Right now, Republicans across the country are on a mission to whitewash America’s history in a way that protects white feelings and scrubs the stain of anti-Black racism from the nation’s fabric. GOPropaganda lawmakers have been introducing legislation to ban things like Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project from school curricula, the military and the workplace and they’ve made it clear that, if they had it their way, only a white-guilt-free version of Black history would ever be taught—which is essentially not teaching it at all.
One Democratic lawmaker introduced legislation aimed in the other direction on Tuesday. Instead of a bill that seeks to hide America’s shameful past, his bill would expose it. And we’re not talking about something that goes back as far as the slave trade or America’s Reconstruction period; we’re talking about the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program that led to the murder death of Black Panther Party Chicago chapter leader Fred Hampton in 1969.
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CNN reports that the bill introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Illinois) would require the government to release all records related to the program known as COINTELPRO, which was used to monitor the Black Panthers and other leaders of the civil rights movement as well as antiwar activists and so on.
“I want to shine a bright light on this dark chapter of our nation’s history,” Rush said in a statement introducing the bill. “And I think it is very timely and very important that we do it at this moment.”
