Herbert

Hills Relationship to the FBI, As Documented in the FBIs New York City Field Office File (100-NY-92288) By Trevor Griffey Visiting Faculty, U.S. History The Evergreen State College January 24, 2013 There are any number of stories contained in the FBIs New York City Field Office file on Herbert Hillcovering his work in the SWP, NAACP, and NALC, as well as his relationship to black labor activists in Chicago and Detroit among other places. What follows below is my analysis of Hills relationship to the FBI as culled from the file. Breaking with the SWP, 1948-49 The FBIs New York City field office file contains an informant report from 1948, which states that Herbert Hill, who was then on the Executive Committee of the NAACP, told an SWP convention in New York that the S.W.P. has been working in the N.A.A.C.P. for the past three years. In the past, they have just been helping out in isolated cases He said that the party intends to sperad [sic] to all Branches of the N.A.A.C.P. and help in a day-to- day-struggle with the negro people. He then told of the need for negro leadership and that the negro work must be done as a mass movement and coordinated with the work being done in the trade unions.1 This is the kind of report that, regardless of whether it was accurate, could have been used by the FBI to drive Hill out of the NAACP if it wanted to. It not only describes an SWP plot to infiltrate the NAACP, but also suggests that Hill himself was overseeing this strategy. Material in Hills FBI file indicates that Hill became angry with the SWPs failure to support his work fighting police brutality in Harlem, and that he may not have parted with the SWP on good terms. The very next serial in its file on Hill was an informant report on a SWP New York convention in January, 1949 which stated that Hill spoke of his activity in NAACP and complained of the little help he received from the Harlem Branch of the [Socialist Workers] Party.2 According to another informant, HILLS talk was received with resentment by the majority of members present. Sometime later that year, Hill quit the Socialist Workers Party in a fury, according to another informant. He would work for the NAACP for the next two and a half decades.3 Informing on the SWP, 1953-55 In 1953, Felix Morrow, a former SWP activist, recommended to the FBI that it talk with Hill that HILL completely disassociated himself from the SWP and he was certain that HILL would be receptive to an interview. The FBIs goal for interviewing Hill was to identify a Communist Party plant in the SWP who had reportedly acquired a government job in Washington DC.4

 Its worth pausing to note why FBI files contained information about Herbert Hills activity in the SWP, and why its communication with him after he left would also be in its files. The FBI was empowered by anti-communist legislation passed in 1947 to investigate the loyalty of all federal employees and leaders of federally certified labor unions, and to determine loyalty based on whether individuals were members of the more than 100 organizations listed by the Attorney General as subversive. State and local governmentsthemselves beneficiaries of significant federal largesse in the postwar erapassed similar legislation. The SWP was on the Attorney Generals list, meaning that nearly all government agencies, labor unions, and government contractors were legally required to deny employment to past and present SWP members. Because organizations that did not prohibit subversives from membership could find themselves placed on the Attorney Generals List of Subversive Organizations, the very existence of the blacklist also functioned to compel organizations to purge themselves. It was partly in response to this pressure that the NAACP prohibited communists from membership in 1950, one year before Hill was named Labor Secretary, and warned of efforts by communists to capture or split and wreck the NAACP.5 So when FBI Agents Rex Shroder and Richard Brennan interviewed Herbert Hill at the FBIs office in New York on March 3, 1953, they were interviewing the employee of an organization that had recently purged itself of communists, an employee who himself had been part of an anti-capitalist organization. The document describing the interview listed Hill as a Potential Security Informant, and stated that [redacted] was cooperative throughout the entire interview and he offered to be of any further assistance regarding the SWPs activities during the period of his participation.6 But there are no other documents in the file that contain this PSI listing. It would appear that Hill was interviewed again on February 4, 1954, by FBI agents Joseph P. Benson and L. Chandler Eavenson in the FBIs Albany, NY field office. Not only did Hill provide more information on his SWP colleagues, but he effectively evaded becoming a target of FBI domestic intelligence operations as a result of his conversation. According to the FBI agents report, He continued his cooperative attitude and freely furnished information regarding people he recalled as associates or acquaintances in the Socialist Workers Party in New York City. Inasmuch as subject has been cooperative and no information is in possession of this office reflecting any present activity in the SWP, subject is not being recommended for the Security Index.7 The report indicates the FBI questioned Hill about whether he used the alias of Bernard Gregson or Ben Taft during his time in the SWPsuggesting that Hill was an object of investigation and not just someone assisting the investigation.

