Security Matter - C
My younger daughter, Daniela, won a residency with the Penumbra Foundation to create a photographic art book that will add to her ongoing exploration of family memory. The book will counterpose elements of my mother’s FBI file with photographs and documents from our family archive, which she is curating. The book will be available next month and we will pass on information about cost as available. The Forward to the book is adapted from this essay.
On June 30, 1949, the Federal Bureau of Investigation classified my mother, Norma Spector, as a security risk. She was 26 years old. The classification was “Security Matter - C,” in which the “C” stood for “communist.” She was assigned file number 100-90909: the “100” represented a domestic security threat and the “90909” was her unique identifier.
Under the 1950 Internal Security Act, the President has the authority to detain citizens and non-citizens who pose a threat of espionage or sabotage during times of “national emergency.” The list that the FBI developed became known as the Security Index. Mom joined Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Robeson, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and thousands of others on the Index.
Mom requested her FBI file in 1977 under the 1974 Freedom of Information Act. The FBI delivered the file in 1978. It comprises nearly 400 pages of documents dated from June 30, 1949 to February 9, 1978; the information in the documents begins in 1944, when Mom was 21 years old and living in Detroit, and ends when Mom was 55 and living in Brooklyn.
Reading the file is a strange experience. On one hand, I am looking at proof that the government singled out Mom for surveillance, and paid or coerced people — some, apparently, quite close to her — to watch her every move and to dig for information that could be used against her. On the other hand, much of the information is dreary, for example, dates, times, and places of meetings; home addresses; and travel schedules. Nothing in the file even hints at espionage or sabotage. The collective effort of hundreds, maybe thousands, of agents and informants over 34 years found exactly bupkis. Which was the point — intimidation, not security.
I had to wonder sometimes what was going through the agent’s mind while he was dutifully recording an informant’s report:
Mom’s file is a wonderful catalog of the breadth of her political work. The FBI associated her with at least 16 organizations during those 34 years, including the Communist Party, USA; the Federation of Greek Maritime Unions; Women Strike for Peace; Brooklyn Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy; and the National Negro Congress. The file is full of reports like these:
“[Informant] advised on April 26, 1960, that arrangements are being perfected to publicly protest Civil Defense exercises in City Hall Park, New York, New York, on May 3, 1960. This source states that efforts are being made to have about one hundred mothers and their children in City Hall Park on May 3, 1960. According to this source this group of women and children is to remain in the open taking no shelter when the ‘Take Cover’ signals are sounded…. The source further advises that this protest is being guided, at least in part, by Norma Spector.”
“Norma Spector … was arrested on July 22, 1963, at the construction site of the Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York. During the picketing of this project, the pickets blocked the entrance to the building site and were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.”
“On 6/29/55, [the informant] advised that Norma Hannon [sic — her maiden name was Hanan] picketed the UN Plaza on 6/23/55 in a protest to the current court martials [sic] and executions in Greece of political prisoners. This activity was sponsored by the Council of Greek Americans.”
“8/29/63, [the informant] advised that on 8/28/63, Norma Spector participated in the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.”
“[The informant] advised that the subject was present at the [Siloam Presbyterian] church working on plans for the boycott of the NYC schools on the following dates: 3/14/64, 3/16/64.”
In the early 1960s, the FBI believed that Mom was “recruiting Norweigan [sic] seamen to act as couriers to Latin American countries on behalf of Cuba.” And not just the FBI, but also the CIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Why was the ONI involved? Well, Norwegian seamen go, you know, to sea, so, yeah.
Which triggered a memory from my childhood of the family occasionally having dinner at the Norwegian Seamen’s House at 62 Hanson Place in downtown Brooklyn. The House was built by the Norwegian government to care for Norwegian seamen in this country. I suspect we ate there because the Norwegian government subsidized the social services and the food was cheaper than the local restaurants. Maybe an FBI agent tracked us to the House and the FBI, knowing that “the subject was formerly active in activities of the American Branch of the Federation of Greek Maritime Unions,” suspected that Mom was meeting Norwegian couriers while the rest of us were eating lamb stew with cabbage.
We lived at 224 St. James Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant until the summer of 1964, when we moved to 251 Clermont Avenue in Fort Greene. Both communities at the time were African American. Which was a problem for white men dressed in identical suits, hats, haircuts, and shoes:
An informant reported that during an April 18, 1968 meeting of a Brooklyn Communist Party club, “a statement was made to the effect that Norma Spector did not attend the club meetings because she fears a nervous breakdown.”
I don’t remember Mom’s health being a particular issue in 1968, but full-time organizers like her always run that risk. The FBI tracked Mom to around 50 meetings between February 18, 1959 and March 9, 1961 alone. The number of meetings between 1949 and 1977 was many times more. That’s not counting organizing social events, fundraisers, rallies, demonstrations, and delegations; making phone calls and travel and housing arrangements; writing letters, speeches, and articles; reading newspapers, magazines, and books; designing, producing, and handing out leaflets; making signs and banners; speaking in public and private; collecting signatures on petitions; tending to comrades and friends who were ill or in need; and being ever aware of the miasma of government repression. Mom cooked for days in preparation for some of the social events we hosted at our house. (Yet the FBI file often described Mom as “an unemployed housewife.”)
