During the Cold War, the United States supported right-wing, anti-communist dictators. It supported Latin American dictators who killed political prisoners with death flights and kidnapped the children of political dissidents to have them adopted by political supporters of the dictators. Mothers of the Disappeared protested against such things. The US supported right-wing dictators Pinochet, who killed thousands of people in Chile, and Suharto, who killed thousands of people in Indonesia. The US also supported right-wing death squads that killed Catholic churchwomen in El Salvador.

In Indonesia in October 1965, Suharto, a powerful Indonesian military leader, accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of organizing a brutal coup attempt, following the kidnapping and murder of six high-ranking army officers. Over the months that followed, he oversaw the systematic extermination of up to a million Indonesians for affiliation with the party, or simply for being accused of harboring leftist sympathies. He then took power and ruled as dictator, with US support, until 1998.

On Sept. 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet wrested control of Chile from the democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, in a coup backed by the US government. Under the Pinochet dictatorship, more than 3,000 people were killed or "disappeared," their bodies never found. Still others were subject to torture and psychological abuse.

In the months leading up to the coup, the US blocked international loans to Chile, subsidized opposition newspapers, labor unions and political parties, denied spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a trucker's strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and financed the military that staged the coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible."

In 1980 four Roman Catholic churchwomen were killed by a right wing death squad in El Salvador. There was a secret recording of a conversation between the commander of the unit who murdered the women, a national guard sergeant named Luis Antonio Colindres Alemán, and a member of the inner circle of El Salvador's right-wing death squads. The tape proves that Colindres Alemán killed the women only after receiving instructions from a superior officer and in collusion with a second security force, answering to multiple chains of command that reached to senior levels of the Salvadoran military and a clique of officers whose excesses were tolerated and shielded from scrutiny by US officials for the sake of winning a civil war against leftist insurgents. Hundreds of civilians were killed in El Mozote, many of them children.

Vietnamese children running from napalm

VIETNAM WAR

The Vietnam War was a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The war was also part of a larger regional conflict in Indochina and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

The Vietnam War lasted from 1954 through 1975. Direct American involvement ended in 1973. America entered the war after the French colonialists withdrew in 1954. The war started when Eisenhower was president and continued when Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were president. Agent Orange and napalm were used. The government of South Vietnam was too corrupt to gain the support of the people of Vietnam. The war eventually spread to Laos and Cambodia.

For a brief period of time after World War II Vietnam was free of foreign influence and united by the Viet Minh, which was led by Ho Chi Minh. Then the British took over southern Indochina and let France control it. Nationalist China, controlled by Chiang Kai-shek, took over northern Indochina and was persuaded by the US to turn it over to France. In 1946 the French bombarded Haiphong, starting an eight year war. America subsidized most of the cost of the French military in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism.

When the French were defeated in 1954, the Geneva Conference divided Indochina into Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The US chose Ngo Dinh Diem, a former Vietnamese official living in New Jersey, to head the government of South Vietnam in Saigon. Diem was unpopular because he refused to allow elections, imprisoned political opponents and was accused of corruption. He was a Catholic in a mostly Buddhist country. In 1960 the National Liberation Front was formed. It was supported by peasants and opposed Diem's government. In 1963 South Vietnamese generals overthrew and executed Diem.

The heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. US military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. By 1969 more than 500,000 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and US combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War reached a substantial scale in 1965 with demonstrations against the escalating role of the United States in the war. Over the next several years, these demonstrations grew into a social movement which was incorporated into the broader counterculture of the 1960s. Members of the peace movement within the United States at first consisted of many students, mothers, and anti-establishment youth. Opposition grew with the participation of leaders and activists of the civil rights, feminist, and Chicano movements, as well as sectors of organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups, including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, military veterans, physicians (notably Benjamin Spock), and others. Anti-war demonstrations consisted mostly of peaceful, nonviolent protests. By 1967, an increasing number of Americans considered military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake. On May 4, 1970 National Guardsmen fired on anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four students.

The war spread into Laos and Cambodia. A woman in Laos described "the trembling of the earth and the shock from the sounds of arms exploding around my village. I began to hear the noise of airplanes, circling about in the heavens." She described "the damaged houses, the injured and the dead." Nixon ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia beginning in 1970.

During December 1972 President Nixon ordered a major bombing of Vietnam called Operation Linebacker II. Soon after this, Nixon ended the war and North Vietnam took over South Vietnam. By the end of the war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped, in addition to Agent Orange, a defolient that caused widespread environmental damage, and burning by napalm.

From 1975 through 1979 the Khmer Rouge took over and started what were later called the "killing fields" in Cambodia. Between one and two million died. Vietnam defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia, but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines, and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. A mass exodus in 1975 of people loyal to the South Vietnamese cause was followed by another wave in 1978 of "boat people," refugees fleeing the economic restructuring imposed by the communist regime. Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

The Gulf of Tonkin incident happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam from August 2 to August 4, 1964, during the Vietnam War. It was described to the US Congress on August 5, 1964, as two unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the US destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy. The Gulf of Tonkin incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed President Lyndon B. Johnson to greatly escalate US military involvement in the war. The Maddox and the Turner Joy of the US Seventh Fleet were sent to the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 in order to conduct reconnaissance and to intercept North Vietnamese communications in support of South Vietnamese war efforts. At the same time, the Vietnamese navy was undertaking a mission under the oversight of the US Department of Defense to attack radar stations, bridges, and other such targets along North Vietnam's coasts.

On the night of July 30–31, 1964, South Vietnamese commandos attacked North Vietnamese radar and military installations on Hon Me and Hon Ngu islands in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Maddox, on patrol in the area but probably unaware of the raids that had taken place, observed torpedo boats sent out in pursuit of the South Vietnamese vessels and thus withdrew, but it returned on August 1.

The following day, on August 2, the Maddox found that it was being approached by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox fired warning shots, but the torpedo boats continued and opened fire in return. The Maddox called in air support from a nearby carrier, the Ticonderoga. In the ensuing firefight, one of the torpedo boats was badly damaged, but the Maddox escaped harm.

The event led the US to believe that North Vietnam was targeting its intelligence-gathering mission, and therefore the Turner Joy was sent to reinforce the Maddox. From the point of view of the Maddox, the attack had been unprovoked, though North Vietnam was under the impression that the Maddox had been involved in the raids on Hon Me and Hon Ngu islands.

By the night of August 4, the US military had intercepted North Vietnamese communications that led officials to believe that a North Vietnamese attack on its destroyers was being planned. Those communications most likely referred to operations to salvage the torpedo boat that had been damaged in the earlier firefight. That night proved to be a stormy one. The Maddox and Turner Joy moved out to sea, but both reported that they were tracking multiple unidentified vessels approaching their positions. The vessels appeared to be coming from several different directions, and they were impossible to lock onto.

Both ships began firing at what they thought were torpedo boats, and again they sought air support. A plane piloted by Commander James Stockdale joined the action, flying at low altitude to see the enemy ships. Stockdale reported seeing no torpedo boats. Several hours later, Captain John Herrick of the Maddox, after reviewing the events, sent the message, "Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. …Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken."

Johnson and his advisers had approved retaliatory strikes on North Vietnamese naval bases as soon as the reports of the apparent attack of August 4 came in. Moreover, another intercepted report seemed to confirm that the attack had in fact taken place, and thus Herrick's caution was not taken seriously. That report had been misinterpreted, however. It was in fact a more detailed report about the action on August 2, and there had not actually been an attack on August 4.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Johnson were both convinced of the reality of the second attack, however, and thus they asked Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It passed the House and Senate easily, and Johnson signed it on August 10. The purpose of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was for Congress to approve and support "the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Resolution led to direct US involvement in the Vietnam War.

My Lai Massacre

William Laws Calley Jr. was the United States Army officer who led the massacre of at least 347 and up to 504 civilians, almost all women, children and elderly men. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12. Calley was convicted by court-martial of the murder of 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. Calley was released to house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia granted him a new trial, but that ruling was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His initial life sentence having been modified to a term of 20 years and then further reduced to ten, Calley ultimately served three years of house arrest for the murders. Public opinion at the time about Calley was divided. Many Americans viewed him as a hero, or a scapegoat at worst. Because of public support, Calley was released from prison.

The New York Times reported the testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at Calley's trial. According to the Times,

Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D. Meadlo-the same soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them-pushed the prisoners into a ditch. ...

There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley, I can't remember the exact words-it was something like "Start firing."
Meadlo turned to me and said: "Shoot, why don't you shoot?"
He was crying.
I said, I can't. I won't.
Then Lieutenant Calley amd Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and fired.
People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect their children.

Calley wasn't the only one guilty of atrocities. One soldier wrote a letter to his family that read, "Dear Mom and Dad: Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight! ... Everyone is crying, begging and praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan. Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock."

The Tet Offensive was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and its Viet Cong (VC) launched a surprise attack on January 30 and 31, 1968, against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the United States Armed Forces and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. The name is the truncated version of the Lunar New Year festival name, a holiday period that was chosen as most ARVN personnel were on leave. The purpose of the wide-scale offensive by the Hanoi Politburo was to trigger political instability in a belief that mass armed assault on urban centers would trigger defections and rebellions.