Afterward, Hill was reinterviewed, and apparently provided data regarding former associates or acquaintances in the Social [sic] Workers Party. Only the cover page for the report from the Albany field office was included in Hills file, and the actual information he provided to the FBI is located in different files that the FBI did not release to me and which may be located in the National Archives.8 The FBI came to see Hill as a resource for its wide-ranging investigation of the SWP. In November, 1954, the FBI asked Hill to help it identify an SWP writer who used the pen name Charles Hanley. Hill obliged with a dim recollection that the name might have once been used by CHARLES CURTISS, whom HILL belies has broken with the SWP and moved to the West Coast.9 Seven years later, in May of 1961, someone in Los Angeles confessed to the FBI of having lied on a loyalty oath that he had never been a member of a subversive organization, when in fact he had been a member of the SWP in the early 1940s. That confession is contained in Hills FBI file. It could be that Hill had played a role in identifying the person to the FBI. But the persons testimony also names people the person worked with in the SWP, including Hill, which could also explain why the testimony is included in Hills file.10 A July 21, 1954 letter in the FBIs files claims that Herbert Hill is available to testify revolutionary acts and purposes of SWP unless circumstances of subject case are as follows: Hill does not wish to appear as witness against individuals who have voluntarily renounced their party membership and now living without any subversive contacts He can testify that on many occasions he heard SWP leaders speak favoring the replacement of our present capitalistic government by a dictatorship of proletariat.11 But Hill later retracted this commitment, with a telling explanation. On April 4, 1955, Hill reportedly told New York FBI Agent George Baxtrum that [redacted] said he would be happy to furnish any information he has in his possession, but definitely did not want his identity revealed. He explained that if his SWP background became known Id lose my job in 10 minutes. He went on to explain that he would be unwilling to appear as a witness at any legal proceeding, once again stressing however, his desire to cooperate with the government in every way short of revealing his identity.12 Hill further tried to bolster his anticommunist credentials with the FBI by relating information to them about his work on the NAACPs credentials committee. In September, 1955, Hill gave the FBI a list of names of SWP members who he claimed tried to attend the NAACP convention in Atlantic City in June of that year. Hill bragged to the FBI that he used his position to deny them access to the event, as well as providing information to the chair of the convention that denied Victoria Garvia the right to speak because of her connection to left-wing labor unions. This may have been a pseudonym for Victoria Garvin, the National Negro Labor Council leader.

 In addition, the FBI report said that HILL stated that he has been publicly identified in the CP Press as the FBI Agent of the NAACP, and that actually it is his duty to fight subversive and Communist influence in the organization. In working toward that end, HILL stated that he had been able to introduce a resolution at the convention with identified the National Negro Labor Council, presumably as a subversive organization. He also bragged that during the very recent past he has been working in close cooperation with representatives of the Communications Workers of America (CWA-CIO) in a project to remove the National Mine Mill and Smelter Workers Union from a refinery and smelting plant located at Staten Island, presumably because of its left-wing ties.13 At the same time that Hill was reporting on the activities of the SWP at the NAACP convention to the FBI, even going so far as to identify George Weissman to the FBI by name, Weissman appears to have been clueless about Hills duplicity. FBI informants in the SWPs Central Committee later reported that Weissman told the group that HILL was outwardly friendly to him at the convention.14 Distancing, 1957-1960 Meanwhile, despite not being placed on the FBIs Security Index, FBI kept files open on Hill throughout its field offices in the late 1950s and 1960s, tracking his public speaking and his subscriptions to various publications among other things. Some of this monitoring occurred because the FBI targeted the NAACP with an open-ended investigation of potential Communist Infiltration (COMINFIL) from 1941-75. Working with community activists interested in stamping out racism in the labor movement inevitably brought Hill back in touch with leftistsincluding communists and socialistswho attended his talks, joined campaigns that he helped launch, and participated in helping found the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) in Chicago in 1960. Many of these individuals and groups they were a part of were monitored by the FBI, and so reports from those investigations also found their way into Hills FBI files. These documents, particularly relating to black labor activism in Chicago and Detroit in the early-to-mid 1960s, make up most of Hills post-1950s New York field office file, and may be of interest to scholars despite being only tangentially related to Hill. One document, from an FBI informant in the Cleveland Independent Socialist League, provides an interesting anecdote. It reports that Donald Slaiman claimed in 1958 that he knows HILL quite well and he is a good man to know.15 The rosy relationship did not last long, as Slaiman ascended to the position of director of the AFL-CIOs civil rights department and became a regular target of Hills criticism of AFL-CIO union racism. Despite remaining publicly anticommunist in the 1950s, Hill was cognizant that he was doubly vulnerable to FBI blackmail. Not only did he remain vulnerable to red- baiting for having participated in the SWP in the 1940s. His organizing and advocacy

