
This study gives a chilling account of the government attack against the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party, placed in the context of the traditional use of the FBI for domestic political repression. It is a powerful indictment, with far–reaching implications concerning the treatment of political activists, especially those that are Black or Native American, and the functioning of our political institutions generally.
Colston Richard Westbrook was an American teacher and linguist who worked in the fields of minority education and literacy. At the University of California, Berkeley, he established a program of prison outreach and approved students from the Bay Area to serve as volunteers. Some of the participants from Berkeley and two former prisoners at Vacaville Prison were among the founding members in 1973 of the radical leftist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Judas and the Black Messiah is a 2021 American biographical crime drama film directed and produced by Shaka King, who wrote the screenplay with Will Berson, based on a story by the pair and Kenny and Keith Lucas. The film is about the betrayal of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late-1960s Chicago, by William O'Neal, an FBI informant. Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback, Ashton Sanders, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Lil Rel Howery, Algee Smith, Dominique Thorne, and Martin Sheen also star.