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Final files of segregation-era snooping agency unsealed

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - The final pages of documents have been unsealed from a segregation-era Alabama agency that secretly tracked the activities of civil rights workers, suspected subversives and interracial couples.

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 made public this week by state archivists.

The files mostly contain summaries from informants whose 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.

"They were sort of like an intelligence gathering organization for the extreme right wing," said Sam Webb, a history professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham, who remembered commission investigators photographing a war protest at the University of Alabama in 1970.

"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," he said.

A larger batch of material was unsealed a decade ago. And archivists who released the final documents Tuesday under a federal court timetable doubt that the complete files were turned over when a lawsuit seeking them was filed in the early 1970s.

Tracey Berezansky, assistant director for government records at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, said the peace commission produced only 6 cubic feet of records.

"This commission was in existence for 15 years. It's our belief there was material purged from these files before the case went to court and the court seized the files," Berezansky said.

Included in the newly released files were details of a 17-year-old white girl's relationship with a 27-year-old black man, part of an investigation into an interracial commune called Resurrection City that was raided by Dallas County deputies in 1970. The girl's family had her arrested and committed to a mental hospital, according to the files.

The commission's informant reported that members of Resurrection City "maintain contact with the Black Panthers and with the Malcolm X Society, among others" and that the members told him they were "dedicated to changing the course of a world gone mad."

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.

Reports from 1969 claimed that Hosea Williams, who helped lead the 1965 march at Selma that became known as "Bloody Sunday," had ties to Black Panthers. The images of marchers clubbed by state troopers at the Selma march also prompted then-state Sen. John Hawkins of Birmingham to write Gov. Albert Brewer about an April 1969 march in Selma to observe the first anniversary of King's assassination: "I hope you will be able to prevent a replay of 1965."

The investigations looked into a wide range of events, ranging from lunchroom brawls between black and white students in city schools to suspected communists making "frequent trips to the Iron Curtain countries."

The informants probably exaggerated their information in trying to convince the commission that the events were linked to militant or communist groups, Berezansky said.

"They wanted to know what was going on or at least what they assumed was going on from the reports, but who knows how truthful the reports coming back were," Berezansky said.

[Last modified August 4, 2005, 01:06:05]