(and, by extension, the groups that Hill worked with) could be damaged by public exposure that Hill collaborated with the FBI to provide information on the SWP and other socialist groups. The FBI associated Hills fear of exposure to his having been publicly outed as an FBI ally by the Communist Party press.16 These tensions came to a head in October, 1960, when the FBI sought to deny federal employment to a former SWP member that Hill previously provided information about to the FBI. When FBI agent George Baxtrum telephoned Hill and asked him to testify against his former SWP colleague, Hill told him (perhaps with some frustration) that he has nothing to add to information previously furnished when contacted in 1954, and that his reasons, as in the past, are that his employment would probably be in jeopardy if his past connections with the SWP were known. On October 24, Hill told agent Baxtrum again, this time in person, that he would not testify before the Security Hearing Board against a former SWP colleague. According to Baxtrum, Hill pointed out his belief that if either his past connection with the SWP or his present co-operation with the FBI became known, there were some who would seize upon this to attack the [redacted] probably the Negro American Labor Council. Under pressure, and perhaps to defend himself as an anticommunist, Hill then provided the FBI with information about Trotskyist attempts to participate in the NAACP convention in 1959, and described their efforts to sneak into the conventions proceedings after being denied credentials.17 COINTELPRO In his article for Labor, Herbert Hill and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Phelps describes the evidence he found in FBI files online that the FBI made an anonymous phone call to Hill on May 24, 1962, warning Hill against collaborating with the SWP in Monroe, NC in solidarity with Robert F. Williams and the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants (CAMD). Phelps found that as part of the decision to make this anonymous phone call to Hill, which was intended to drive a wedge between the NAACP and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as part of the FBIs illegal counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against the SWP, FBI agents in New York City reported to FBI Headquarters that He has been contacted on a few occasions by an Agent and has been cooperative in regard to furnishing information on individuals who were in the SWP during the time he was a member. During these contacts with [redacted], he has been continually anxious that his prior SWP connection not be revealed to any outside source and particularly to his present employers. [redacted] has stated that it is the policy of the NAACP to make every effort to keep itself free of any connection with a subversive organization in order that it may carry on its work more effectively.18 Hill, who Phelps convincingly proved was the name behind the redactions, hardly needed to know who was calling. It was a call that demanded a particular, conditioned response. Hill may not have known that he received the call as part of the FBIs illegal counterintelligence program against the SWP. But it didnt matter

whether the information was credible or the operation was legal. It didnt matter whether the caller was a right wing vigilante, a member of the local red squad, or an FBI agent. The call was a threat, delivered in a coded language of assistance, and that was all that Hill needed to know. The story of the FBI calling Hill shows that it was always doing more than seeking information from Hill. It was also investigating him and engaging in a kind of counterintelligence practice. The FBI used its contact with Hill to cultivate the continually anxious condition in him about his own past that it then sought to exploit. It wasnt just information that the FBI wanted. It wanted Hill to purge the NAACP as part of the FBIs broader campaign to prevent alliances between liberals and the left. This is not the kind of phone call that a law enforcement agency places to a loyal agent in the field, or a call with instructions to a dutiful informer. This was a phone call meant to tell Hill that he was being watched, that the NAACP was being watched, and that the NAACP would allow its local branches to ally with leftists at its peril. Its no wonder, then, that when anonymously provided with rumors of CAMDs ties to the SWP, Hill was, according to FBI agents, reportedly very forceful in his denial of NAACP connection with the CAMD and anxious to eliminate any impression the caller had that the NAACP would offer support in this instance.19 Note on citing FBI files: Below I cite the FBI file number (eg. 100-NY-92288) followed by the document serial number contained in the lower right hand portion 1 100-NY-92288-2 2 100-NY-92288-3 3 100-NY-92288-9 4 100-NY-92288-10 5 Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 167. 6 100-NY-92288-11 7 SAC Albany to FBI Headquarters, May 3, 1954, located between serials 12 and 13 in Hills NY field office file, 100-NY-92288. 8 Files likely to have a full copy of the May 3, 1954 document are: 100-NY-85922, 100-AL-13776, 100-AL-12661, and 100-HQ-358131. The serial number for 100-NY- 85922 may be 12 or 12-11, but its not entirely clear. 9 100-NY-92288-15 10 100-NY-92288-46 11 100-NY-92288-14 12 100-NY-92288-16 13 100-NY-92288-18 14 100-NY-92288-19 15 100-NY-92288-25 16 100-NY-92288-45 17 100-NY-92288-42

 18 100-HQ-436291-54, available online at http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/socialist- workers-party/cointel-pro-socialist-workers-party-part-01-of-05 19 100-HQ-436291-55, available online at http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/socialist- workers-party/cointel-pro-socialist-workers-party-part-01-of-05