Malcolm X was the leader and icon of the Black Nationalist movement as spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. He was a minister for the National of Islam and preached a message of black nationhood that appealed to a far broader audience. He saw separatism as self-determination and criticized reliance on whites to achieve black progress. Recently, the FBI file on Malcolm X has been released. In the introductory material to a published edition of these files, Clayborne Carson suggests that the reason Malcolm X was the target of an FBI investigation was that he was successful at being a spokesperson for blacks and that he achieved a national and even international position as a result. Carson says the publication of these files should be part of an effort "to study him within the context of American racial politics during the 1950s and 1960s" (4).
Within that context, leaders like Malcolm X were targeted by the FBI because J. Edgar Hoover was generally hostile toward African-American militancy, though Carson says the policy was applied inconsistently toward the Nation of Islam. The FBI surveillance of Elijah Muhammad and his followers in the 1950s was carried on by Hoover without explicit authority though the group was not yet seen as subversive, and it became more intentional and directed in the 1960s:
The Nation's potential as a stimulus for revolutionary and seditious activities became evident to the FBI mainly as a result of the increasing prominence of Malcolm X and the increasing militancy and scale of black protests (65).
Other black and potentially subversive groups and individuals were also placed under FBI surveillance during the 1960s, and such surveillance would only increase as the decade progressed and civil unrest increased as well. One report in the book notes how the FBI sought to "connect Malcolm and the NOI [Nation of Islam] to other organizations" (163) with little success: "the FBI can make no c...