The FBI's RACON

During World War II, an unprecedented wave of militant black protest and activism swept through the United States, setting the stage for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover perceived this racial turmoil as a threat not only to wartime mobilization efforts but also to the preservation of a stable, segregated society, and ordered an extensive, nationwide investigation and surveillance of African Americans "to determine why particular Negroes or groups of Negroes or Negro organizations have evidenced sentiments for other 'dark races' (mainly Japanese) or by what forces they were influenced to adopt in certain instances un-American ideologies." The unstated objective of the inquiry, known by the secret code name RACON, was to neutralize the black challenge to the institutional grip of Jim Crow. This landmark volume publishes for the first time the FBI's Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States, an exhaustive report that grew out of the larger internal security investigation. Compiled from reports submitted by fifty-six field units in all areas of the country, the document chronicles in rich detail the experience of African Americans during World War II. A comprehensive introduction by Robert A. Hill situates the FBI report within a political, cultural, and literary context to provide a fuller understanding of this sparsely documented period in African-American history and its relationship to civil rights movements in the postwar era. Hill also explores the ways in which the investigation and surveillance of blacks during World War II illuminate the FBI's wartime evolution from an investigative body to a political counterintelligence agency.