Of all his civil rights initiatives during these years, Hoover’s decision to investigate the Citizens’ Councils is perhaps the most surprising. The councils advertised themselves as the law-abiding, respectable wing of massive resistance. Given his well-known sympathies with white Southerners, Hoover could well have accepted this at face value and looked the other way, as many Southern leaders chose to do. That he took a different path says less about his personal sympathies than about his fury at those who would defy federal law, and about his expanding definition of justifiable domestic
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