1968: The Global Revolutions

By 1968, the FBI had been keeping index cards on suspected communists, and other dissidents, for decades. The Rabble Rouser Index card for Amiri Baraka identifies him as a “Black Nationalist Spokesman” to be kept under surveillance, though agents’ attempt to transcribe his recently adopted Swahili/Arabic name as “Ameer Bardkat” suggests the limits of their ability to understand transformations occurring in black nationalist circles. In 1970, an FBI COINTELPRO action led to the publication of an anonymous article accusing Baraka of conspiring against the Black Panthers.