The American music magazine Rolling Stone has requested to obtain all archival material that the FBI has on Aretha Franklin.
Now the secrecy stamp has been partially lifted after a four-year process.
Aretha Franklin's FBI files consist of 270 pages and show extensive surveillance of the celebrated soul singer.
A large part of the material is also still classified.
"Black extremists," "communist sympathizers" and "haters America" are expressions used in the documents that charted the singer and those she associated with privately and professionally.
An icon in the civil rights movement
The FBI tracked Aretha Franklin between 1967 and 2007. Dubbed "The Queen of Soul," the singer was an icon of the civil rights movement and associated with black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Angela Davis, which apparently worried the federal police.
But the documents also show that the FBI did try, but never succeeded, to link Franklin to the more militant elements of the civil rights movement such as the Black Panthers.
“They would never have found anything”
- It makes me feel a special way when I learn that the FBI was chasing her and wanted to keep track of everything she did, Kecalf Franklin tells Rolling Stone.
- But at the same time, because I know what my mother was like, I know that she had nothing to hide, so they would never have found anything.
So they wasted their time and as you can see... they found nothing.
Aretha Franklin passed away in 2018, aged 76.