The FBI’s history with Black leaders is not a theory. COINTELPRO targeted Martin Luther King Jr. and others, and that history is documented in the Church Committee reports. So when Black elected officials in the 1980s said they were investigated more often than white ones, many listened. [1]
In 1988 Hirsch Friedman, an Atlanta lawyer who had worked as an FBI informant, signed an affidavit saying agents had told him of an unwritten policy, which he called “Fruehmenschen,” of routinely investigating Black officials on the assumption that they were unfit to govern. Representative Mervyn Dymally of California placed it in the Congressional Record. A 1998 peer-reviewed study discusses it in detail. [1]
ABSCAM also raised a different ethnic objection. Critics, including former Senator James Abourezk, argued that the robed-sheikh fiction played on ugly stereotypes about Arabs. The FBI replied that the name came from Abdul Enterprises and denied any racial motive. [2]
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