The offensive was launched prematurely in the early morning hours of January 30 in large parts of the I and II Corps Tactical Zones of South Vietnam. This early attack allowed allied forces some time to prepare defensive measures. When the main operation began during the early morning hours of January 31, the offensive was countrywide; more than 80,000 PAVN/VC troops struck more than 100 towns and cities, including 36 of 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, 72 of 245 district towns and the southern capital. The offensive was the largest military operation conducted by either side up to that point in the war.

Hanoi had launched the offensive in the belief that it would trigger a popular uprising leading to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. Although the initial attacks stunned the allies, causing them to lose control of several cities temporarily, they quickly regrouped, repelled the attacks and inflicted heavy casualties on PAVN/VC forces. The popular uprising anticipated by Hanoi never materialized. During the Battle of Huế, intense fighting lasted for a month, resulting in the destruction of the city. During its occupation, the PAVN/VC executed thousands of people in the Massacre at Huế. Around the American combat base at Khe Sanh, fighting continued for two more months.

The offensive was a military defeat for North Vietnam, as neither uprisings nor ARVN unit defections occurred in South Vietnam. However, the offensive had a strong effect on the US government and shocked the American public, which had been led to believe by its political and military leaders that the North Vietnamese were being defeated and incapable of launching such an ambitious military operation. American public support for the war declined as a result of the Tet casualties and the escalation of draft calls.

The Phoenix Program was designed and initially coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American and South Vietnamese militaries, and a small number of special forces operatives from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. In 1970, CIA responsibility was phased out, and the program was put under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).

The program, which lasted from 1968 to 1972, was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, assassination, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, and interrogation. The CIA described it as "a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong." The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that North Vietnamese infiltration had required local support within noncombat civilian populations, which were referred to as the "VC infrastructure" and "political branch" that had purportedly coordinated the insurgency.

Throughout the program, Phoenix "neutralized" 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed, and the rest surrendered or were captured. Of those killed 87 percent were attributed to conventional military operations by South Vietnamese and American forces, while the remaining 13 percent were attributed to Phoenix Program operatives.

Between 65,000 and 70,000 Vietnamese civilians were held in prison camps, including Phu Quoc and Qui Nhon. Civilians were beaten and tortured, and American advisers observed and sometimes participated.

Black boxer and heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title for objecting to the Vietnam War and draft. He said the following in 1967 at Riverside Church in New York:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

The Khmer Rouge or Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The Kampuchea Revolutionary Army was slowly built up in the forests of eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the People's Army of Vietnam, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although it originally fought against Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge changed its position and supported Sihanouk following the CCP's advice after he was overthrown in a 1970 coup d'état by Lon Nol who established the pro-American Khmer Republic. Despite a massive American bombing campaign (Operation Freedom Deal) against them, the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War when they captured the Cambodian capital and overthrew the Khmer Republic in 1975. Following their victory, the Khmer Rouge–who were led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan–immediately set about forcibly evacuating the country's major cities. In 1976, they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge regime was highly autocratic, totalitarian, and repressive. Many deaths resulted from the regime's social engineering policies and the "Moha Lout Plaoh," an imitation of China's Great Leap Forward which had caused the Great Chinese Famine. The Khmer Rouge's attempts at agricultural reform through collectivization similarly led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, including the supply of medicine, led to the death of many thousands from treatable diseases, such as malaria.

The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents, and their racist emphasis on national purity resulted in the genocide of Cambodian minorities. Its cadres summarily executed and tortured perceived subversive elements, or they killed them during genocidal purges of their own ranks between 1975 and 1978. Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide which took place under the Khmer Rouge regime led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25 percent of Cambodia's population.

In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge was largely supported and funded by the Chinese Communist Party, receiving approval from Mao Zedong; it is estimated that at least 90 percent of the foreign aid which was provided to the Khmer Rouge came from China. The regime was removed from power in 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and quickly destroyed most of its forces. The Khmer Rouge then fled to Thailand.

LEADED GASOLINE

A filling station in Dayton, Ohio, sold the first gallon of leaded gasoline in February 1923. Thomas Midgley Jr. missed the event. The General Motors engineer who discovered that tetraethyl lead, also called TEL, raised the octane of gasoline was in Miami, Florida, convalescing from severe lead poisoning.

Midgley and his boss, Charles Kettering, the man who patented the electric starter in 1911, had ignored the known health risks of lead. Exposure affects not only the nervous, cardiovascular, and immune systems, but it can also cause major behavioral issues and learning problems in young children.

However, in engines, the toxic compound eliminated knock, which was an industry-wide problem at the time. TEL was held up as the protector of valve seats and high-compression engines.

The following year, 32 men at the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey became sick (in some cases, to the point of insanity), and five of them died from TEL exposure. Standard Oil's medical consultant claimed that the workers' deaths were "wholly unlike those of chronic lead poisoning such as painters often have."

Leaded gasoline was the primary fuel type produced and sold in America until 1975. Although cited as a reason for limiting the use of leaded gas, health issues associated with TEL ­exposure weren't what finally caused its removal after 52 years; it was tailpipe emissions. The use of catalytic converters became necessary to meet stricter emissions regulations outlined in the Clean Air Act of 1970, and leaded gasoline proved damaging to these devices.

Although Time magazine in 2010 called leaded gas one of the 50 worst inventions of all time, it's still sold in the US for use in off-road vehicles, farm equipment, aircraft, race cars, and marine engines.

SILENT SPRING

DDT was first synthesized in 1874 by the Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler. DDT's insecticidal action was discovered by the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller in 1939. DDT was used in the second half of World War II to limit the spread of the insect-borne diseases malaria and typhus among civilians and troops. Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods." In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which documented the environmental harm caused by pesticides such as DDT including an increased risk of cancer and harm to wildlife. In 1972 DDT was banned.

CANCER ALLEY

Cancer Alley is the regional nickname given to an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, in the River Parishes of Louisiana, which contains over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. As of 2012, this area accounted for 25 percent of the petrochemical production in the United States. By the 1970s the documented serious water and air pollution. Environmentalists consider the region a sacrifice zone where rates of cancer caused by air pollution exceed the federal government's own limits of acceptable risk. Community leaders such as Sharon Lavigne have led the charge in protesting the expansion of the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley, as well as addressing the associated racial and economic disparities.

ASBESTOS

Asbestos is a heat and fire resistant mineral that is commonly used in building materials like flooring, ceilings, roofs, and automotive parts. It wasn't until the 1950s that the connection between asbestos exposure and health became clear. Asbestos can cause asbestosis (scarring in the lungs), lung cancer, mesothelioma (cancer of the lining of the lungs, abdomen and heart), and pleural disease. Asbestos is banned in 55 countries but continues to be imported and used in the United States but at lower levels than in the past.

More doctors smoke Camels

SURGEON GENERAL'S REPORT ON TOBACCO

On June 12, 1957, Surgeon General Leroy Burney "declared it the official position of the US Public Health Service that the evidence pointed to a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer." Definite proof of the health risks of tobacco was published with the first report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, which was released in 1964. A more recent study proves that second-hand smoke causes cancer. Over more than 40 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health has been responsible for 35 reports on the health consequences of smoking.

There is documented evidence that some tobacco companies paid medical experts to downplay or misrepresent the role of tobacco in causing cancer. For instance, research and court cases have shown that a handful of physicians, including board‐certified otolaryngologists, were compensated-sometimes by significant amounts-to provide expert testimony in litigation cases. These experts testified that factors other than smoking were responsible for cancers, despite the well‑established link between tobacco use and cancer. In some instances, their opinions appeared to have been influenced by instructions or even written drafts provided by tobacco company lawyers, rather than an independent analysis of the scientific literature .

In addition, historical evidence points to a broader pattern in which the tobacco industry engaged in deceptive practices over several decades. They intentionally sought to create confusion about the risks of smoking by funding biased research and using public relations campaigns to cast doubt on emerging scientific evidence that linked smoking to lung cancer and other diseases. This strategy not only involved misleading public health communications, but also extended to hiring experts to lend undue credibility to their claims, thereby undermining public trust in medical science and regulatory efforts.

Tobacco ads claimed that doctors recommended Camel cigarettes, and that liberated women smoked Virginia Slims. People didn't know that smoking caused cancer and heart disease, so they smoked in workplaces until laws were passed to ban indoor smoking.

NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOLS

3,104 Native American students died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970. The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition, accidents, a shooting and a suspicious fall from a high window. Native American children were separated from their families to eradicate their culture. Children were beaten and harshly punished if they did not adhere to strict rules in the classroom - and in the fields, laundry rooms, kitchens or workshops where they often were forced to spend half their days. The smallest infraction often led to a whipping, no food or solitary confinement. Catholic priests, sisters and brothers had sexually abused more than 1,000 children in multiple boarding schools.

