HUNTER GRAY / HUNTER BEAR / JOHN R. SALTER, JR.

AUGUST 1960

WITCH HUNT CONTINUES: FBI SURVEILLANCE [HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR] THIS IS THE FINAL PAGE -- IN THIS PARTICULAR SEQUENCE OF OURS -- ON FBI STUFF RELATING TO MY SOUTHERN MOVEMENT ACTIVISM. FROM IT YOU CAN GO TO THREE PREVIOUS PAGES AS WELL      WITCH HUNT CONTINUES [HUNTER GRAY / JOHN R SALTER JR] The Southern Conference Educational Fund [SCEF.] In 1961- 62, as Advisor to the Jackson Youth Council of NAACP, I, along with others, envisioned a large-scale mass movement in Jackson. After months of tedious and dangerous organizing, that came to pass. The Jackson Movement, of which I was Strategy Committee Chair, reached its sanguinary climax in May and June 1963 -- the largest mass upheaval in the history of Mississippi.   Following that, in the fall of 1963, I joined the staff of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, a Southwide civil rights group of radical inclination, as its full-time Field Organizer: grassroots civil rights and anti-Klan organizing in the Deep South.

SEE THIS DIRECTLY RELATED PIECE ON MY SCEF ORGANIZING:

http://hunterbear.org/NORTH%20CAROLINA_OUR%20SUCCESSFUL%20BLACK%20BELT%20MOVEMENT.htm

AND SEE THIS:

http://www.hunterbear.org/a_bizarre__1979_fbi_smear_effort.htm

It made news.
 

The FBI continued to update its high priority agitator listings of me. A typical page.
 

The work with the Southern Conference Educational Fund went very well. I organized in various parts of the Deep South. Increasingly, I came to concentrate my efforts in the far-flung, rigidly segregated, poverty stricken, Klan-infested multi-county Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt: an extremely hard-core region. We broke the hard lines of resistance to social change. Broke the power and terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Won a myriad of key victories. Laid the basis for democratic unionism in textile, lumber and garment industries and retail stores. Widespread grassroots leadership developed. After two years with SCEF, I moved into militant and radical Southern grassroots anti-poverty community organizing. In 1967, we left the South for the Pacific Northwest. The FBI followed. Somewhere along the line, I wound up on the Rabble Rouser Index.
 

NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR  [December 10 2008]:  We've added these two pages, albeit just a  bit out of sequence on this specific webpage.  This little collusion/ colloquy involving Congressman Fountain [NC] and various top FBI officials, developed directly in connection with our highly successful SCEF-sponsored multi-county Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt Project which I launched at the beginning of 1964.

The FBI was ever watchful -- at Coe (where my students and I organized interesting and constructive things, including a strong   AFSCME local union of maids and janitors) -- and beyond. I was at Chicago, where I directed large-scale community organizing on the turbulent and bloody South/Southwest Side -- working with Black, Puerto Rican, Chicano, and some Native people -- and  organized over 300 block clubs and related groups. We also successfully fought urban renewal schemes, the Daley Machine, and an endless gaggle of White supremacist outfits -- as well as racist police.  Active, too, in many Native American organizations on the North Side, I played a key role in organizing the all-Indian Native American Community Organizational Training Center -- and served as its long-time Chair.

At Iowa City, I was a professor in the Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Iowa, and my students and I organized much indeed -- including the Native American/Chicano Cultural Center at Iowa State Penitentiary. At Rochester, N.Y., I was Director of Roman Catholic Social Justice activities for the twelve county Rochester Diocese. Among other projects, we organized a highly successful strike of Canadian migrant Algonquin Indian mink workers -- long emeshed in feudal conditions in rural Ontario County. I was also Co-Chair of the Rochester Metro Labor Law Reform Committee, which was supported by all unions.  As always, we sensed a covert, veiled FBI presence. Fired by the Bishop after two years for "insubordination," I went to Navajo Community College [now Dine' College] at the Navajo Nation, where I served as Chair of Behavioral Sciences and held many other college posts. I was active in a wide variety of social justice activities, including the uranium issue (which I'd written about since 1957 onward). The Albuquerque Regional Office of the FBI -- and its Gallup Field Office -- launched a vicious attack designed to undermine me in 1979 but was completely unsuccessful. Later, we went to the University of North Dakota, where I taught oft-record numbers of students and served as Chair of its Department of Indian Studies -- and where much happened.

SEE THE THREE PREVIOUS PAGES FOR MORE FBI STUFF

AND THESE, HERE: