Historians
have exhaustively documented how African Americans gained access to
electoral politics in the mid-1960s, but few have scrutinized what
happened next, and the small body of work that does consider the
aftermath of the civil rights movement is almost entirely limited to
the Black Power era. In Rumor,
Repression, and Racial Politics,
George Derek Musgrove pushes much further, examining black elected
officials’ allegations of state and news media repression—what
they called “harassment”—to gain new insight into the role of
race in U.S. politics between 1965 and 1995.
Drawing
from untapped sources, including interviews he conducted with
twenty-five sitting and former black members of Congress, Musgrove
tells new stories and reinterprets familiar events. His cast of
characters includes Julian Bond, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Alcee
Hastings, Ronald Dellums, Richard Arrington, and Marion Barry, as
well as white political figures like Newt Gingrich and Jefferson
Sessions. Throughout, Musgrove connects patterns of
surveillance, counterintelligence, and disproportionate investigation
of black elected officials to the broader political culture. In so
doing, he reveals new aspects of the surveillance state of the late
1960s, the rise of adversary journalism and good government reforms
in the wake of Watergate, the official corruption crackdown of the
1980s, and the allure of conspiracy theory to African Americans
seeking to understand the harassment of their elected
leadership.
Moving
past the old debate about whether there was a conscious conspiracy
against black officials, Musgrove explores how the perception of
harassment shaped black political thought in the post–civil rights
era. The result is a field-defining work by a major new intellectual
voice.