March 28, 1975

WASHINGTON--"If all this sounds like a mixture of the late Joseph McCarthy and the worst of Watergate, that's not surprising. The FBI may have called it 'counterintelligence,' but it reads a lot like lies and libel."

This is how CBS national news reporter Bruce Morton closed his morning broadcast March 19 on the 3,138 pages of secret FBI files on the Socialist Workers party and Young Socialist Alliance. The files were made public at a news conference here March 19 by the Political Rights Defense Fund (PRDF).

Pointing to the two-foot-high stack of documents, PRDF National Secretary Syd Stapleton told reporters, "Here we have in J. Edgar Hoover's own words the proof of a sweeping illegal campaign to destroy two legal organizations, the SWP and YSA, and to disrupt the civil rights, antiwar, and students movements."  
 

March 27, 1950

CHICAGO, March 20--With a cynical statement charging the victims themselves engineered the Peoria St. riot last November, Municipal Judge Joseph H. McGarry last week freed the final defendants charged with mob violence against Negroes.

Judge McGarry claimed the Peoria St. affair was an "organized incident" and a "miserable conspiracy hatched and put into effect by a small but highly organized vocal group of subversive agents, professional agitators and saboteurs."

The conspirators, he claimed, were the occupants of the Peoria St. house themselves! He alleged their agents posed as neighbors and whipped up the riot in order to discredit the city government, police and courts.

He also ignored the evidence of the NAACP, the Urban League, trade union leaders and scores of other local organizations and individuals who have been aroused to action by the riot and other attacks on minorities.  
 
 
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