The U.S. postage stamp for Ethel L. Payne, an American journalist who covered the civil rights movement for the Chicago Defender and later became a commentator for CBS News.

While much has been made of the government's current penchant for secrecy, few have noticed that this atmosphere now shrouds government history as well.

Working on a biography of a noted Washington journalist, I placed a routine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2011 for her FBI file. The timing of my application seemed propitious. Two years earlier, President Barack Obama had signed an executive order to speed declassification of materials and had issued an encouraging FOIA memorandum.

"All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure," he wrote, "in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government."

In fact, the FBI promptly mailed me the requested file. When I opened it, however, I found the material so extensively redacted that it looked as if the photocopier had spewed mostly blank pages. I immediately appealed to have the file, now decades old, unredacted. I cited the president's memorandum and noted that the subject of my book, Ethel L. Payne, was an African-American. I presumed this administration might be more sympathetic to exposing past FBI transgressions against blacks.

Payne, of course, was only one of many African-Americans who were targets of FBI investigators in the past. Among its many domestic surveillance activities, the FBI ran the Ghetto Informant Program, an operation that recruited informants and researched what was sold in, according to FBI parlance, "Afro-American-type bookstores." The bureau even targeted black lawmakers such as Ron Dellums, a U.S. congressman from California and a friend of Payne's.

The FBI opened a file on Payne in 1973 on the basis of information its New York field office obtained, alleging subversive behavior on her part. Agents were able to determine only that she worked for the Chicago Defender, then one of the most prominent black newspapers; was a past president of the Capital Press Club, "composed of approximately 100 black news representatives"; and was scheduled to appear at a National Urban League convention — hardly the activities of a subversive.