What You Will Find Here

The documents in this collection span nearly three decades of FBI surveillance activity in Michigan. It offers a layered record of an institution building, refining, and ultimately defending a program of political repression. It is a portrait of how the federal government watched political life, who it targeted, how it justified that watching, and what it did with what it found.

The approximately 4,000 pages here trace federal surveillance from the early 1940s, when the Bureau was constructing the infrastructure of mass political surveillance, through the 1950s, when the FBI formally authorized its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and the "Communist" label became a weapon wielded against Black civil rights organizations, to the 1960s and early 1970s, when surveillance expanded into every corner of Michigan's political landscape. The earliest materials include RACON surveys, the Bureau's Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States, which produced hundreds of pages of reporting from Detroit's FBI Field Office on what the Bureau called "racial unrest" and "agitation" in Black communities during World War II, establishing the habits and assumptions that would shape federal surveillance for decades to come. From there, the collection moves through the surveillance of organizations ranging from the Communist Party, USA to the Civil Rights Congress to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and individuals ranging from nationally prominent figures like Kwame Ture (fka Stokely Carmichael), Martin Luther King Jr., and Benjamin J. Davis Jr. to rank-and-file union members, university professors, and ordinary citizens whose primary connection to any federal investigation was attending a meeting or signing a petition.

Two arguments run throughout. The first is that this surveillance was rarely a response to genuine threats of violence or political subversion. It was a response to the threat of change — the possibility that Black Americans might organize effectively and combat oppression, that workers might demand more, that students might challenge the powerful, that ordinary people might discover their own collective capacity. The second is that the costs of this surveillance were not borne just by the famous. They were borne by the unknown. By the union member whose employer received an anonymous letter, by the professors denied tenure after a quiet word from the Bureau, by the activist whose friends and family were told things about them that were not true, and by the communities whose organizations were infiltrated, divided, and ultimately destroyed.

They are in these files. Many of them never knew it.

About the Collection's Origins

This database exists because of the years of work contributed by Dr. Trevor Griffey. Navigating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process to obtain these records, Dr. Griffey faced rejected requests, unhelpful agency responses, demands to narrow the scope of inquiries, documents sent to wrong addresses, and repeated claims by federal agencies that records were missing or destroyed. Some of those records were subsequently found anyway, recovered through alternative sources. It was only after the Obama administration enforced the E-FOIA Act, requiring email submissions and digital delivery, that Dr. Griffey was able to systematically build the archive. He processed tens of thousands of pages through optical character recognition software and keyword searching to identify and organize the material now available here. Upon completing the collection, he donated the full archive to the Carceral State Project, where it is now accessible to researchers, educators, journalists, and the public. The people documented in these files — the organizers, lawyers, students, and workers whose political lives the Bureau worked so hard to contain — deserve a complete accounting of what was done to them. Dr. Griffey’s efforts to reconstruct what happened in Michigan is a contribution toward that accounting.

Using These Documents

The records in this database are available for research, education, and public use. Several features of this collection require particular attention before using or citing individual documents.

Document Dates and Temporal Layering

The date of a document does not always correspond to the period it covers. Post-exposure materials from the mid-1970s frequently contain detailed accounts of operations conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, reproduce earlier memoranda in full, or reference surveillance activities that predate the document by twenty years. Bureau reports from the 1960s similarly draw on earlier files, making explicit reference to surveillance conducted in the 1940s and 1950s. Researchers should attend carefully to the distinction between when a document was produced and what period it addresses. Both dates are analytically significant and should be noted in any citation or research use.

File Scope and Individual Pages

Many files in this database encompass large volumes of material. In some cases, a single file identifier covers hundreds of pages produced across multiple years, by multiple authors, from multiple field offices. If citing a file in its entirety, use the citations provided in the database. When citing a specific document within a larger file, please include the following where available:

• File identifier of the specific document being referenced
• Date of the specific memorandum, report, or communication
• Author or originating office (e.g., Detroit Field Office to FBI Director, or specific agent name where legible)
• Title or subject line as it appears in the original document

This level of specificity matters both for scholarly accuracy and for the accountability this archive is intended to support. The people documented in these files deserve a precise record of what was written about them, by whom, and when.

Redactions and Incomplete Records

Many documents contain redactions made by the FBI during the FOIA review process. Names, organizational identifiers, and operational details have been withheld in ways that sometimes obscure the full picture. Some files are fragmentary or missing pages in ways that are not always explicitly flagged. Researchers should treat gaps in the record as analytically significant. The absence of material is often as informative as its presence, and in some cases reflects deliberate decisions about what should not be known.

A Note on Inclusion

Inclusion in a surveillance file does not indicate wrongdoing of any kind. It indicates only that the FBI decided a person's political activities warranted federal attention. These were decisions made, as these documents make clear, on the basis of political association, organizational membership, attendance at public events, or the exercise of constitutionally protected speech and assembly. Researchers working with this material for publication or classroom use are encouraged to consult the accompanying report for contextual guidance and to contact the Carceral State Project with questions about specific documents or files.

Exploring the Collection Further

To place these documents in their full historical context, we invite you to read the accompanying Story Map report, A Government Watching Its Own People: FBI Surveillance, COINTELPRO, and the Michigan Story. The report draws directly on the documents in this database to trace the arc of federal surveillance in Michigan from the RACON surveys of the 1940s through the exposure of COINTELPRO in the 1970s — examining how the Bureau built its surveillance infrastructure, how the "Communist" label functioned as a legal justification for watching Black and left political organizing, and what the costs of that surveillance were for the individuals and communities caught inside it. For additional explorations of FBI surveillance and its relationship to Michigan's political history, please visit the related Story Map linked here.