On Jan. 17, 1961‬, democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was executed with the assistance of the governments of Belgium and the United States. Belgium had exploited the Republic of the Congo as a colony for rubber in the 19th and 20th centuries and for coltan. Tantalum from coltan is used to manufacture tantalum capacitors which are used for mobile phones, personal computers, automotive electronics, and cameras. Coltan mining is widespread in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Lumumba was the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was a postal clerk and traveling salesman. In 1958, he helped found the Mouvement National Congolais, a political party that demanded independence from Belgium. In October 1959, he was arrested and imprisoned for inciting anti- colonial riots. He won the country's first parliamentary election in June 1960.

On June 30, 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium came to grant them their independence. He told them that they should be thankful the Belgians brought them civilization. In Lumumba's speech, he reminded the King of all the crimes they committed against them. King Baudouin thought Lumumba was ungrateful. The United States and Great Britain accused Lumumba of being a communist because he believed that the wealth of Congo should remain in Congo. The US CIA and their counterparts in Britain and Belgium paid a group of Congolese military men (including Joseph Mobutu) to kill Lumumba. He was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1961, after a long torture session. Before they killed him, they made him eat the paper on which his Independence Day speech was written.

J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), from June 30, 1935, to May 2, 1972. Hoover was appointed to the BOI by President Coolidge. Hoover expanded the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency and instituted a number of modernizations to policing technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover also established and expanded a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List. He was found to have used the FBI to harass and sabotage political dissidents, and to have extensively collected information on officials and private citizens using illegal surveillance, wiretapping, and burglaries. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was able to intimidate and threaten high-ranking political figures. Hoover soon became the head of the Division's Alien Enemy Bureau, which was authorized by President Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of World War I to arrest and detain allegedly disloyal foreigners without trial. He received additional authority from the 1917 Espionage Act. Out of a list of 1,400 suspicious Germans living in the US, the Bureau arrested 98 and designated 1,172 as arrestable. America's First Red Scare was beginning, and one of Hoover's first assignments was to carry out the Palmer Raids. Hoover and his chosen assistant, George Ruch, monitored a variety of US radicals. Targets during this period included Marcus Garvey; Rose Pastor Stokes and Cyril Briggs; Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman; and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who, Hoover maintained, was "the most dangerous man in the United States." When Hoover took over the BOI, he fired all female agents and banned the future hiring of them. He frequently fired Bureau agents, singling out those he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers," or whom he considered "pinheads." He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations. Melvin Purvis was a prime example: Purvis was one of the most effective agents in capturing and breaking up 1930s gangs, and it is alleged that Hoover maneuvered him out of the Bureau because he was envious of the substantial public recognition Purvis received. In late July 1934, Special Agent Melvin Purvis, the Director of Operations in the Chicago office, received a tip on Dillinger's whereabouts that paid off when Dillinger was located, ambushed, and killed by Bureau agents outside the Biograph Theater. Hoover was credited for overseeing several highly publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bank robbers. These included those of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933, of Dillinger in 1934, and of Alvin Karpis in 1936, which led to the Bureau's powers being broadened. In 1939, the FBI became pre-eminent in domestic intelligence, thanks in large part to changes made by Hoover, such as expanding and combining fingerprint files in the Identification Division, to compiling the largest collection of fingerprints to date, and Hoover's help to expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine and analyze evidence found by the FBI. During the 1930s, Hoover persistently denied the existence of organized crime, despite numerous organized crime shootings as Mafia groups struggled for control of the lucrative profits deriving from illegal alcohol sales during Prohibition, and later for control of prostitution, illegal drugs and other criminal enterprises. Hoover was reluctant to pursue the Mafia as he knew that organized crime investigations typically required excessive man hours while resulting in a relatively small number of arrests.

In 1983, a pro bono legal team with new evidence re-opened the Korematsu v. United States case in a federal district court on the basis of government misconduct. They showed that the government's legal team had intentionally suppressed or destroyed evidence from government intelligence agencies reporting that Japanese Americans posed no military threat to the US The official reports, including those from the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, were not presented in court. In 2018 the US Supreme Court admitted that the Korematsu decision was wrong.

Hoover's main interest had always been Communist subversion, and during the Cold War he was able to focus the FBI's attention on these investigations. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, he paid little attention to criminal vice rackets such as illegal drugs, prostitution, extortion, and flatly denied the existence of the Mafia in the United States. In the 1950s, evidence of the FBI's unwillingness to investigate the Mafia became a topic of public criticism. After the Apalachin meeting of crime bosses in 1957, Hoover could no longer deny the existence of a nationwide crime syndicate. In fact, Cosa Nostra's control of the Syndicate's many branches operating criminal activities throughout North America prevailed and was heavily reported in popular newspapers and magazines. Hoover created the "Top Hoodlum Program" and went after the syndicate's top bosses throughout the country.

The FBI investigated rings of German saboteurs and spies starting in the late 1930s and had primary responsibility for counterespionage. The first arrests of German agents were made in 1938 and continued throughout World War II. In the Quirin affair during World War II, German U-boats set two small groups of Nazi agents ashore in Florida and on Long Island to cause acts of sabotage within the country. The two teams were apprehended after one of the agents contacted the FBI and told them everything – he was also charged and convicted.

During this time period, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of concern over Nazi agents in the United States, gave "qualified permission" to wiretap persons "suspected ... [of] subversive activities." He went on to add in 1941 that the US Attorney General had to be informed of its use in each case. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson left it to Hoover to decide how and when to use wiretaps, as he found the "whole business" distasteful. Jackson's successor at the post of Attorney General, Francis Biddle, did turn down Hoover's requests on occasion. An example of J. Edgar Hoover approving wiretaps is the Nixon wiretaps.

In the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Hoover the task to investigate both foreign espionage in the United States and the activities of domestic communists and fascists. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI under Hoover undertook the intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing activists in the United States. The FBI also participated in the Venona project, a pre-World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. They did not initially realize that espionage was being committed, but the Soviets' multiple use of one-time pad ciphers (which with single use are unbreakable) created redundancies that allowed some intercepts to be decoded. These established that espionage was being carried out. Hoover kept the intercepts – America's greatest counterintelligence secret – in a locked safe in his office. He chose not to inform President Harry S. Truman, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, or Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and General George Marshall while they held office. He informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Venona Project in 1952.

In 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Hoover submitted a plan to President Truman to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain 12,000 Americans suspected of disloyalty. Truman did not act on the plan.

Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. After The Washington Post broke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about them.

Hoover had a public showdown with T. R. M. Howard, a civil rights leader from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI's failure to investigate thoroughly the racially motivated murders of George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till. Hoover wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as "irresponsible." In the 1960s, Hoover's FBI monitored John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. The COINTELPRO tactics were later extended to organizations such as the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others.

Jacqueline Kennedy recalled that Hoover told President John F. Kennedy that King had tried to arrange a sex party while in the capital for the March on Washington and that Hoover told Robert F. Kennedy that King had made derogatory comments during the President's funeral.

In one 1965 incident, white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen, who had given chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young black man; one of the Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an acknowledged FBI informant. The FBI spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the CPUSA and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement. FBI records show that Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Nevertheless, three Klansmen would be convicted in a federal trial for Liuzzo's murder in December 1965.

Hoover also personally ordered to cease the Federal inquiry into the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan that killed four girls. By May 1965, local investigators and the FBI had identified suspects in the bombing and witnesses, and this information was relayed to Hoover. No prosecutions of the four suspects ensued even though the evidence was reportedly "so strong that even a white Alabama jury would convict." There had been a history of mistrust between local and federal investigators.

Hoover wrote in a memo that the chances of a conviction were remote and told his agents not to share their results with federal or state prosecutors. In 1968, the FBI formally closed their investigation into the bombing without filing charges against any of their named suspects. The files were sealed by order of Hoover. Hoover in 1970 personally authorized "black-bag" jobs against the Weather Underground per testimony from William C. Sullivan.

Hoover kept a large collection of pornographic films, photographs, and written materials, with particular emphasis on nude photos of celebrities. He reportedly used these for his own titillation and held them for blackmail purposes.

On June 13, 1966 the Supreme Court held in Miranda v. Arizona that the Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which establishes the right against self-incrimination, also requires police to advise custodial interrogation subjects that they need not answer questions or make statements. A brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union is rightly credited with supplying the 5-to-4 majority with much of its intellectual ammunition. But Chief Justice Earl Warren's majority opinion leaned just as heavily on a submission from the FBI. Hoover required that people apprehended by the FBI be given a description of their constitutional rights even before the Miranda decision. This was part of Hoover's attempt to make the FBI professional.

During oral argument in the Miranda case, Justice Abe Fortas asked the federal government's lawyer for more detail on FBI interrogation practices. Hoover's written answer to the court was prompt and specific. "Both suspects and persons under arrest" were given warnings "at the very outset of the interview," he wrote. They could consult with counsel of their choice "or anyone else with whom [they] wish to speak," could have "free counsel" if they were "unable to pay" and could consult with counsel by telephone, if more convenient. Interviews were terminated promptly if counsel was requested. If an interview subject was "indecisive" about requesting counsel, or when there was a question as to whether he had waived counsel, Hoover wrote, the decision to proceed was "left to the judgment of the interviewing Agent."

COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) 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 (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party), 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 (including Puerto Rican independence groups, such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party). 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.

In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by US Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably communists. Some of his aides reported that he purposely exaggerated the threat of communism to "ensure financial and public support for the FBI." At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the CPUSA, where Hoover ordered observation and pursuit of targets that ranged from suspected citizen spies to larger celebrity figures, such as Charlie Chaplin, whom he saw as spreading Communist propaganda.

COINTELPRO's methods included infiltration, burglaries, setting up illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents, and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations. Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders. This program remained in place until it was exposed to the public in 1971, after the burglary by a group of eight activists of many internal documents from an office in Media, Pennsylvania, whereupon COINTELPRO became the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI. COINTELPRO's activities were investigated in 1975 by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, called the "Church Committee" after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho); the committee declared COINTELPRO's activities were illegal and contrary to the Constitution.

The FBI engaged in covert operations targeting domestic political groups from its earliest years. Covert operations under the official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. However, the official chronology of the program is the subject of debate. According to a senate investigation, "If COINTELPRO had been a short-lived aberration, the thorny problems of motivation, techniques, and control presented might be safely relegated to history. However, COINTELPRO existed for years on an 'ad hoc basis before the formal programs were instituted, and more significantly, COINTELPRO-type activities may continue today under the rubric of 'investigation." Many of the tactics used in COINTELPRO are alleged to have seen continued use, including discrediting targets through psychological warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; illegal violence; and assassination. According to a Senate report, the FBI's motivation was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order."

Beginning in 1969, Black Panther party leaders were targeted by the COINTELPRO and "neutralized" through tactics including assassination, imprisonment, public humiliation, and false criminal charges. Some of the Black Panthers targeted include Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Marshall Conway. Common tactics used by COINTELPRO were perjury, witness harassment, witness intimidation, and withholding of exculpatory evidence.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and especially their leaders. Under Hoover, the official in charge of COINTELPRO was assistant director William C. Sullivan. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs, giving written approval for limited wiretapping of Martin Luther King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so." Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.

The FBI initiated COINTELPRO, an abbreviation for Counterintelligence Program, in 1956 with the aim of undermining the operations of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, the scope of the organization was broadened to encompass various additional domestic factions, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. The cessation of all COINTELPRO operations occurred in 1971. Despite its relatively small scale (constituting approximately 0.2 percent of the FBI's overall workload during a 15-year timeframe), COINTELPRO was subsequently subject to criticism from both Congress and the American public for infringing upon first amendment rights and other grounds.

Tactics included anonymous phone calls, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally. An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified the FBI's ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it within COINTELPRO, with the justification that the movement was infiltrated by communists. In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other African Americans in the South. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an African-American civil rights organization, was founded in 1957, the FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately, focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison, and eventually Martin Luther King Jr.

FBI "suicide" letter to Martin Luther King

Hoover equated the Civil Rights Movement with communism even though it had been decades since communists supported civil rights. American communists paid for lawyers for the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s, but then the Communist Party line changed, and communists were told to stop work on civil rights. By the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was largely led by the black church.

Martin Luther King Jr interpreted part of the 1964 letter that the FBI mailed anonymously as an effort to persuade him to commit suicide. More portions of the letter would be released in 2014. After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote:

In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech ... We must mark him now if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.

Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms, as they were now aware that King was growing in stature daily as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement.

In the mid-1960s, King began to publicly criticize the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most "notorious liar" in the United States. In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous "suicide package" sent by the FBI on November 21, 1964, that contained audio recordings obtained through tapping King's phone and placing bugs throughout various hotel rooms over the previous two years, and that was created two days after the announcement of King's impending Nobel Peace Prize. The tape, which was prepared by FBI audio technician John Matter, documented a series of sexual indiscretions by King combined with a letter telling him: "There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation." King believed that he was subsequently informed that the audio would be released to the media if he did not acquiesce and commit suicide prior to accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. When King refused to satisfy their coercion tactics, FBI Associate Director, Cartha D. DeLoach, commenced a media campaign offering the surveillance transcript to various news organizations, including Newsweek and Newsday. By 1969-one year after King's assassination-FBI efforts to "expose" him continued unabated. According to Church Committee findings, the Bureau "furnished ammunition to opponents that enabled attacks on King's memory and ... tried to block efforts to honor the slain leader." However, more portions of the FBI letter to King were made public in 2014 which suggested that the FBI's intent was to push King out of leadership and have "older leaders" like Roy Wilkins lead the civil right movement. The claim that the FBI's intent was to remove King from SCLC leadership was also previously backed in 1976 by the findings of the Church Committee. Although no signature appears on the envelope or letterhead, when congressional investigators (the Church Committee) later examined FBI archives they found a carbon copy in the files of Deputy FBI Director William C. Sullivan, a White FBI assistant director, and most scholars now credit him as its author. Since Hoover's FBI didn't hire minorities or women the letter was almost certainly written by a white man pretending to be black.

During the same period the program also targeted Malcolm X. While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was "directly" involved in Malcolm's murder in 1965, it is documented that the Bureau worked to "widen the rift" between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad through infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization," rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes, which ultimately led to Malcolm's assassination. The FBI heavily infiltrated Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity in the final months of his life. Manning Marable's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm's assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI's involvement in his death cannot be known.

Amidst the urban unrest of July–August 1967, the FBI began "COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE," which focused on King and the SCLC, as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Nation of Islam. BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations."

A March 1968 memo stated the program's goal was to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups"; to "Prevent the RISE OF A 'MESSIAH' who could unify ... the militant black nationalist movement"; "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence [against authorities]"; to "Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to ... both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy"; and to "prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth." Dr. King was said to have potential to be the "messiah" figure, should he abandon nonviolence and integrationism, and Stokely Carmichael was noted to have "the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way" as he was portrayed as someone who espoused a much more militant vision of "black power." While the FBI was particularly concerned with leaders and organizers, they did not limit their scope of target to the heads of organizations. Individuals, e.g. writers, were also listed among the targets of operations.

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic 1960 novel by Harper Lee, set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression, and narrated by a young girl named Scout Finch. The story follows Scout, her brother Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer. By detailing Atticus' quiet strength in defending a black man — Tom Robinson — who is standing trial for being falsely accused of raping a white woman, the book discusses important themes like racial prejudice and doing the right thing no matter the consequence. In Atticus' case, the consequence is the ridicule of the residents in the town he calls home. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and is based loosely on Lee's own childhood experiences. Lee wrote in a letter to JoBeth McDaniel, "What was heart-breaking was to discover that people you loved — friends, relatives and neighbors — who you assumed were civilized, harbored the most vicious feelings."

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the books most often banned by schools. Lee wrote a letter to the editor of the Richmond News Leader. "To hear that the novel is 'immoral' has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink," wrote Lee. She even ended the note with a donation so the members of the board could register for first grade reading lessons. The school eventually reversed its decision.

John F. Kennedy

John Kennedy expanded the Vietnam War and attempted a Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba planned by the Eisenhower administration. The CIA trained 1,400 Cuban exiles to seize the Bay and spark a popular uprising against Castro. The attempt failed. Castro convinced Khrushchev that nuclear missiles were needed in Cuba to deter another invasion, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis in turn led to a nuclear weapons treaty. The Soviets removed missiles from Cuba, and the US removed missiles from Turkey and Italy. Kennedy also established the Peace Corps. Kennedy supported civil rights. After the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall Kennedy said, "Ich bin ein Berliner," or I am a Berliner.

While in India, James Lawson had studied Mahatma Gandhi's techniques of nonviolent direct action and passive resistance used in his political movement. By the end of her first semester at Fisk, Diane Nash had become one of Lawson's most devoted disciples. Lawson's workshops included simulations in order to prepare the students to handle verbal and physical harassment that they would ultimately face during the sit-ins. In preparation, the students would venture out to segregated stores and restaurants, doing nothing more than speaking with the manager when they were refused service. Lawson graded their interactions in each simulation and sit-in, reminding them to have love and compassion for their harassers. Though protests would continue in Nashville and across the South, Nash and three other students were first successfully served at the Post House Restaurant on March 17, 1960. Students continued the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters for months, accepting arrest in line with nonviolent principles. Nash, with John Lewis, led the protesters in a policy of refusing to pay bail. In February 1961, Nash served jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" - nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in. They were all sentenced to pay a $50 fine for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter. Chosen as spokesperson, Nash said to the judge, "We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants."

The Nashville sit-in movement was responsible for the desegregation of lunch counters in the city's downtown. Lewis was arrested and jailed many times during the nonviolent activities to desegregate the city's downtown businesses. He was also instrumental in organizing bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests to support voting rights and racial equality.

