"While the [FBI]�s voguish interest in Harlem�s 'New Negroes' faded during the Great Depression..."

"... its inspection of African-American writing persisted from World War II through the militant Black Arts movement unveiled in 1965."

In the early 1940s, worried over black attitudes to the war effort, the FBI began compiling files on such traveling targets as [Richard] Wright, Chester Himes and Barack Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis....

In the depths of the Cold War, a busy season of FBI literary criticism, no fewer than 22 African-American authors were first tracked by Bureau paperwork, among them Ralph Ellison and Lorraine Hansberry. (Hansberry�s now family-friendly drama A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was reviewed by an incognito FBI agent even before reaching Broadway. The four-page paper that resulted would receive a non-inflated �A� in my introductory African-American literature class.) Three Cold War files created in the 1950s�for [James ] Baldwin, Hoyt Fuller and Black Arts founder Amiri Baraka � looked forward to the last great wave of FBI book-clubbing: an elaborate counterintelligence program, well documented in the Senate�s Church Committee report of 1976, to imitate and subvert the literature of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s....