A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of BLACK STUDIES RESEARCH SOURCES: Microfilms from Major Archival and Manuscript Collections August Meier and John H. Bracey, Jr. General Editors CENTERS OF THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FBI Files on Montgomery, Albany, St. Augustine, Selma, and Memphis > >* »^«•r UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS OF AMERICA A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of BLACK STUDIES RESEARCH SOURCES: Microfilms from Major Archival and Manuscript Collections August Meier and John H. Bracey, Jr. General Editors CENTERS OF THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FBI Files on Montgomery, Albany, St. Augustine, Selma, and Memphis Edited by David J. Garrow Guide compiled by Michael Moscato and Martin Schipper A microfilm project of UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS OF AMERICA 44 North Market Street • Frederick, MD 21701 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Centers of the southern struggle [microform]. (Black studies research sources) Accompanied by a printed reel guide, compiled by Michael Moscato and Martin P. Schipper. Includes index. 1. Afro-Americans-Civil rights-History--20th century-Sources. 2. Civil rights movements- United States-History-20th century-Sources. 3. Afro-Americans-H ¡story-1877-1964~Sources. 4. United States-Race relations-Sources. 5. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation- Archives. 6. Afro-Americans-Civil rights-Southern States~History-20th century-Sources. 7. Southern States-Race relations-Sources. I. Garrow, David J., 1953- . II. Schipper, Martin Paul. III. Moscato, Michael. IV. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. V. University Publications of America. VI. Series. [E185.61] 975,.00496073 88-37866 ISBN 1-55655-047-2 (microfilm) Copyright ©1988 by University Publications of America. All rights reserved. ISBN 1-55655-047-2. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction v Note on Sources , xi Editorial Note xii Use of FBI Records Explanation of FBI Classifications xiii Explanation of Exemptions xiii How to Cite FBI Records xv Initialism List xvi Montgomery, Alabama Chronology, 1955-1958 1 Reel Index (Reels 1-2) 4 Albany, Georgia Chronology, 1961-1963 ,., , 7 Reel Index (Reels 2-4) ,..., , 11 St. Augustine, Florida Chronology, 1963-1964 15 Reel Index (Reels4-5) , r 18 Selma, Alabama Chronology, 1965 21 Reel Index (Reels 6-16) , 23 Memphis, Tennessee Chronology, 1968 33 Reel Index (Reels 17-21) 35 Subject Index , 43 INTRODUCTION Important Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files on the southern civil rights movement essentially come in three major types•lengthy ones on major individual leaders, such as the one on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ; extremely lengthy ones on each of the major civil rights organizations that was active across the South (King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC], the vibrant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE]); and valuable but so far less-heralded files on each of the cities or towns that was a major movement "hot spot" at one time or another between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s. Familiarity with all three types of files is important for a student or researcher who wants to fully appreciate the range of monitoring and information-gathering the FBI directed toward the black freedom struggle in the South. However, mastery of the locale-oriented files is a somewhat more complicated enterprise than is the use of either individual or organizational files. This is the result of two majorfactors. First, FBI data-gathering on important centers of movement activity, such as Selma in 1965 or Memphis in 1968, went into more than one major file. Second, a substantial percentage of these crucial, locale-oriented files do not bear titles that straightforwardly describe or indicate what they contain. For example, the most important FBI headquarters file concerning the 1955-1956 Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott contains in its title no mention of either a bus boycott or Montgomery•a fact that initially delayed the identification and release of those important materials, pursuant to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), for several years. The available FBI locale-oriented files, especially locales that were not the sites of FBI field offices (e.g., Montgomery, Albany, St. Augustine, and Selma), quickly reveal the extent to which FBI aware- ness of and interest in black activism was almost totally reactive in the South of the 1950s and 1960s. The FBI reaction was frequently to the onset of visible public action or appeals for change in the form of protest marches ordemonstrations against racially discriminatory municipal officials and agencies. Hence, in town after town, newly interested FBI agents had little background knowledge of or familiarity with local black communities and their leaders when a protest campaign or series of demonstrations began to emerge. That lack of prior backgrou nd experience is clearly revealed by the lack of FBI information-gathering prior to the onset of visible activism, and it is reflected as well in the often extensive reliance upon local law enforcement commanders for information that bureau agents manifested when daily demonstrations or other protests did start. Whether in Montgomery in late December 1955, in Albany in December 1961, or in the months immediately preceding the formal launching of SCLC's intensive 1965 campaign in Selma, local police commanders•Police Chief Laurie Pritchett in Albany and Public Safety Director Wilson Baker in Selma•were almost without exception local bureau agents' primary sources of information. Among the results of such initial dependence is one that is frustrating to present-day users of the FOI A-released files. One provision of the FOIA, usually spoken of as "b-7-D" after its precise statutory citation, 5 U.S.C. 552 (b) (7) (D), allows the FBI•like otherfederal agencies•to delete the identities of local officials who, by providing workaday police information, became bureau "sources." Hence, one of the systematic drawbacks that readers of these files must keep very much in mind is the degree to which the processed (i.e., deleted) state of these files masks and understates the very close, regular contact that existed between local lawmen such as Pritchett and Baker and bureau agents assigned to towns such as Albany and Selma. However, each set of files, especially those on Albany, St. Augustine, and Selma, presents a greater mass of detailed, day-to-day information on developments and happenings in each of those civil rights campaigns than is available from any other source. Each set of files pertaining to the five different centers of southern civil rights activism has special characteristics and individual peculiarities. While many users of these files will want to make specific reference to the indexing of each of these files (see Reel Index for each section), some general guidance and description of how these sets of files relate to the civil rights histories of these five different locales is in order. Montgomery, Alabama The first and most valuable of the three FBI headquarters files pertaining to the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott is the one numbered 100-135-61, a file titled "Racial Situation, Alabama," and initially created as a repository for field office reports concerning any Alabama counties or cities, not Montgomery alone. Unlike many FBI files whose numerical designations are simply twofold•e.g., 100-106670•this file's threefold designation results in numerical serializations for individual docu- ments•e.g., 100-135-61 -199•that contain four groups of numbers. After the Montgomery boycott formally got under way on December 5,1955, four days after the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a newly boarded white rider, the few agents in the bureau's small Montgomery "resident agency" were somewhat slow to assign much importance or devote much study to the boycott's prolongation. Only at the end of December and the early days of January 1956, by which time the boycott had been in effect for over three weeks and chances of any easily negotiated settlement seemed to be receding, did sustained attention begin to be devoted to the Montgomery protest. The most intense period of boycott events took place between late January, when city officials adopted a "get-tough" policy of harassment against the black boycotters, and mid-April, when the failure of the city's effort to squelch the protest through courtroom prosecutions left the situation in a relatively qu iet de facto stand-off f eatu ring the black commu nity's resolute perseverance. It was those early months of 1956, however, that catapulted the boycott and its youthful spokesman, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., into national and international prominence as, first, King's home was bombed and, second, he was indicted, tried, and convicted of violating anobscure and questionable state anti- boycott statute. By then, moral and financial support forthe protest was arriving from around theglobe, but the wearisome daily effort of sustaining a car-pool system of transportation for thousands of black Montgomerians came to an end only in December 1956, more than a year after the boycott's onset, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that municipally enforced segregated seating on public buses violated the Constitution. In the wake of the boycott itself, FBI interest in the protesters' organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), and in its leaders' efforts to help develop more widespread southern black activism as well as northern awareness of segregation, did not appreciably slacken. A formal case file on the MIA itself (100-429326) was established as part of a very modestly sized and inconclusive inquiry into whether any of the MIA's óut-of-town contributions were coming from Com- munist or otherwise "subversive" organizations. The more substantive and politically charged bureau interest in nascent black southern activism in Montgomery and elsewhere is reflected more fully and richly in an important but highly variegated file, 62-101087, that ostensibly was intended to be a "catch- all" repository for matters involving southern segregation.