When Diane Nash asked Nashville's mayor, Ben West, on the steps of City Hall, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?," the mayor admitted that he did. Three weeks later, the lunch counters of Nashville were serving blacks. Reflecting on this event, Nash said, "I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said that he felt it was wrong for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counters solely on the basis of the color of their skin. That was the turning point. That day was very important."

In August 1961, Nash participated in a picket line to protest a local supermarket's refusal to hire blacks. When local white youths started egging the picket line and punching various people, police intervened. They arrested 15 people, only five of whom were the white attackers. All but one of the blacks who were jailed accepted the $5 bail and were freed. But Nash stayed. The 23-year-old activist had insisted on her arrest with the other blacks, and once in jail, refused bail.

Nash was arrested dozens of times for her activities. She spent 30 days in a South Carolina jail after protesting segregation in Rock Hill, in February 1961. In 1962, although she was four months pregnant with her daughter Sherri, she faced a two-year prison sentence in Mississippi for contributing to the delinquency of minors whom she had encouraged to become Freedom Riders and ride on the buses. Despite her pregnancy, she was ready to serve her time with the possibility of her daughter's being born in jail.

In Lee County, Georgia a black teenager named James Crawford joined SNCC and took black people to the county courthouse to vote. When he took a black woman to the deputy registrar the following conversation occurred:

Registrar: What do you want?
Crawford: I brought this lady down to register.
Registrar: (after giving the woman a card to fill out and sending her outside in the hall) Why did you bring this lady down here?
Crawford: Because she wants to be a first class citizen like y'all.
Registrar: Who are you to bring people down to register?
Crawford: It's my job.
Registrar: Suppose you get two bullets in your head right now?
Crawford: I got to die anyhow.
Registrar: If I don't do it, I can get somebody else to do it.
Registrar: Are you scared?
Crawford: No.
Registrar: Suppose somebody came in that door and shoot you in the back of the head right now. What would you do?
Crawford: I couldn't do nothing. If they shoot me in the back of the head there are people coming from all over the world.
Registrar: What people?
Crawford: The people I work for.

In 1961, John Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. The group of seven blacks and six whites planned to ride on interstate buses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans to challenge the policies of Southern states along the route that had imposed segregated seating on the buses, which violated federal policy for interstate transportation. The "Freedom Ride," originated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and revived by James Farmer and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the states in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which held segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955) that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel. The ICC failed to enforce its ruling, and Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South. The Freedom Rides revealed the passivity of the local, state, and federal governments in the face of violence against law-abiding citizens. The project was publicized and organizers had notified the Department of Justice about it. It relied upon the Alabama police to protect the riders, even though the state was known for notorious racism, and did not undertake actions except assigning FBI agents to record incidents. After extreme violence broke out in South Carolina and Alabama, the Kennedy Administration called for a "cooling-off" period, with a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

The Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner, Bull Connor, together with Police Sergeant Tom Cook (an avid Ku Klux Klan supporter), organized violence against the Freedom Riders with local Klan chapters. The pair made plans to bring the Ride to an end in Alabama. They assured Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informer and member of Eastview Klavern #13 (the most violent Klan group in Alabama), that the mob would have fifteen minutes to attack the Freedom Riders without any arrests being made. The plan was to allow an initial assault in Anniston with a final assault taking place in Birmingham.

On Sunday, May 14, 1961, Mother's Day, in Anniston, Alabama, a mob of Klansmen, some still in church attire, attacked the first of the two Greyhound buses. The driver tried to leave the station, but he was blocked until KKK members slashed its tires. The mob forced the crippled bus to stop several miles outside town and then threw a firebomb into it. As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, intending to burn the riders to death. Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank or an undercover state investigator who was brandishing a revolver caused the mob to retreat, and the riders escaped the bus. The mob beat the riders after they got out. Warning shots which were fired into the air by highway patrolmen were the only thing which prevented the riders from being lynched.

Some injured riders were taken to Anniston Memorial Hospital. That night, the hospitalized Freedom Riders, most of whom had been refused care, were removed from the hospital at 2 am, because the staff feared the mob outside the hospital. The local civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth organized several cars of black citizens to rescue the injured Freedom Riders in defiance of the white supremacists. The black people were under the leadership of Colonel Stone Johnson and were openly armed as they arrived at the hospital, protecting the Freedom Riders from the mob. Shuttlesworth took in the Freedom Riders at the Bethel Baptist Church, allowing them to recuperate after the violence that had occurred earlier in the day.

When the Trailways bus reached Anniston and pulled in at the terminal an hour after the Greyhound bus was burned, it was boarded by eight Klansmen. They beat the Freedom Riders and left them semi-conscious in the back of the bus.

A mob of white people beat Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama. A picture was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed. When the bus arrived in Birmingham, it was attacked by a mob of KKK members aided and abetted by police under the orders of Commissioner Connor. As the riders exited the bus, they were beaten by the mob with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains. Among the attacking Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant. White Freedom Riders were singled out for especially frenzied beatings; James Peck required more than 50 stitches to the wounds in his head. Peck was taken to Carraway Methodist Medical Center, which refused to treat him; he was later treated at Jefferson Hillman Hospital.

On the afternoon of that same Sunday, the second bus arrived at Birmingham's Trailways station, with James Peck as the captain of this leg. Peck, a 46-year-old descendant of the Peck & Peck New York retail family and one of the two Harvard alums on the ride, had participated in CORE'S 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, where he was surprised by the level of tolerance towards integration among drivers and passengers. However, fourteen years later, he faced a hostile group of white men in sports shirts, who carried lead pipes hidden in paper bags. Peck challenged them, declaring that they would have to kill him before hurting his fellow Freedom Riders. Despite his brave words, he was attacked and severely beaten by five men in an alley. The attackers used a Coke bottle, which was a typical weapon for southern vigilantes. Peck lost consciousness within seconds and needed 53 stitches to close his exposed skull. Meanwhile, inside the station, the Klansmen violently assaulted the Freedom Riders and anyone else who tried to stop them, including a news photographer who arrived at the scene.

When reports of the bus burning and beatings reached the US Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, he urged restraint on the part of Freedom Riders and sent an assistant, John Seigenthaler, to Alabama to try to calm the situation.

After the severe attacks, CORE's Executive Director James Farmer Jr., a veteran of CORE's original 1947 Freedom Rides, was hesitant to continue them. Nash talked with the students of the Nashville Student Movement and argued that, "We can't let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead." Nash remained adamant that they not send a message to the public that civil rights efforts could be stopped with violence. As the violence escalated and bus drivers began to refuse service to the Riders due to the dangers, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became involved and worked to keep the Rides going. Kennedy called the Alabama governor and the Greyhound bus company to implore them to allow the Rides to continue. Kennedy insisted that his special assistant John Seigenthaler travel to Alabama to get directly involved in the matter. Seigenthaler informed the reluctant Alabama governor that it was the government's duty to protect these citizens during the Freedom Rides. Nash spoke with Seigenthaler on the phone, and Seigenthaler warned her that the Freedom Rides could result in death and violence for participants. She responded, "We know someone will be killed, but we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence." Nash explained to Seigenthaler that she and other students had already signed their wills. John Lewis, who had just returned from the Freedom Ride, agreed to continue it, as did other students. A contingent of activists from New Orleans CORE also participated. Nash believed that if Southern violence were allowed to halt the Freedom Rides the movement would be set back years. She pushed to find replacements to resume the rides. On May 17, a new set of riders, 10 students from Nashville who were active in the Nashville Student Movement, took a bus to Birmingham, where they were arrested by Bull Connor and jailed. The students kept their spirits up in jail by singing freedom songs. Out of frustration, Connor drove them back up to the Tennessee line and dropped them off, saying, "I just couldn't stand their singing." They immediately returned to Birmingham.

When Nash was bringing a batch of students to Birmingham to continue the Ride, she telephoned Birmingham activist Fred Shuttlesworth to inform him. He responded to her sternly: "Young lady, do you know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?" Nash assured him that she did and that that would not stop her from continuing the ride. After gathering the final list of Riders, she placed a phone call to Shuttlesworth. They knew their phone line had been tapped by local police, so they worked out a set of coded messages related to, of all things, poultry. For instance, "roosters" were substituted for male Freedom Riders, "hens" for female Riders and so on. When Nash called Shuttlesworth again on Wednesday morning to tell him "The chickens are boxed," he knew that the Freedom Riders were on their way.

On May 20, 1961, the Riders left Birmingham for Montgomery with the promise of protection from the federal government, including police escorts and planes flying overhead. After about 40 miles, all signs of protection disappeared, and the Riders were subjected to a violent, angry mob armed with makeshift weapons such as pipes and bricks. Both white and black Riders were injured by the mob, including special assistant John Seigenthaler who exited his car to help one of the female Riders who was being beaten.

In answer to SNCC's call, Freedom Riders from across the Eastern US joined John Lewis and Hank Thomas, the two young SNCC members of the original Ride, who had remained in Birmingham. On May 19, they attempted to resume the ride, but, terrified by the howling mob surrounding the bus depot, the drivers refused. Harassed and besieged by the mob, the riders waited all night for a bus.

