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To promote his 1967 novel
The Man Who Cried I Am, John A. Williams xeroxed portions of the book detailing the King Alfred Plan -- an international conspiracy to exterminate all people of African descent -- and left copies in subway car seats around Manhattan. The ploy worked so well that soon after, black folks all over New York City were talking about "the plan," a fictitious plot that many thought was true.
Williams explained this gambit to me several years ago, but he didn't divulge the origins of the King Alfred Plan, though it might have evolved from rumors in the early 1950s surrounding the McCarran Act, an anti-Communist law in which political subversives were to be rounded up and placed in concentrations camps during a national emergency. The Act was given fresh currency in 1966 when journalist Charles Allen published an extensive pamphlet after touring several World War II concentration camps. Written at a time when the Black Panthers were on the rise, Williams's imaginative "plan" may have been prompted by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, which was designed to undermine the black power movement.
Many activists were convinced that the FBI, CIA and local law enforcement agencies were in cahoots and conspired daily to make sure the Panthers and other radical organizations were neutralized or otherwise infiltrated. Later, there were a number of books, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, (1988), by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, in particular, that disclosed the level of disinformation, distortion and dirty tricks -- including some that were ultimately fatal -- initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to thwart the emergence of "a black messiah."
Indeed, there have been a number of books about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X that probe the conspiratorial premise, and Baba Zak A. Kondo's...