And the mailings: in those days, Dad and Mom, and sometimes us kids when we were older, sat at the dining room table and folded leaflets or letters, stuffed them in envelopes, sealed the envelopes, pasted on the address and return-address stickers and stamps, and bundled the envelopes to take them to the post office.
I do remember when Mom went on strike. That was the word she used. I think it was in 1964. We had just moved into our 4-story brownstone on Clermont Avenue. I came home from school and found Mom in her home office on the ground floor. I asked her what was for dinner. She didn’t look at me but said, without emotion, that she wasn’t going to make dinner.
“But what are we going to eat?”
“I don’t know, find something.”
I stood there. She didn’t say anything else and she still didn’t look at me. I was 11; this was frightening. I hid in a closet until Dad came home. He and Mom talked and then Mom went to their bedroom upstairs. I had never seen Dad with such a look on his face. He told us that Mom was going away for a while. He was too upset to explain why, except to say that Mom was going on a vacation. He couldn’t tell us for how long.
Mom came downstairs with a suitcase. She didn’t say goodbye to us. She and Dad left, and Dad came back by himself, with the same look on his face.
Nothing about what had just happened made sense to me. Moms don’t do what Mom had just done. Sometimes Mom came home late, but she always came home. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.
Dad wore the same face for the time that Mom was gone. I don’t remember how much time that was. I later found out that she was staying at the YWCA in downtown Brooklyn. He visited her there. My sisters and I saw her once or twice, but I felt strange in her presence. I didn’t know why she was angry with me or whether she still loved me.
One day Dad told us that Mom was coming home and that we all had to help out more around the house. That seemed kind of nebulous to an 11-year-old, probably more so to 10-year-old Debby and 7-year-old Rachel. He left and came back with Mom. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do: Did she want me to hug her? Apologize?
Time, and the love inherent in my family, brought us back together. I was too young in 1964 to understand what happened, and I didn’t ask when I got older. I think now that Mom was close to or at a nervous breakdown. Maybe what I saw that day in her office as a lack of emotion was a numbness. For her own well-being, she had to separate herself from her life — her family and, I’m guessing, her political work — for a time, and just do her.
Mom and Dad couldn’t explain that to us kids. We wouldn’t have understood. So Dad told us we had to be more helpful.
It’s not that Dad didn’t help her. He was at her side for 45 years. She was his purpose in life. Mom told the story of the time Dad and she were walking to a subway station after a demonstration in Manhattan. Dad was walking behind her. Several plainclothes cops were trailing them, taunting and threatening. At the station, their tormentors went their own way. That evening, when Mom and Dad were getting ready for bed, Mom saw that the backs of Dad’s legs were covered in black and blue bruises from being kicked by the thugs. Dad had walked behind Mom to prevent harm to her. He hadn’t said a word.
Daniela, my younger daughter, once asked Mom how she was able to do everything she did. Mom smiled and said, “I had Harry.”
So maybe the FBI report about the 1968 meeting was true: maybe Mom felt she was approaching the edge of the cliff again. She did reduce her political workload in the 1970s. After 1977 her main work was with Women for Racial and Economic Equality, which she helped found.
Mom and Dad struggled for decades to move the world, inch by political inch, toward the future they believed in. Our home on Clermont Avenue became known in the progressive movement beyond the Communist Party as “The Spectors.” My sisters and I were used to coming home from school and finding familiar and unfamiliar faces, people who stopped by to say hello, to enjoy Mom’s cooking, or to accept shelter during a personal crisis. At the same time, and because of that future, Mom and Dad struggled to keep the family safe from the economic, political, and social ravages of capitalism by armoring us with love.
It wasn’t easy.
***
The rest of the family also make appearances in Mom’s FBI files. Dad first appears in a memo in October 1952, the year after Mom and he married. The New York office of the FBI learned that Dad had an FBI file going back to being fired as a “security risk” from the Aberdeen Proving Ground near Baltimore in the late 1940s. (The U.S. Army designed and tested ordnance material at the APG.)
Dad’s sister, Mariam, appears in the file, including as a leader of the Communist Party in Baltimore. She lived at 211 St. James Place while we lived on the same block at 224. Those two apartment buildings hosted a bunch of meetings over the years. Aunt Mary moved with us to Clermont Avenue.
Rachel appears in the file, but not by name.
The informant had to have been someone close enough to the family to hear about Rachel’s birth that same day.
The FBI gave Debby her own identification number because in 1970 she participated in the third contingent of the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba.
My appearance in the file is less auspicious. In the same memo that warned of Debby’s “subversive” voyage, the agent wrote that the subject (me) still lived at home “and is unemployed ‘doing nothing’ as the subject dropped out of school two and one half years ago.” Ouch.
***
This book, Security Matter - C, is a work of art and memory. Using pages from Mom’s FBI file and photographs and documents from the extraordinary family archive she is creating, Daniela juxtaposes the FBI’s portrait of Mom as a security risk (the left-hand pages), with Mom as mother, wife, comrade, sister, and friend (the right-hand pages): the FBI’s demon-haunted world vs. flesh-and-blood human beings. The two sets of pages don’t touch because they have nothing in common, like matter and antimatter.
This book is also Daniela’s way of asserting the memory of her grandmother against those who would control the narrative by turning her grandmother into a wraith. Her grandmother was a revolutionary, a working-class, radical, anti-racist feminist who loved people and wanted a better world for everyone.
The FBI destroys. Mom created. May her memory be a blessing.