418 ChaPter^8
words “Hell No, We Won’t Go”–Carmichael’s advice, like Paul Robeson’s
after World War II, to young Blacks to refuse to serve in the military–written
on them. “From Mississippi and Harlem to... Vietnam,” he explained, “a pow-
erful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and
voiceless colored masses.” Within the United States, he added, the main barrier
to black progress was “a federal government that cares far more about winning
the war on the Vietnamese than the war on poverty... which is unwilling to
curb the misuse of white power but quick to condemn Black Power.”
Carmichael had a point. Up to that time most Americans could support
the Civil Rights movement as a simple matter of justice and fairness. But
Black Power militants—with their advocacy of self-defensive violence, revolu-
tion, and separatism, and their solidarity with Vietnamese, Cuban, and African
Revolutionaries—terrified Whites, and many established African American
leaders as well. More so, the government intensified its surveillance of so-
called black subversives. Bringing back the tactics used in the Red Scare
against so-called Communists, the FBI revived Operation Cointelpro
[Counterintelligence Program] to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or oth-
erwise neutralize” groups such as the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the Nation
of Islam. King himself, especially after publicly denouncing the Vietnam War,FIGuRE 8-8 H. Rap Brown of SNCC at a news conference, 1967