In December 1925, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on black art and literature was published under the title The New Negro. It was a defining moment in awakening a politically conscious African American community. The book’s editor, Alain LeRoy Locke, coined the phrase to describe an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion that was taking place as part of the Harlem Renaissance. “The New Negro is keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American culture,” Locke wrote. “Subtly the conditions that are moulding a New Negro are moulding a new American attitude.”

J. Edgar Hoover, who was appointed to head a Department of Justice unit to investigate “radical political organizations,” took notice. He directed his agents to spy on black painters, musicians, and writers like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. As former FBI agent Tyrone Powers later wrote, the intention was “to weaken and unlink the unified chain” of black movements, from the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights era. The program persisted for five decades, until Hoover’s death in 1972.

William Maxwell, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, discovered the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI file of Claude McKay, author of the sonnet “If We Must Die,” and found that it was 193 pages long. After 106 subsequent FOIA requests, he discovered similar files on 51 African American writers. In 2015, Maxwell published his findings in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature and created a publicly accessible digital archive.