Police surveillance and infiltration of political groups has a long history in the U.S. Although specialized police units first targeted anarchists and communists in the early twentieth century (giving them the moniker red squads), during the 1960s law enforcement expanded their remit in response to a range of real and imagined threats: clandestine urban guerrilla groups like Weather Underground, campus demonstrations, not to mention the hundreds of civil disturbances that kicked off between 1964 and 1972. As the threats multiplied, demands grew louder for enhanced law enforcement capacity to monitor and infiltrate so-called “subversive” groups. In 1968, the Kerner Commission echoed the prior year’s recommendation by the President’s Crime Commission to expand and strengthen police intelligence operations in American cities to better anticipate events and prevent crimes before they were committed. Expanding on recent work in the history of policing, this panel de-centers the FBI’s role in the 1960s by exploring overt and covert police surveillance conducted by state and local agencies. Our starting point is that any account of the Long 1960s that ignores this dimension of political repression remains incomplete.

The panel seeks to generate conversation between four historians who are interested in covert police surveillance and the impact such law enforcement practices have on political activists: Joseph Kaplan, one of the first historians to make extensive use of the NYPD's Red Squad records after their discovery in 2016; Gregg Michel, whose monograph Spying on Students (LSU Press, 2024) focuses on the law enforcement campaign against New Left and progressive student activists in the South during the 1960s; Seth Kershner, who has been writing about New York State Police surveillance of Sixties social movements and has a book on the topic under contract with Fordham University Press. Finally, Aaron Fountain, Jr., whose forthcoming book draws on extensive research with FBI files, will discuss where the FBI fits in the literature and how expanding the field to include police and private groups can help fill gaps that remain.

Ultimately, this panel will challenge attendees to reassess their views of political activism in the Long 1960s and to grapple with the complex and multidimensional history of police repression in America.