The problem is that partisanship and racism made it OK to investigate left-wing and black leaders on spurious grounds. However, eventually a right-wing leader managed to ignore the law blatantly and importantly enough to be investigated : and at that point the right turned against the FBI.
There's no principle, only partisanship. Kind of a disaster for the rule of law.
The major trend in these comments is the FBI and the government were bad, and are still bad, and the only solution is to dismantle them, but these commenters are too late. Where were these revolutionaries in 1968? Hoover died in 1972 and so did his fascist policies.
But you nailed it. While the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, institutional racism in executive agencies was still the rule rather than the exception.
I think it is interesting how that contrasts with minority member success stories in entertainment. In this[1] rehearsal take for a track on Franklin's debut album, we can hear fascinating avant garden social hieracrchy.
Remember that in 1960, even though first developed in the 1940's, multitracking was cutting-edge technology, and multitrack decks were still rare. The modern recording process of scratch track replacement and instrument isolation and separation hadn't yet been developed. Music performances were recorded live in the studio with all the musicians performing in the same tracking room, playing simultaneously together with or without being physically separated by gobos ("go betweens"). Franklin sits at a piano, playing and singing simultaneously, with her own single microphone, and the Ray Bryant Combo itself probably only had one microphone, with both ultimately mixed down to mono. There is no monitoring for the artists, no headphone mixes, and everyone still has to be able to hear everyone else, and Franklin has to play and sing above the accompaniment to be able to hear herself. Hammond speaks from the control room over a PA in the tracking room in deference to Franklin.
But what it is abundantly clear is that, judiciously but humbly so, Franklin is in charge. Columbia Records and producer John Hammond put a young 18yo black woman in charge of a band's and her own studio performances in late 1960," while 8 years later the government is still notably racist and paranoid.
In any regard, while institutional racism still exists in government, it is a shadow of its former ubiquity, except perhaps in unsophisticated rural sheriffs departments. In comparison of then to today, the FBI is now one of the more enlightened agencies, even with only about 20% of its agents minority members. Institutional racism remains, but it has become the exception, and racist policy and language and acts are held to scrutiny; participants are held accountable and extirpated from the ranks.