Coming to the your community or school this Fall

Production Team:

Andres Alegria, Prentis Hemphill, Anita Johnson and Claude Marks

With additional camera work: Isaac Ontiveros

Original Music: Camilo Landau

Additional contributions from Greg Boozell—CAN TV Chicago, Bill X Jennings, California Newsreel, CSUP Chicano Movement Archivesl—Reyes Martinez, Freddie Freak, Roz Payne—Newsreel Films, & Denis Mueller.

Thanks for the generous support of the Akonadi Foundation, John Brown Education Fund, Funding Exchange, LEF Foundation, Peoples Life Fund, Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, Roddick Foundation, Solidago Foundation, B. Wardlaw, Louis Wolf & Dolores Neuman.

A video documentary

COINTELPRO may not be a well-understood acronym but its meaning and continuing impact are absolutely central to understanding the government’s wars and repression against progressive movements. COINTELPRO represents the state’s strategy to prevent movements and communities from overturning white supremacy and creating racial justice. COINTELPRO is both a formal program of the FBI and a term frequently used to describe a conspiracy among government agencies—local, state, and federal—to destroy movements for self-determination and liberation for Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous struggles, as well as mount an institutionalized attack against allies of these movements and other progressive organizations.

COINTELPRO 101 is an educational film that will open the door to understanding this history. This documentary will introduce viewers new to this history to the basics and direct them to other resources where they can learn more. The intended audiences are the generations that did not experience the social justice movements of the sixties and seventies.

Interviews in the video include:

Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford)—Founder of Revolutionary Action Movement and professor at Temple University.
Bob Boyle—Attorney representing many activists and political prisoners targeted by COINTELPRO.
Kathleen Cleaver—former leader of the Black Panther Party, now Professor of Law at Emory and Yale Universities and an expert on COINTELPRO.
Ward Churchill—just-removed Professor at the University of Colorado who has written extensively about COINTELPRO.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz—Long-time Native American activist and educator.
Priscilla Falcon—Long-time Mexicana activist and professor whose husband was assassinated for his leadership in the Chicano struggle.
Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt—former leader of the Black Panther Party who was falsely imprisoned for 27 years in a COINTELPRO case.
Jose Lopez—Director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and long-time advocate of Puerto Rican independence.
Francisco 'Kiko' Martinez—long-time Chicano/Mexicano activist and attorney.
Lucy Rodriguez—Puerto Rican Independentista and former Political Prisoner.
Ricardo Romero—long-time Chicano/Mexicano activist and Grand Jury resister
Akinyele Umoja—African American History scholar at Georgia State University.
Laura Whitehorn—radical activist and former political prisoner who was targeted by the federal government.