Under intense public pressure from the Kennedy administration, Greyhound was forced to provide a driver. After direct intervention by Byron White of the Attorney General's office, Alabama Governor John Patterson reluctantly promised to protect the bus from KKK mobs and snipers on the road between Birmingham and Montgomery. On the morning of May 20, the Freedom Ride resumed, with the bus carrying the riders traveling toward Montgomery at 90 miles an hour, protected by a contingent of the Alabama State Highway Patrol.

The Highway Patrol abandoned the bus and riders at the Montgomery city limits. At the Montgomery Greyhound station on South Court Street, a white mob awaited. They beat the Freedom Riders with baseball bats and iron pipes. The local police allowed the beatings to go on uninterrupted. Again, white Freedom Riders were singled out for particularly brutal beatings. Reporters and news photographers were attacked first and their cameras destroyed, but one reporter took a photo later of Jim Zwerg in the hospital, showing how he was beaten and bruised. Seigenthaler, a Justice Department official, was beaten and left unconscious lying in the street. Ambulances refused to take the wounded to the hospital. Local black residents rescued them, and a number of the Freedom Riders were hospitalized.

On the following night, Sunday, May 21, more than 1,500 people packed into Reverend Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church to honor the Freedom Riders. Among the speakers were Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had led the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Farmer. Outside, a mob of more than 3,000 white people attacked the black attendees, with a handful of the United States Marshals Service protecting the church from assault and fire bombs. With city and state police making no effort to restore order, the civil rights leaders appealed to the President for protection. President Kennedy threatened to intervene with federal troops if the governor would not protect the people. Governor Patterson forestalled that by finally ordering the Alabama National Guard to disperse the mob, and the Guard reached the church in the early morning.

In a commemorative Op-Ed piece in 2011, Bernard Lafayette remembered the mob breaking windows of the church with rocks and setting off tear gas canisters. He recounted heroic action by King. After learning that black taxi drivers were arming and forming a group to rescue the people inside, he worried that more violence would result. He selected ten volunteers, who promised non-violence, to escort him through the white mob, which parted to let King and his escorts pass as they marched two by two. King went out to the black drivers and asked them to disperse, to prevent more violence. King and his escorts formally made their way back inside the church, unmolested.In 1964, SNCC opened Freedom Schools, launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer for voter education and registration. Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts for Freedom Summer, a campaign to register black voters in Mississippi and to engage college student activists in aiding the campaign. Lewis traveled the country, encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people vote in Mississippi, which had the lowest number of black voters and strong resistance to the movement.

The next day, Monday, May 22, more Freedom Riders arrived in Montgomery to continue the rides through the South and replace the wounded riders still in the hospital. Behind the scenes, the Kennedy administration arranged a deal with the governors of Alabama and Mississippi, where the governors agreed that state police and the National Guard would protect the Riders from mob violence. In return, the federal government would not intervene to stop local police from arresting Freedom Riders for violating segregation ordinances when the buses arrived at the depots.

On Wednesday morning, May 24, Freedom Riders boarded buses for the journey to Jackson, Mississippi. Surrounded by Highway Patrol and the National Guard, the buses arrived in Jackson without incident, but the riders were immediately arrested when they tried to use the white-only facilities at the Tri-State Trailways depot. The third bus arrived at the Jackson Greyhound station early on May 28, and its Freedom Riders were arrested.

In Montgomery, the next round of Freedom Riders, including the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Gaylord Brewster Noyce, and southern ministers Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, Wyatt Tee Walker, and others were similarly arrested for violating local segregation ordinances.

This established a pattern followed by subsequent Freedom Rides, most of which traveled to Jackson, where the Riders were arrested and jailed. Their strategy became one of trying to fill the jails. Once the Jackson and Hinds County jails were filled to overflowing, the state transferred the Freedom Riders to the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary (known as Parchman Farm). Abusive treatment there included placement of Riders in the Maximum Security Unit (Death Row), issuance of only underwear, no exercise, and no mail privileges. When the Freedom Riders refused to stop singing freedom songs, prison officials took away their mattresses, sheets, and toothbrushes. More Freedom Riders arrived from across the country, and at one time, more than 300 were held in Parchman Farm.

The Kennedys called for a "cooling off period" and condemned the Rides as unpatriotic because they embarrassed the nation on the world stage at the height of the Cold War. James Farmer, head of CORE, responded to Kennedy saying, "We have been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off any more, we'd be in a deep freeze." The Soviet Union criticized the United States for its racism and the attacks on the Riders.

In mid-June, a group of Freedom Riders had scheduled to end their ride in Tallahassee, Florida, with plans to fly home from the Tallahassee Municipal Airport. They were provided a police escort to the airport from the city's bus facilities. At the airport, they decided to eat at the Savarin restaurant that was marked "For Whites Only." The owners decided to close rather than serve the mixed group of Freedom Riders. Although the restaurant was privately owned, it was leased from the county government. Canceling their plane reservations, the Riders decided to wait until the restaurant re-opened so they could be served. They waited until 11:00 pm that night and returned the following day. During this time, hostile crowds gathered, threatening violence. On June 16, 1961, the Freedom Riders were arrested in Tallahassee for unlawful assembly. That arrest and subsequent trial became known as Dresner v. City of Tallahassee, named for Israel S. Dresner, a rabbi among the group arrested. The Riders were convicted of unlawful assembly by the Municipal Court of Tallahassee, and the convictions were affirmed in the Florida Circuit Court of the Second Judicial District. The convictions were appealed to the US Supreme Court in 1963, which refused to hear the case based on jurisdictional reasons. In 1964, the Tallahassee 10 protesters returned to the city to serve brief jail sentences.

The Freedom Riders in Monroe were brutally attacked by white supremacists with the approval of local police. On August 27, James Forman – SNCC's Executive Secretary – was struck unconscious with the butt of a rifle and taken to jail with numerous other demonstrators. Police and white supremacists roamed the town shooting at black civilians, who returned the gunfire. Robert F. Williams fortified the black neighborhood against attack and in the process briefly detained a white couple who had gotten lost there. The police accused Williams of kidnapping and called in the state militia and FBI to arrest him, in spite of the couple being quickly released. Certain he would be lynched, Williams fled and eventually found refuge in Cuba. Movement lawyers, eager to disengage from the situation, successfully urged the Freedom Riders not to practice the normal "jail-no bail" strategy in Monroe. Local officials, also apparently eager to de-escalate, found demonstrators guilty but immediately suspended their sentences. One Freedom Rider however, John Lowry, went on trial for the kidnapping case, along with several associates of Robert F. Williams, including Mae Mallory. Monroe legal defense committees were popular around the country, but ultimately Lowry and Mallory served prison sentences. In 1965, their convictions were vacated due to the exclusion of black citizens from the jury selection.

In 1962 James Meredith, a black man, enrolled in the previously all-white University of Mississippi. In spite of his excellent military and educational background the State of Mississippi fought to block his enrollment. The US Supreme Court decided that he could attend the university, and the Kennedy administration pressured the state to allow this to happen. US Marshals and the US Border Patrol protected Meredith when he enrolled.

Klan Cross Burning

The Ole Miss riot of 1962 left two dead and 300 injured. The mob assaulted reporters and others, burned, looted and hijacked vehicles. Racist rioters threw Molotov cocktails and acid at marshals. They attacked marshals twice with a bulldozer and once with a fire engine. Then they fired bullets. They burned a general's car, and he escaped amid gunfire. Kennedy sent 3,000 troops to end the violence.

Fred Shuttlesworth was a Baptist minister and a civil rights activist. On December 25, 1956, an attempt was made on Shuttlesworth's life by placing sixteen sticks of dynamite under his bedroom window. He escaped unhurt although his house was heavily damaged. A police officer, who also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, told Shuttlesworth as he came out of his home, "If I were you I'd get out of town as quick as I could." Shuttlesworth told him to tell the Klan that he was not leaving and "I wasn't raised to run."

When Shuttlesworth and his wife Ruby attempted to enroll their children in John Herbert Phillips High School, a previously all-white public school in Birmingham in the summer of 1957, a mob of Klansmen attacked them, with the police nowhere to be seen. The mob beat Shuttlesworth with "chains, baseball bats and brass knuckles, and his wife was stabbed in the hips." His assailants included Bobby Frank Cherry, who six years later was involved in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. Shuttlesworth drove himself and his wife to the hospital, where he told his children to "always forgive."

In 1958, Shuttlesworth survived another attempt on his life. A church member standing guard saw a bomb that had been placed beside the church and quickly moved it to the street before it went off.

Shuttlesworth invited SCLC and King to come to Birmingham in 1963 to lead the campaign to desegregate it through mass demonstrations–what Shuttlesworth called "Project C," the "C" standing for "confrontation." While Shuttlesworth was willing to negotiate with political and business leaders for peaceful abandonment of segregation, he believed, with good reason, that they would not take any steps that they were not forced to take. He suspected their promises could not be trusted until they acted on them.

