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.
Budd Schulberg was an American screenwriter, television producer, novelist and sports writer. He was known for his novels What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and The Harder They Fall (1947), as well as his screenplays for On the Waterfront (1954) and A Face in the Crowd (1957), receiving an Academy Award for the former.
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, also known as Geronimo Ji-Jaga and Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, was a decorated military veteran and a high-ranking member of the Black Panther Party in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Born in Louisiana, he served two tours in Vietnam, receiving several decorations. He moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at UCLA under the GI Bill and joined the Black Panther Party. He was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.
Odessa Cleveland is an American retired film and television actress.
William Cornelius Sullivan was an assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was in charge of the agency's domestic intelligence operations from 1961 to 1971. Sullivan was forced out of the FBI at the end of September 1971 due to disagreements with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The following year, Sullivan was appointed as the head of the Justice Department's new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which he led from June 1972 to July 1973. Sullivan died in a hunting accident in 1977. His memoir of his thirty-year career in the FBI, written with journalist Bill Brown, was published posthumously by commercial publisher W. W. Norton & Company in 1979.
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.
Edward Artie Bullins, sometimes publishing as Kingsley B. Bass Jr, was an American playwright. He won awards including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obie Awards. Bullins was associated with the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party, for which he was the minister of culture in the 1960s.
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").
The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI was an activist group operational in the US during the early 1970s. Their only known action was breaking into a two-man Media, Pennsylvania, office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and stealing over 1,000 classified documents. They then mailed these documents anonymously to several US newspapers to expose numerous illegal FBI operations which were infringing on the First Amendment rights of American citizens. Most news outlets initially refused to publish the information, saying it related to ongoing operations and that disclosure might have threatened the lives of agents or informants. However, The Washington Post, after affirming the veracity of the files which the Commission sent them, ran a front-page story on March 24, 1971, at which point other media organizations followed suit.
The Watts Prophets were an American political poetry group from Watts, California, United States. Like their contemporaries The Last Poets, the group combined elements of jazz music and spoken-word performance, making the trio one that is often seen as a forerunner of contemporary hip-hop music.
Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the artistic director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.
Gina Gionfriddo is an American playwright and television writer. Her plays Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn were finalists for the 2009 and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. She has written for the television series Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, FBI: Most Wanted, The Alienist, and House of Cards.
Tim Cummings is an American actor and author.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
The Grantsmanship Center is a private training, and resource organization for nonprofit academic and government agencies around the globe. The Center was founded in 1972 in Los Angeles, where it is still headquartered. The Center's training programs and publications cover grant management, applying for federal grants, social enterprise for non-profits, and writing proposals for research funding. As of 2019, the Center had trained more than 140,000 people.
Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.
Harry Dolan was a writer for and the director of the Watts Writers Workshop created by Budd Schulberg. He started off as a janitor and became one of the most serious African American writers of his time. Through his contributions and efforts in the Watts Writers’ Workshop he raised awareness in the United States' racial conflict during the 1960s.
The Studio Watts Workshop was an arts organization founded in 1964 and based in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, dedicated to providing working space for artists and offering a broad range of arts workshops for the local community.
What Makes Sammy Run? is a musical with music and lyrics written by Ervin Drake and a book by Budd Schulberg and Stuart Schulberg. The story, based on Budd Schulberg's 1941 novel of the same name, centers on a ruthlessly ambitious young man who schemes his way to the top of the Hollywood studio food chain in the 1930s, betraying friends and lovers in his wake.
Lester Koenig was an American screenwriter, film producer, and founder of the jazz record label Contemporary Records.
