The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

The FBI director had been invited to give an update on the racial tensions in the South since Brown, and he did not miss his chance. His report to the cabinet was chilling. Once again using the old canard that the NAACP was being infiltrated by the Communist Party, Hoover depicted black activist organizations as provocative and dangerous. Their spokesmen, he said, had declared that “white blood will flow,” and he singled out the bus boycott in Montgomery as an example of the NAACP’s revolutionary activities. Hoover praised white southerners who had reacted to provocations by forming citizens’ councils made up of “bankers, lawyers, doctors, state legislators, and industrialists,” that is, “some of the leading citizens of the South.” These men were protecting “historic traditions and customs” and would not abandon them “without a struggle.” The situation was a powder keg, Hoover darkly declared, and some “over-zealous but ill-advised leaders of the NAACP and the Communist Party” were likely to set off an explosion.