About the Project

The dataset chosen for the F.B. Eyes project originates from multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the F.B.I. files on notable African American literary figures and institutions. Dr. William J. Maxwell, along with members of Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), digitized, organized, and presented the resulting files that have been declassified and/or redacted. I chose this dataset, which I found as one of the “Selected Links” found as a resource on the Digital Schomburg site, because I was intrigued by not only the constant monitoring and surveillance of these individuals and institutions but the amount of information – associations, addresses, family members, and other personal information – collected and recorded by informants and special agents for the F.B.I. I was somewhat familiar with F.B.I. surveillance done during the civil rights era – Martin Luther King Jr. and COINTELPRO being the most notable. What I wasn’t prepared for was the level of detail and record keeping over a period of time – decades, in some cases – for individuals and institutions that had been monitored as potential threats to the American public but were only threats to the status quo: a racially divided, politically-driven society that was not safe for marginalized groups.

For this project, I’ve sampled pages from the files of James Baldwin, Shirley & W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Pauli Murray, and Richard Wright (henceforth known collectively as “the subjects”). Within the pages of the files in the dataset were copies of Playbills, reviews – from positive to down-right negative – of a subject’s work, physical descriptions, various pieces of information collected by different F.B.I. field offices located in states that the subject has either visited, lived, or plans to visit; excerpts, if available, from a subject’s work (the more damning, the better), travel plans and any corresponding documentation that must be submitted to the government; a network of possible or actual associations – which were also being monitored in other files. All in all, within the pages of the files, J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. hoped to use the subject’s words and actions to bring them down and ruin their careers. In examining the thousands of pages of the seven subjects, it is patently clear that the institution’s and, at large, society’s disdain for the subjects was more than political; within Richard Wright’s file was a letter and a number of clippings with the letter writer’s expletive-laden commentary of Wright’s work (which is not included in the project, for obvious reasons). Included in the files had been letters from “concerned citizens” looking to “the splendid work done by the F.B.I. in detecting crime” (Anonymous, 1945) for information about the subjects to ensure that they were upstanding Americans they can bring around their children or have visit their campuses. It seems that what frightened J. Edward Hoover, the F.B.I., and many of the “concerned” the most was the audacity of the subjects to repeatedly and loudly account the experiences of Black folk and take actionable steps to bestow the equity as citizens that they’ve been advised to quietly and slowly wait for. 

To flesh out the documents and provide more perspective, I consulted The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections, predominantly the Schomburg Library Digital Collections – the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books division and the Photographs and Prints division – for other documents and images. Additionally, I scoured the digital collections of other institutions – Yale, PEN America, and The Poetry Foundation, to name a few, for images, audio and video to highlight the subject and their work. Because of level of surveillance and documentation done by the F.B.I., it is hard to list what the dataset does not provide. According to Dictionary.com, being subversive is the “tending or intending to subvert or overthrow, destroy, or undermine an established or existing system, especially a legally constituted government or a set of beliefs” (Dictionary.com). While this definition does apply to the subjects, they, among other people of color, have to be subversive because the established/existing systems do not work for them or people like them and because the system works for men like J. Edgar Hoover, what would be the point of changing?

This project and the contents therein are an attempt to answer the following questions: “What is the origin or background of the relationship between notable Black people and institutions and the F.B.I, particularly under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover?”, “How this relationship affected – positively or negatively – the people and institutions that were monitored?,” and “Who are the people that the F.B.I. have deemed worthy of surveying?” By providing a biography, images, audio, video, and additional information about the subjects, the project aims to re-inject balance out the data extracted from the subjects’ well-rounded lives.

Moving to the visualization aspect, it is important to take in the advice from Drucker, to effectively create visualizations the properly tell a story:

We can take any data set and put it into a pie chart, a continuous graph, a scatter plot, a tree map and so on. The challenge is to understand how the information visualization creates an argument and then make use of the graphical format whose features serve your purpose.

The visualization included in the project shows the number of works created by the individual along with the number of pages that make up their file. It isn’t a simple bar chart, it is a digestible look at how the subject’s F.B.I. file compares to the page numbers of some of their popular works. Additionally, the accompanying chart gives the viewer a chance to learn more about the subject’s work.

Ultimately, through this project, I hope that the visitors and viewers learn a lot or a little more than before about the subjects – their lives, their work, all of their information, J. Edgar Hoover and his time as F.B.I. director, the historical events that take place during the lengthy time period surveillance, and how these elements all culminated in the tracking and monitoring of these subjects and the many others located in the F.B.I. files.

References
Anonymous. (1945). Citizen letter In United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard Wright F.B.I. file [PDF file]. Retrieved from http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/files/original/6cbca7b06906e2058dfa459dfe9922ac.pdf
Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Subversive. Retrieved from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/subversive
Drucker, J. (n.d.). Visualization | Intro to the Digital Humanities. Retrieved from http://dh101.humanities.ucla.edu/?page_id=40