Before the Panthers, the Revolutionary Action Movement — the clandestine organization around Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmad), with Robert F. Williams as its exiled chairman — was the state's chief Black-revolutionary target. In 1967 police and the FBI announced they had foiled RAM plots to assassinate moderate leaders and poison Harlem's water: the "Queens 17" raids and the Herman Ferguson case, built on infiltrators whose stories the defense showed to be manufactured.

Ferguson, a respected assistant principal, was convicted of conspiracy in 1968 and jumped bail into two decades of exile rather than serve; on his 1989 return he served four years. The RAM cases — conspiracies proven by police agents, plots that never happened — rehearsed every technique of the COINTELPRO era on the movement's first revolutionary generation.