One of the 1963 demonstrations he led resulted in Shuttlesworth's being convicted of parading without a permit from the City Commission. On appeals the case reached the US Supreme Court. In its 1969 decision of Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, the Supreme Court reversed Shuttlesworth's conviction, determining that circumstances indicated that the parade permit was denied not to control traffic, as the state contended, but to censor ideas.

In 1963, Shuttlesworth was set on provoking a crisis that would force the authorities and business leaders to recalculate the cost of segregation. This occurred when James Bevel initiated and organized the young students of the city to stand up for their rights. This plan was helped immeasurably by Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety and the most powerful public official in Birmingham, who used Klan groups to heighten violence against blacks in the city. Even as the business class was beginning to see the end of segregation, Connor was determined to maintain it. While Connor's direct police tactics intimidated black citizens of Birmingham, they also created a split between Connor and the business leaders. They resented both the damage Connor was doing to Birmingham's image around the world and his high-handed attitude toward them. Bevel organized a Children's Crusade on May 2-3, 1963 where black children filled the jails, were set free, and often went back to jail, fighting against segregation. The televised images of Connor's directing handlers of police dogs to attack young unarmed demonstrators and firefighters using hoses to knock down children had a profound effect on American citizens' view of the civil rights struggle, and helped lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1963 Alabama governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama to block the admission of black students Vivian Malone and James Hood, despite the order of a federal judge allowing them to attend. Kennedy federalized the Alabama US National Guard and desegregated the University.

Wallace's "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" speech was written by Asa "Ace" Carter. Under the pseudonym of supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, he wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), a Western novel that was adapted into a 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood that was added to the National Film Registry, and The Education of Little Tree (1976), a best-selling, award-winning book which was marketed as a memoir but which turned out to be fiction. In 1976, following the success of The Rebel Outlaw and its film adaptation, The New York Times revealed Forrest Carter was actually Asa Carter, a Ku Klux Klan organizer and segregationist.

On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy said the following about civil rights:.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

King wondered why the Kennedy administration was moving at a "horse and buggy pace" on civil rights. He didn't know that J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI, equated civil rights with communism.

In 1954, following the US Supreme Court ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, civil rights leader Medgar Evers applied to the state-supported University of Mississippi Law School to challenge that practice in the state. His application was rejected due to his race, as the flagship school had long been segregated. Evers submitted his application as part of a test case by the NAACP. On November 24, 1954, Evers was named as the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi. In this position, he helped organize boycotts and set up new local chapters of the NAACP. Evers was also involved with James Meredith's efforts to enroll in the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s. Evers also encouraged Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr. in his organizing of the Biloxi wade-ins from 1959 to 1963, protests against segregation of the city's public beaches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Evers conducted actions to help integrate Jackson's privately owned buses and tried to integrate the public parks. Evers led voter registration drives and used boycotts to integrate Leake County schools and the Mississippi State Fair. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. Ten days later, Evers was nearly run over by a car after he came out of the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi.

On June 12, 1963, Evers was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan member and white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go," Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Eddystone Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet passed through his heart. Initially thrown to the ground by the impact of the shot, Evers rose and staggered 30 feet before collapsing outside his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was the first to find him. Evers was taken to the local hospital in Jackson, where he was initially refused entry because of his race. Evers' family explained who he was, and he was admitted; Evers died in the hospital 50 minutes later, three weeks before his 38th birthday. Evers was the first black man to be admitted to an all-white hospital in Mississippi.

Beckwith was tried twice on a murder charge in Mississippi in 1964. The all-white male juries each ended in hung juries, and Beckwith went free. In 1994, based on new evidence, he was tried again. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001 at the age of 80.

Beckwith tried to ride his infamy into public office when he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1967, telling crowds that he believed in "absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule." In 1973, New Orleans police caught him with a ticking time bomb that he planned to use to blow up a Jewish leader's home, and he went to prison. He blamed his conviction on the "little Jewish prosecutor" and "n- women" on the jury. In a 1990 interview, he called the white Citizens' Council, created to preserve Jim Crow ways, "the first ray of light Dixie had seen since we fought through Reconstruction and captured the right to vote, the right of white people to run the South." He pointed to his Bible and said, "N-s are beasts. It says so in here in the book of Adam." He bragged about Mississippi having more churches per capita than any other state. "That's a fact - till the n-s started having all those holy roller meetings and NAACP meetings in those churches. Then they began to burn down." Then he said, "You know, n-s are careless with matches," before erupting in laughter. As for the NAACP leader he killed, Beckwith called him a "mongrel" and said, "God hates mongrels." Beckwith bragged that God was on his side. He said he served as a minister in the Christian Identity Movement, a white supremacist religion that teaches Adam and Eve were white people. Back in the 1950s, the Liberty Lobby joined forces with the white Citizens' Council, trying to get Black Americans shipped to Africa. Beckwith supported this. He said he believed that those of African descent were "mud people" who had no souls. "What is a n- but a heathen? He's not a Christian. After you turn him into a literate Christian, he's still a n-." He made no secret either of his hatred of Jews, calling them the offspring of Satan and claiming they had satanic powers. One day, white people, whom he called the "true Israelites," would destroy these Jews, he said. "We Israelites have more firepower."

On August 28, 1963, the March on Washington brought around 250,000 people to Washington, D.C. to protest for civil rights. The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. In his I Have a Dream speech King said:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men yes, black men as well as white men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.

16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

While King's March on Washington inspired millions, some black leaders were more militant. Malcom X was a black leader who did not believe in nonviolence. He said that the March "was a sellout. It was a takeover." Commenting on the March on Washington, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms said, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."

In August 1963, King was in prison for his work on civil rights and wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail in response to white religious leaders who said he should be patient and wait for progress. He said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

On September 15, 1963 the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four black girls at a Sunday school. The girls killed were Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair. Carol McNair was eleven when she died, and the rest were fourteen.

In King's Loving Your Enemies sermon he said that "hate distorts the personality of the hater" and that love "has within it a redemptive power."

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, assumed the presidency. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination, but he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby two days later. Johnson saw it as his mission to complete Kennedy's attempts at civil rights.

In 1964 the US Supreme Court issued its New York Times v. Sullivan decision. The New York Times published an advertisement by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin criticizing the police in Montgomery, Alabama and elsewhere for mistreatment of civil rights protesters. The ad had factual inaccuracies, such as which song was sung by protesters, how many times King was arrested and so on. Before the Sullivan decision the only defense against a defamation lawsuit was to prove that the information was true. This precedent began with the prosecution of John Peter Zenger in 1735, although the precedent was only accepted years after Zenger's trial. Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan was never named in Rustin's ad, but sued for defamation because he felt that opposition to segregation implied defamation against anyone who believed in segregation, including himself. Both a lower court and the Alabama Supreme Court agreed with Sullivan, and awarded him $500,000.00 in damages. The US Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court ruling, and held that a public figure had to prove actual malice to win a defamation lawsuit. This decision was a major victory both for the First Amendment and for civil rights. Before this decision many Southern states sued for defamation to shut down media criticism of Southern opposition to civil rights.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

It was nearly midnight on February 28, 1964, when 37-year-old Walker turned his cream-colored 1961 Impala onto Poor House Road, six miles north of Woodville. The Black man had just finished his shift at integrated International Paper in Natchez and was headed home to his wife and five children. Three hundred yards after he pulled onto the gravel road, a mob of Klansmen and perhaps other white men stopped his car and opened fire with their shotguns. The pellets tore Walker's face apart. When he was found the next day, he was dead, all the windows had been shot out, and part of the steering wheel had been blown off.

Catherine Walker Jones was 13 when she saw the body of her father, Clifton Earl Walker, in a blood-soaked Impala with holes in the driver's side door and holes in the passenger's side door. "He had been dead 14 hours," she said. "That's a bittersweet memory in my mind."

FBI and congressional records show the Mississippi Highway Patrol wanted to arrest then-Wilkinson County Constable Gordon "Bud" Geter and Klansman Ed Fuller, but then-District Attorney Lennox Forman refused to charge them. The killing of Walker was part of a series of attacks on black men in southwest Mississippi. Dozens of black men had been whipped, beaten and robbed by white men wearing hoods or masks. Some injuries were so severe the black men had to be hospitalized. The attacks were believed to be the work of the White Knights, the most violent white supremacist group in the nation at the time. The White Knights are believed to have killed at least 10 people in Mississippi.

On June 21, 1964, three Civil Rights Movement activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by local members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Before they were killed they were trying to register black residents of Mississippi to vote. They talked with the congregation of a black church that had been burned. Many other black churches in Mississippi had also been burned. They had been arrested earlier in the day for speeding, and after being released were followed by local law enforcement and others, all affiliated with the Klan. After being followed for some time, they were abducted by the group, brought to a secluded location, and shot. They were then buried in an earthen dam. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote. Goodman and Schwerner were white, and Chaney was black. The remains of eight other black men were also found in Mississippi.

Together with SCLC, Nash and James Bevel eventually implemented the Selma to Montgomery marches, a series of protests for voting rights in Alabama in early 1965. They were initiated and organized by James Bevel, who was running SCLC's Selma Voting Rights Movement. Marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge on their way to the state capital of Montgomery, but after they left the city limits, they were attacked by county police and Alabama state troopers armed with clubs and tear gas, determined to break up the peaceful march. Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lewis, who had knelt to pray, had his skull fractured, but he was aided in escaping across the bridge to Brown Chapel, a church in Selma that served as the movement's headquarters. Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot in the stomach while trying to protect his mother during a confrontation between Alabama state troopers and around 400 unarmed civil rights protesters. He died eight days later. The images were broadcast over national television, shocking the nation. James Reeb was a white American Unitarian Universalist minister. While participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches actions in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he was murdered by white segregationists and white supremacists, dying of head injuries in the hospital two days after being severely beaten. Three men were tried for Reeb's murder but were acquitted by an all-white jury. Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist from Michigan, was shot dead by members of the Klan as a traitor to her race. She was driving back from where she took fellow activists to the Montgomery airport when she was shot. Soon after this, President Lyndon Johnson publicly announced that it was "wrong-deadly wrong-to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country." The initiative culminated in passage by Congress of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., known in Witness Protection as Thomas Neil Moore, was a paid informant and agent provocateur for the FBI. As an informant, he infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, as part of the FBI's COINTELPRO project, to monitor and disrupt the Klan's activities. Rowe participated in violent Klan activity against African Americans and civil rights groups. From 1965 until his death, Rowe was a figure of recurring controversy after he testified against fellow Klansmen who were accused of killing Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a civil rights volunteer. He was accused of being an accessory to the murder. He was involved in the attack on the Freedom Riders and also accused of involvement in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Given immunity, he was never convicted of any wrongdoing. Rowe admitted to many of these violent acts in his 1976 autobiography, My Undercover Years with the Ku Klux Klan, and in confession and testimony given to the United States Senate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The legislation began with President Kennedy and was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. The Act bans segregation in schools, public accommodations and employment, and prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina, refused to obey the law. Students from a nearby black college protested. State troopers fired on the demonstrators, killing three and wounding 28 in the Orangeburg Massacre. Hoover's FBI falsified information about the students to help the troopers with their defense.

The Food Stamp Act of 1964 made permanent a pilot program that began in 1961. It provides food assistance to low income Americans. Now the program is called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which resulted in the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. He enacted the Higher Education Act of 1965, which established federally insured student loans.

On August, 1965 President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act prohibits any voting rule that abridges the right to vote based on race, color or language. It bans literacy tests and requires bilingual ballots. The Act required preclearance of changes to voting rules in certain mostly Southern areas. The preclearance requirement was eliminated by US conservative Supreme Court justices in their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed more immigration from countries outside of Western Europe. The result was an increase in immigration from Asia and Africa. For four decades immigration quotas were based on eugenics, which is a racist pseudo-science based on the belief that whites are superior to other races. The Act removed eugenics from immigration quotas. Fifty years after the immigration reforms of 1965 the white share of the population went from 84 percent to 62 percent.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1965. Part of Johnson's "War on Poverty," the act has been one of the most far-reaching laws affecting education passed by the United States Congress, and was reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The act provides federal funding to primary and secondary education, with funds authorized for professional development, instructional materials, resources to support educational programs, and parental involvement promotion. The act emphasizes equal access to education, aiming to shorten the achievement gaps between students by providing federal funding to support schools with children from impoverished families.

The 1966 US Supreme Court Miranda v. Arizona decision held that Americans have a right to be told what their constitutional rights are upon arrest. Specifically, it requires that people who are arrested be told about their right to remain silent, and about their right to have a lawyer when questioned.

The US Supreme Court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision allowed interracial marriage.

The "long, hot summer of 1967" refers to a period of widespread racial unrest across major American cities during the summer of 1967, where over 150 riots erupted, primarily fueled by deep-seated frustrations regarding police brutality, poverty, and racial inequality within black communities. The most destructive riots of the summer took place in July, in Detroit and Newark;

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibits housing discrimination based on race, religion or national origin. Since 1974 it also prohibits discrimination based on sex. Since 1988 the Act prohibits housing discrimination against people with disabilities, families with children and pregnant women.

As a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement, many Southern whites joined the Republican Party, and minorities joined the Democratic Party. By the late 1980s Republicans controlled much of the South. So, events ranging from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond realigned the two major political parties. Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

In 1968 James Earl Ray was accused of assassinating Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee. In the same year, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, California.

Because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War Johnson chose not to seek reelection.

In 1969 Maya Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The autobiography describes the author's life growing up in the Old South as a black girl. She described family members hiding from the Klan and the underfunded segregated school she went to as a child. She said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." In addition to the book, she wrote the poem Caged Bird, a metaphor for her own experience. The poem is as follows:

A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

James Strom Thurmond Sr. (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to 2003. Before his 49 years as a senator, he served as the 103rd governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951. Thurmond was officially a member of the Democratic Party in the Senate until 1964, when he joined the Republican Party. He had earlier run for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate in opposition to Democratic president Harry Truman, receiving over a million votes and winning four states. During his Dixiecrat campaign he said,

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

A staunch opponent of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, Thurmond completed what was then the longest Senate speech at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957; it was surpassed by Senator Cory Booker's speech in April 2025. In the 1960s, Thurmond voted against both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite his support for racial segregation, Thurmond denied the accusation that he was a racist by insisting he was a supporter of states' rights and an opponent of excessive federal authority. Thurmond switched parties ahead of the 1964 United States presidential election, saying that the Democratic Party no longer represented people like him, and endorsed Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, who also opposed the Civil Rights Act. By the 1970s, Thurmond started to moderate his stance on race, but continued to defend his prior support for segregation based on states' rights and Southern society at the time. With Thurmond's party switch, he became the first Republican US Senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction in 1879.

Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was a leader in the conservative movement. He served as a senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003. On domestic social issues, Helms opposed civil rights, disability rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, access to abortions, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the 1990 election the North Carolina GOP and others mailed over 125,000 notices almost exclusively to black voters telling them that they were not eligible to vote and warned that if they went to the polls they could be prosecuted for voter fraud. At the behest of several civil rights groups and the Democratic National Party, the US Department of Justice sued the Helms campaign, the NC GOP, four lobbying firms and two individual lobbyists. Thomas Farr, campaign manager for Helms, disavowed any knowledge of the dirty tricks, which was shown to be false when his hand written notes were discovered. The affected parties acknowledged and agreed to the Justice Departments' ruling and were forced to desist from any other such activities. Helms aired a late-running television commercial titled "Hands," also known as 'White Hands,' that showed a white man's hands crumpling up an employment rejection notice while a voiceover said, "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is." Another Helms television commercial accused Gantt of running a "secret campaign" in homosexual communities and of being committed to "mandatory gay rights laws" including "requiring local schools to hire gay teachers." Helms won the election with 1,087,331 votes (52.5 percent) to Gantt's 981,573 (47.4 percent).

George Corley Wallace Jr. (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was the 45th and longest-serving governor of Alabama (1963–1967; 1971–1979; 1983–1987). Wallace is remembered for his staunch segregationist and populist views although in the late 1970s he moderated his views on race, renouncing his support for segregation. During Wallace's tenure as governor of Alabama, he promoted "industrial development, low taxes, and trade schools." Wallace unsuccessfully sought the United States presidency as a Democrat three times, and once with the American Independent Party, in which he carried five states in the 1968 election. Wallace opposed desegregation and supported the policies of "Jim Crow" during the Civil Rights Movement, declaring in his 1963 inaugural address that he stood for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever."

Project MKUltra was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA's abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.

Project MKUltra began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects' consent. One scientist was given such a high dose of LSD that he jumped out of a New York hotel window to his death. Additionally, other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.

Project MKUltra was preceded by Project Artichoke. It was organized through the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. The program engaged in illegal activities, including the use of US and Canadian citizens as unwitting test subjects. MKUltra's scope was broad, with activities carried out under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions aside from the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated using front organizations, although some top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement.

MKUltra was inspired by attempts by the Nazis to develop a truth serum at Auschwitz and Dachau death camps during World War II. In areas under American control in the early 1950s in Europe and East Asia, mostly Japan, West Germany and the Philippines, the CIA created secret detention centers (black sites) so that the US could avoid criminal prosecution. The CIA captured people suspected of being enemy agents and other people it deemed "expendable" to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. The prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.

The CIA was behind assassination plots, including attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba. A CIA operative at an army base in the Canal Zone gave a container with the African swine fever virus to anti-Castro Cubans, who brought the disease to Cuba in 1971. This led to the slaughter of 500,000 pigs. Also, the CIA and the Committee of Forty headed by Henry Kissinger worked to destabilize the Marxist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. When the American ambassador to Chile, David Popper, accused the Chilean junta of violating human rights, Kissinger told Popper to "cut out the political science lectures." The CIA orchestrated the bombing of Laos. The FBI forged letters, engaged in burglaries (92 between 1960 and 1966) and opened mail illegally. The FBI also played a role in the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.