Such concerns were amplified in the development of domestic securities agencies such as the nascent FBI, which focused on the spread of "dangerous" groups such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Communist Party. As enormous federal, state, and local resources were committed to Jim Crow segregation, a racial apartheid system implemented most strongly in the southern United States but present in the North as well, the fear of America's people of color uniting with colonized people abroad put the growth of Islam among black Americans at the front of the federal government's surveillance and suppression agenda.

DEFINE: Clarifies that the FBI's surveillance of groups like UNIA and the Communist Party extended to Islam among Black Americans, framed through fear of international solidarity.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 376