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Alabama Agency Spied On Interracial Couples
Federally sealed files finally made public.
The extent to which America sought to curb racial mixing in its society is still painful almost forty years after the case of Loving Vs Virginia. It was recently revealed that for a period of fifteen years during the 60s and 70s, an Alabama agency secretly tracked the activities of civil rights workers and liberals.
Sam Webb,a history professor at the University of Alabama said, 'they were sort of like an intelligence gathering organization for the extreme right wing. They gathered information from people who they believed were different. Just about everybody was different. If you weren't white and conservative, as far as they were concerned you were some kind of subversive.'
Until now Kept under seal by a federal court order to protect juveniles named in its documents, the final four files of the Alabama Legislative Commission to Preserve the Peace were finally made public this week by state archivists.
The newly released files show that details of a 17-year-old white girl's relationship with a 27-year-old black man was part of a commission investigation into an interracial commune, called Resurrection City, that was raided by Dallas County sheriff's deputies in April 1970. According to the files, the girl's family had her arrested and committed to a mental hospital.
A June 1969 report discusses two white teachers who were reassigned to different schools by the Wilcox County superintendent because they were believed to be dating black men.
The files mostly contain summaries from informants who spied on black civil rights leaders, interracial couples, hippies and suspected communist groups and reported their findings to commission members. Those reports were shared privately with governors and legislators and, on some occasions, were produced for the public with titles such as 'campus unrest.
Among the dozens of groups investigated were the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Panther Party, League for Industrial Democracy, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Source: Dateline Alabama
