The Civil Rights Sex Tapes

This talk explores the FBI’s audio surveillance of Black freedom agitators through its production of sex tapes involving prominent southern activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. It begins with a history of audio surveillance of Black intellectuals to understand racial listening and its relationship to racial liberalism. It proceeds with a discussion of the ways that the sex tapes from the civil rights era marked a unique technological collision of race panic and sex panic that amplified how racial desire built anti-Black repression. With a particular focus on discourses of emasculation and impotence, the paper charts how anti-Black voyeurism resists and promotes what Ghassan Hage has labeled “paranoid nationalism.” It concludes with an assessment about the relationship between white eavesdropping and state entrapment as modes of utilizing technology to bridge white sexual repression, particularly during J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI. Using FBI files, Johnson administration records and interviews, and memoir, Dr. Corrigan suggests that the civil rights sex tapes provide a unique space to understand how racial intimacy flamed anti-Black animus in the FBI even as racial intimacy in the Department of Justice helped to inaugurate cooperation between white governmental officials and Black activists, particularly in the U.S. South.