In 1969, membership in the Black Panther Party was soaring. People were hungry for action - including 23-year-old Eddie Conway. But he felt like something about the Baltimore chapter was off. Things were disorganized. And when the chapter’s captain, Warren Hart, sent Conway’s friend on an unauthorized mission that got him killed, Conway had to investigate.
Conway knocked on doors, interviewed community members, and dug into Hart’s background. Conway discovered Hart wasn’t at all who he said he was. He reported what he found to national leaders of the Black Panthers. But before they could pounce, Hart left the country. So who was he?
Warren Hart worked for the National Security Agency, “founding” the Baltimore chapter of the Panthers specifically to set activists up for incarceration and murder, and to report information from the party’s Central Committee to the government. What Conway uncovered was COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program. And when Conway interfered with Hart’s mission, he found himself on the FBI’s radar.
Two days after a police officer was shot and killed in 1970, cops arrested Conway. He was convicted of murder and spent more than four decades in prison before his release in 2014. In 2020, long after the fall of COINTELPRO, the FBI paid an infiltrator to disrupt a Black activist group in Colorado.
It’s clear: The authorities wanted to interfere in our organizing spaces then and they’re still doing it today. But the power of our resistance can still keep growing.