Conspiracy Theory in the Black Community

Created by: Thomas Weissinger Professor Emeritus, University Library Professor Emeritus, African American Studies

Last updated: 2012

Abu-Jamal, Mumia with Noelle Hanrahan. All Things Censored. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000.

Bailey, Anne J. “Was there a Massacre at Poison Spring?” Military History of the Southwest 20 (1990): 157-168.

Bewley-Taylor, David R. “Cracks in the Conspiracy: The CIA and the Cocaine Trade in South Central Los Angeles.” International Journal of Drug Policy 12 (July, 2001): 167-180.

Boyd, Herb. “The Man and the Plan.” (Books that feed African American paranoia with tales of government conspiracies and racial genocide are increasingly popular with black youth.) Black Issues Book Review 4 (March-April, 2002): 38-40.

Bogart, Laura M. and Sheryl Thorburn. “Are HIV/AIDS Conspiracy Beliefs a Barrier to HIV Prevention Among African Americans?” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes 38 (February 1, 2005): 213-218.

Brandon, Wendy W. “Interrupting Racial Profiling: Moving Pre-service Teachers from White Identity to Equity Pedagogy.” In Slater, Judith J., Stephen M. Fain and Cesar Augusto Rossatto.The Freirean Legacy: Educating for Social Justice. New York: P. Lang, 2002.

Bratich, Jack Zeljko. “Trust No One (On the Internet): The CIA-Crack-Contra Conspiracy Theory and Professional Journalism.” Television & New Media 5 (2004): 109-139.

Breggin, Peter R. and Ginger Ross Breggin. The War Against Children of Color: Psychiatry Targets Inner City Youth. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998.

Brown, Tony. Black Lies, White Lies: the Truth According to Tony Brown. New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1995.

_____. Empower the People: a 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy that is Stealing Your Money and Freedom. New York: W. Morrow & Co., 1998.

Bullard, Robert D., ed. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from theGrassroots. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1993.

_____. “Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters.” Phylon 49 (nos. 3-4): 151-171.

Bundy, Reginold. “Is Black Farmers’ Plight Black Entrepreneurs’ Destiny? Is Black Farmers’ Dilemma with U.S. Government a Yardstick of How the U.S. Plans to Deal with Black Entrepreneurs Who Seek Contracts in the New Millennium?” New Pittsburgh Courier, October 3, 1998, p. A1.

Caron, Simone M. “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics?” Journal of Social History 31 (1998): 545-569.

2 Case, Carroll. The Slaughter: an American Atrocity. [Asheville, N.C.?]: FBC Inc., 1998.

Cole, Luke W. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Crocker, Jennifer, Riia Luhtanen, Stephanie Broadnax and Bruce Evan Blaine. “Belief in US Government Conspiracies against Blacks among Black and White College Students: Powerlessness or System Blame?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (August 1999): 941-953.

Curtis, C.M. “The Adoption of African American Children by Whites: A Renewed Conflict.” Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services 77 (March 1996): 156-165.

Early, Gerald, ed. “Marcus Garvey’s ‘Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots.'” Gateway Heritage 19 (1998): 40-45.

Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: the Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press; distributed by Publishers Group West, 1992.

Funderburg, Lise. “Who Should Adopt Our Children?” Essence 28 (January, 1998): 64+

Gasch, Helen; Poulson, D Michael; Fullilove, Robert E; Fullilove, Mindy Thompson. “Shaping AIDS Education and Prevention Programs for African Americans amidst Community Decline.” Journal of Negro Education 60 (Winter 1991): 85-96.

Gordon, A.F. “Globalism and the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis.” Race & Class 40 (1999): 145-157.

Gosa, Travis L. “Counterknowledge, Racial Paranoia, and the Cultic Milieu: Decoding Hip Hop Conspiracy Theory.” Poetics 39 (June 2011): 187-204.

Hall, Jeffrey. “Aligning Darkness with Conspiracy Theory: The Discursive Effects of African American Interest in Gary Webb’s ‘Dark Alliance’.” Howard Journal of Communications 17 (July-September, 2006): 205-222.

Hayes, Floyd W., III. “Politics and Education in America’s Multicultural Society: An African-American Studies’ Response to Allan Bloom.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 17 (1989): 71-88.

Hayes, Peter. “The Ideological Attack on Transracial Adoption in the United States and Britain.” In BaNikongo, Nikongo, ed. Leading Issues in African-American Studies. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1997.

Herek, G.M. and J.P. Capitanio. “Conspiracies, Contagion, and Compassion: Trust and Public Reactions to Aids.” Aids Education and Prevention 6 (August 1994): 365-375.

3 Hermann, Valerie Phillips. “Transracial Adoption: ‘Child-Saving’ or ‘Child-Snatching’.” National Black Law Journal 13 (Spring 1993):147-164.

Hine, William C. “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs: South Carolina State College Students Protest, 1955- 1968.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 97 (1996): 310-331.

Hines, Revathi I. “African Americans’ Struggle for Environmental Justice and the Case of the Shintech Plant: Lessons Learned from a War Waged.” Journal of Black Studies 31 (July 2001): 777-790.

Hitz, Frederick Porter and A. R. Cinquegrana. Report of Investigation: Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1997. 1 vol. According to Robert Parry, author of Gary Webb: The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga, Inspector General Frederick Porter Hitz concedes that “the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco–based drug ring with suspected ties to the Contras, the so-called “Frogman Case.”

James, Ward Churchill, James Vanderwall and Jim Vanderwall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston, MA: Southend Press, 2001. 509 pp.

Jones, Hezekiah S. “Federal Agricultural Policies: Do Black Farm Operators Benefit?” In Sterwart, James B. and Joyce E. Allen-Smith, eds. Blacks In Rural America. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

Jones, Maxine D. “The Rosewood Massacre and the Women Who Survived it.” Florida Historical Quarterly 76 (1997): 193-208.

Kunjufu, Jawanza. Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys. Rev. ed. Chicago: African American Images, 1985.

Lemann, Nicholas. The Big Test: the Secret History of the American Meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1999.

Lewis A. “Blacks, Crack and the CIA.” Third Force 4 (November 1996): 9.

Lewis, R. L’Heureux. “Racial Conspiracy and Research.” In Katz, Ralph V. and Rueben Warren. The search for the legacy of the USPHS syphilis study at Tuskegee. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, p. 97-107.

McWhorter, John H. Losing the Race: Self-Sabatoge in Black America. New York: Free Press, 2000. 285p.

Nunnally, Shayla C. Trust in Black America: Race, Discrimination, and Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 286p.

4 Turner, Patricia. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 260p. See Chapter 3: Conspiracy I: “They…the KKK…did it”; and Chapter 4. Conspiracy II: “They…the powers that be…want to keep us down.”

Wacquant L. “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto.” Theoretical Criminology 4 (August 2000): 377-389.

Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: the Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Waters, Anita M. “Conspiracy Theories as Ethnosociologies: Explanation and Intention in African American Political Culture.” Journal of Black Studies 28 (September 1997): 112-125.

Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.

Weisbord, Robert G. Genocide? Birth Control and the Black American. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975.

Whitaker, Charles . “Is There a Conspiracy to Keep Blacks off Juries?” Ebony 47 (September 1992): 54+

Wilhelm, Sidney M. “The Economic Demise of Blacks in America: A Prelude to Genocide?” Journal of Black Studies 17 (1986): 201-254.

_____. “Red Man, Black Man and White America: The Constitutional Approach to Genocide.” Catalyst 4 (1969): 1-62.

Woodson, Byron W. A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

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