February 25, 2021 1:11 AMLegal
- By
SAN FRANCISCO The
Tampa Bay Times published an amazing story Monday about how in the 1970s the FBI and local police surveilled, harassed, arrested and charged civil rights leader Askia Muhammad Aquil under a program ostensibly created to fight communism but which was actually used to target anti-racist reformers.
Among the charges prosecutors levied against Aquil were cohabitation and obscenity. “It was against the law to cohabitate with someone of the opposite sex unless you were married,” Aquil’s attorney Delano Stewart said. “It was never enforced. They only enforced it that time because she was a beautiful white woman dating a Black man.”