The man and the plan: conspiracy theories and paranoia in our culture.

To promote his 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am, John A. Williams xeroxed portions of the book detailing the King Alfred Plan--an international conspiracy to exterminate all people of African descent--and left copies in subway car seats around Manhattan. The ploy worked so well that soon after, black folks all over New York City were talking about "the plan," a fictitious plot that many thought was true.

Williams explained this gambil to me several years ago, but he didn't divulge the origins of the King Alfred Plan, though it might have evolved from rumors in the early 1950s surrounding the McCarran Act, all anti-Communist law in which political subversives were to be rounded up and placed in concentrations camps during a national emergency. The Act was given fresh currency in 1966 when journalist Charles Allen published an extensive pamphlet after touring several World War II concentration camps. Written at a time when the Black Panthers were on the rise, Williams's imaginative "plan" may have been prompted by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, which was designed to undermine the black power movement.

Many activists were convinced that the FBI, CIA and local law enforcement agencies were in cahoots and conspired daily to make sure the Panthers and other radical organizations were neutralized or otherwise infiltrated. Later, there were a number of books, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, (1988), by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, in particular, that disclosed the level of disinformation, distortion and dirty tricks--including some that were ultimately fatal--initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to thwart the emergence of "a black messiah."

Indeed, there have been a number of books about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X that probe the conspiratorial premise, and Baba Zak A. Kondo's investigation of the events surrounding Malcolm's death--Conspiracys: [sic] Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X (Nubia Press, 1992, Washington, D.C.)--is among the more intriguing. It is against this backdrop of the 1970s, and over the last decade or so that a welter of literature that might be called "black paranoia" books has surfaced.

Ironically, most of the authors who are writing these books are white, and primarily delve into such machinations as "Conspiracy Theory," "One World Government," "New World Order," "Masonry," and "Secret Societies." Except for an occasional reference to a personality such as Colin Powell, these books have nothing at all to do with the black experience. But ask any of the book vendors along 125th Street in Harlem or at Los Angeles's swap meets about their bestsellers and invariably they cite Behold a Pale Horse, (1991) by William Cooper; The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History, (1985) by A. Ralph Epperson; The New Age Movement and The Illuminati 666, (1983) by William J. Sutter; and The Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Committee of 300, (1997) by Dr. John Coleman.

Among my students at the College of New Rochelle and New York University, these books are also very popular, and their interest prompted me to find out exactly what makes them so appealing. One thing I discovered, the books have a similar objective, and for the most part cover virtually the same territory. To read one is to read them all--with few exceptions. Moreover, the recent spate of conspiracy books have not turned much new ground since the pioneering work of Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1975). Quigley, who taught at Georgetown University until his death in 1977, was Bill Clinton's mentor. He proposed a pre-World War II Anglophile conspiracy that John Robison's 1967 Proofs of a Conspiracy and Gary Allen in his None Dare Call It Conspiracy in 1972 provide additional fodder for.

Perhaps the easiest way to approach this genre is with a handbook. And Epperson's The Unseen Hand is the best introduction--replete with a glossary of terms and extended definitions of ideas and subjects commonly referred to among books of this ilk. Like most other conspiracy writers, Epperson contends that most of the major events of the past--the wars, the revolutions and the depressions--were planned in advance by an international conspiracy.

What is immediately apparent about Epperson and his fellow believers is that they take their proof of conspiracy wherever they can find it--even on a dollar bill. As Epperson explains in The New World Order, the design for change is told in the Latin inscription encircling the pyramid on the dollar bill, "Annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum," meaning announcing the birth of a new world order. A random comment by Angela Davis, Lucifer worship, even Masonic rituals and symbols are all fair game to make Epperson's case.

Roy Allan Anderson concurs with Epperson in his introduction to The Illuminati 666, but for him the conspiracy goes back to Nimrod in the Bible, whose "evil genius ... began that ancient apostasy in Mesopotamia," he writes.

The Illuminati 666 has even made its way into rap jargon and comicstrips. Huey Freeman, a character in Aaron McGruder's "The Boondocks," sets out on a crusade to expose Santa Claus as an "agent of the Illuminati" seeking to establish a New World Order while the "real" Santa, a black man named St. Nick (Jolly) Jenkins, languishes on death row accused of a crime he did not commit.

Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse, which is immensely popular among African-American readers, dredges up the long discredited anti-Semitic Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion with its tone and a colorful, apocalyptic cover. Books like Protocols, whose authorship is unknown, fit neatly into an African-American mind-set that has witnessed merger after merger among multinational corporations, and the wealth of the world gradually narrowing into the hands of a privileged few. Cooper's notion of a conspiracy--of a "one world government" and "new world order"--would seemingly make perfect sense. But this phenomenon, like many others, may be no more than the inevitable outcome of monopoly capitalism and imperialism that Marx and Lenin predicted. Even so, Cooper, Coleman, Epperson and Anderson would say "Ah, hah!" and offer a rather far-fetched notion that from the start, the Communists were in league with the capitalists.

It is precisely the network of powerful capitalists conspiring to rule the world that is the central theme of Coleman's The Committee of 300. Ultimately, this array of books provide black readers, especially those possessing a healthy dose of paranoia, with the confirmation they need to be on their guard. Some may be drawn to such literature because they are Christians and are vigilant about plans to eradicate the foundations of their faith.

Already a new crop of conspiracy books post-September 11th have hit the streets. Ever since the "underground" reportage that the image of Osama Bin Laden could be seen in the mushrooming clouds over the collapsing twin towers at the World Trade Center, the conspiracy buffs have had a field day. Bin Laden is their answer to the coming of the anti-Christ, the personification of evil.

Thus far, there hasn't been enough time to gauge how the terrorist attacks will impact the publication of new books in this genre, but street vendors in Harlem say sales are booming for books on conspiracy, Islam, the Bible, and practically any book with a doomsday theme. The coming rash of conspiracy writers will point to September 11th and say, "I told you so."

For a list of conspiracy books popular with black readers go to www.bibookreview.com.

Herb Boyd is the national editor of The Black World Today. An award-winning journalist, Boyd is the author of nine books including Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America, an anthology which he coedited with Robert Allen that received the 1995 American Book Award. Boyd examines black paranoia in "The Man and the Plan" on page 38.