J. Edgar Hoover Quotes


Rabble Rousers -- Communists -- Outsiders


Context

The leaders and their members were organizing Civil Rights protests and demonstrations in keys Southern communities. The Southern segregationists commonly referred to the protesters with these three terms. Hoover hated the Civil Rights organizations and many of their leaders and would not allow FBI agents to assure the safety of the demonstrators when they were beaten and brutalized by the Southern law enforcement officers and KKK members—often one and the same as Hoover knew ({637608}). He used the same terms describing the demonstrators as the Southerners did reflecting his biases and sympathies.


Citations

J. Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Descriptions of the leaders of CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and other Civil Rights organizations, 1964

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Linked Quotes

to the Civil Rights demonstrators Hoover, an inveterate racist himself would not allow FBI agents to protect Civil Rights demonstrators (see {637634}) until he was ordered to by the Attorney General.


Related Quotes
J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
  • Born: January 1, 1895
  • Died: May 2, 1972
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Public Servant

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.