Spying on the Queen of Soul

[marmar]

Spying on the Queen of Soul
For 40 years, the FBI surveilled Aretha Franklin and other Black ‘radicals.’ We got the recently declassified files.

By Jenn Dize and Afeni Evans on Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 4:00 am




(Detroit Metro Times) It took four years for the FBI to release its file on Aretha Franklin. Requested via the Freedom of Information Act in 2018, the heavily redacted documents are filled with racist language and extreme surveillance of the late Detroit-based singer and activist. Based on the agency’s admissions, Franklin never did anything wrong. The overstepping surveillance revealed has shocked the nation, but strikes particularly close to home for Michiganders.

With some documents newly declassified earlier this year, the 270-page file spans the years 1967 to 2007 and shows how the agency subjected the Queen of Soul to the sort of surveillance and interference that was placed on contemporaries like Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, and Angela Davis via an FBI program designed to, among other things, infiltrate, surveil, and disrupt the civil rights movement — and Black lives.

First obtained by this journalist and published in Rolling Stone, documents in the files are written with a clear distrust of the Queen of Soul by the agency, show intense surveillance of her movements and infiltration of Black spaces, and use racist terminology throughout. The FBI seemed intent on linking Franklin to “militant Black power,” radicalism, extremism, and racial violence, according to the documents. Some are questioning how much has changed in the agency’s tactics in recent years, based on available evidence.

....(snip)....

Detroit’s shining star for civil rights

Aretha Franklin was part of Detroit’s fabric from a young age, and quickly became an international sensation. The late Congressman John Lewis, who passed away two years following Franklin’s 2018 death, said, “If it hadn’t been for Aretha — and others, but particularly Aretha — the Civil Rights Movement would have been a bird without wings.” It was this notoriety as a popular Black singer, along with Franklin’s monetary and physical support of the civil rights movement, that seemingly raised the FBI’s suspicion.

Of her 1967 track “Respect,” Franklin wrote in her book Aretha: From These Roots, “It [reflected] the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher — everyone wanted respect. It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance.” ....................(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/music/spying-on-the-queen-of-soul-31666094

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. If there was ever an actual "Deep State", it was the 50's and 60's FBI/CIA

And this is exactly what they were ACTUALLY concerned with.

Along with Socialism, of course.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. It continued through 2007!

Wonder if they actually kept track of KKK and other real, domestic terrorists.