Rethinking Repression: New Approaches to Understanding How Police Undermined 20th Century Freedom Movements

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

A defining feature of American empire has been the repression of movements for freedom both inside and outside the mainland United States. This roundtable will assess the “state of the field” in studies of political repression, focused primarily on Black and Puerto Rican freedom movements in the second half of the 20th century. This was the period of Cointelpro, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that disrupted, harassed, and otherwise attacked movements. Though well-known, this roundtable suggests that Cointelpro remains incompletely understood, particularly in its relationship with other forms of repression by other agencies at the national, state, and local levels. Moreover, this roundtable is attuned to differentiations of gender and geography, along with the more typically studied color line, that became weaponized in counterinsurgent forms of state action. Finally, the roundtable will also reconsider typical periodizations, noting that the public disclosure of Cointelpro in the early 1970s did not spell the end of state repression, nor did it hamper efforts at dividing emergent interracial and interethnic solidarities of the 1970s and 1980s. This conversation will highlight new methods, archives, and approaches to studying state repression.

Schrader will begin the roundtable with a set of propositions about the state of the field and suggestions of areas for new research, emphasizing the importance of multiscalar, relational, and comparative approaches for critical thinking that match state agencies’ own multiscalar, relational, and comparative approaches to repression. Blackmer will follow with a rethinking of widely accepted chronologies of state repression within studies of the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th Century. While police militarization and state repression are usually perceived as political responses to urban rebellions and Black Power, the expansion of policing—intended to suppress Black radicalism, enforce white supremacy, and prevent unrest—instead precipitated the uprisings of the 1960s. Ojeda will analyze carpeteo, the police of Puerto Rico’s practice of compiling files against individuals directly or indirectly involved in anticolonial and pro-independence movements and sentiments. She will explore the value of studying repression against anticolonial movements in Puerto Rico from the perspective of regular citizens, those who might not have been active radicals but were still persecuted by the police due to place and circumstance. Bonilla will discuss post–Church Committee paranoia about surveillance in the New Communist Movement. He offers a relational race approach around Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans experiences and strategies in trying to combat surveillance and what that did to their mobilizing and recruiting. Continuing in this vein of expanding the temporal scale of our understanding of repression, Frazier will speak from the perspective of the violence of archives and how we deal with Cointelpro’s more insidious work via historical construction post-1960s. Even as scholars access new archives of repression, these do not necessarily promise any emancipatory politics and, Frazier will argue, must be treated carefully. After all, as Frazier has written of the founding of the United States, “fear of Black rebellion is built into the founding documents which the FBI proports to protect.”

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Stuart Schrader, Johns Hopkins University

Panelists

• Peter Blackmer, Eastern Michigan University

• Eddie Bonilla, Boston College

• Nishani Frazier, North Carolina State University at Raleigh

• Claudia Ojeda Rexach, Brown University

• Stuart Schrader, Johns Hopkins University

Biographical Information

Peter Blackmer is an assistant professor in the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University and alumni of the W.E.B. Du Bois Dept. of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. His work explores the local dynamics and global connections of grassroots Black freedom struggles and urban politics in the 20th and 21st Century United States. His first book, Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long Hot Summers, is scheduled for publication in Fall 2025 with the University of Virginia Press.

Eddie Bonilla is an assistant professor in history at Boston College. Before joining BC, he held postdoctoral fellowships in Ethnic Studies and Latinx Studies at the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh. Eddie received his PhD from Michigan State University in 2019. He is currently working on his book “Homegrown Communists in the Age of Neoliberalism: Multi-Racial Politics and Socialist Revolution” for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Nishani Frazier is Professor of History and Director of Public History at North Carolina State University. Prior to North Carolina State University, she was a faculty member at Miami University of Ohio and University of Kansas. Her research interests include 1960s freedom movements, oral history, museum studies, archives, and public history, black nationalist philosophy, digital humanities, and black economic development. Her publication Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism was released with an accompanying website also titled Harambee City.

Claudia Ojeda Rexach is a Ph.D. Student at Brown University’s Department of History. Her research explores ties between liberalism and repression in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico through surveillance files compiled by the police against individuals involved in nationalist and pro-independence movements on the island. She is interested in understanding how carpetas were enacted as violent political technologies against regular citizens as a form of containing and controlling anti-colonial sentiment throughout the archipelago. Recently, she has also been interested in researching continuities in policing practices between the Spanish and U.S. occupations of Puerto Rico to situate colonial policing within a longer imperial chronology.

Stuart Schrader is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed Policing (University of California Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Blue Power: How Police Organized a Movement to Protect and Serve Themselves, scheduled to be published in 2026. He is the co-editor with Julian Go of The Imperial Entanglements of Policing, also scheduled to be published in 2026. He was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize in 2015 and the winner of the American Studies Association’s Gene Wise – Warren Susman Prize in 2014. He was awarded the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023.