Friendship in the Time of COINTELPRO: Clarence Major and Dingane Joe Goncalves

Abstract

I had to accept the fact that we would never have the openness of friendship I always thought could be possible. . . . Then your card [came] from Nairobi, and I thought once again maybe . . . Pat and I will sit down once and for all and look at why we were not more available to each other all these years. —Audre Lorde to Pat Parker, 6 December 1985 It insists on the irreplaceably rooted nature of friendship, however ethically troubling that may be: the love of the shared and the same. —Alan Bray (259) In the mid-twentieth century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unleashed COINTELPRO (1956–71), a series of counterintelligence operations aimed at crushing American radicalism of every stripe. Already disproportionately victimized by the Bureau, Black writers were particularly impacted by these operations. Following the hiring of J. Edgar Hoover in 1919, “a who’s who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted” by the FBI (Maxwell 3). William J. Maxwell explains: “Poring over novels, stories, essays, poems, and plays as well as political commentary and intercepted correspondence, the FBI acted as a kind of half-buried readers’ bureau with above­ground effects on the making of black art” (5). In the era of COINTELPRO, when Hoover’s fear of a Black political messiah kicked the Bureau into high gear, state surveillance and Black literary culture were intimately entwined.