J. Edgar Hoover Quotes
Freedom cannot long service where defiance and contempt are tolerated or condoned. That is why our country can ill-afford the binge of so called "civil disobedience" which has erupted on the streets ... and across the campuses of many colleges and universities.
J. Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Speech, Michigan Bar Association, Lansing, MI, June 8, 1967
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is a classic Egyptian political technique. Egyptian political leaders espouse democratic values and endorse human rights, but control and regulate the actual exercise of rights so that “unacceptable” groups or people can never really assemble or protest. They make an application to demonstrate and find themselves arrested or “detained” so the Egyptians can say that no one is refused the right to assemble. Their permit was not denied.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
Justice Black would quote the 1st Amendment—"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press"—then slam his hand on his desk and exclaim:
He was trying to justify the arrest, torture and mistreatment of 15 trade union activists in Zimbabwe, and in the process showed himself for the brutal dictator that he had become.
John Edgar Hoover was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover is also credited with establishing and expanding a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List, renamed in 2001 as the Terrorist Screening Database which the FBI still compiles and manages.
