“Not all slave masters abused their slaves – Some actually treated them like family and bore children by them, like the Mississippi plantation owner, William Hoover.
He had eight children by my Great Grandmother, Elizabeth Allen.
One of those children was my Grandfather William Allen, and one was his brother, Ivery Hoover, who later had one son; J. Edgar.” Millie McGhee, author of Secrets Uncovered, J Edgar Hoover – Passing For White?
A new book entitled Secrets Uncovered, J Edgar Hoover – Passing For White? has been published revealing that J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for most of its early history from 1924 until his death in 1972, had black ancestors.
The author, Millie McGhee is an African-American who says she was told as a little girl in McComb, Mississippi, USA, of her familles links with Hoover, described by the author Edward Spannaus, his article The Mysterious Origins of J. Edgar Hoover as “one of the most virulent racists to hold a top government position” in the USA in the 20th century.
She says that her grandfather told of her of a “very powerful” man in Washington who was related to the family but did not want the links to be known and passed himself off as white.
She reveals in her book that this man was Hoover, who was born in 1895, was apparently anxious that no one should know of his black origins.
McGhee, a former teacher in Los Angeles, contacted a genealogist in Salt Lake City, Utah, for help in tracing her family’s history back over 200 years.
Her research shows that Hoover’s grandfather and great-grandfather lived in a segregated black area of Washington and were once classified in a census as “coloured”.
In the search of census records into the family of his father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover (who died in 1921 after a long illness) both the Hoover and Naylor families were living in areas of Washington D.C. – then itself a mostly segregated city – where blacks and whites were listed as living in close proximity.
Some of the white Hoover families had blacks living with them, not as servants, but blacks being of the same occupation, such as “butcher” or “clerk.”
There are also alterations and other oddities in a number of the Hoover family census records, and also in the racial listings which were then included in census records.
According to McGhee, her relatives were warned of “dire consequences” if they spoke publicly of his background. She said that as a little girl she believed that they would be killed if they mentioned the secret.
“Is this man so ashamed of his race that he would spend his whole life passing for white? . . . How has our race offended him ?”
She says that his obsession with the assassinated Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, stemmed in part from a repressed anger about his secret life.
Apparently, although members of the Hoover family have contacted her and said that they are not angry about the disclosures, McGhee’s own family were unhappy with her decision to go public, as, understandably, they never wanted to be associated with him.
According to Spannaus, apparently it was well-known both inside and outside the FBI, that there were rumours about Hoover’s possible black ancestry – which were widespread during his long reign.
There were also reports that Hoover deployed the FBI to track down who was behind rumours of his black ancestry – just as he did regarding rumours and reports about his homosexuality.
The American writer Gore Vidal, who grew up in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, told the writer Anthony Summers that when:
“Hoover was becoming famous, and it was always said of him – in my family and around the city – that he was mulatto.”
“People said he came from a family that had “passed.’ It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after generations of inbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white.”
“That’s what was always said about Hoover.” (Anthony Summers,Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993).
Summers also found evidence that blacks referred to Hoover as “some kind of spook” and even “soul brother,” and realized that in some black communities in the eastern part of the USA, it was generally believed that Edgar had black roots.
Hoover’s ancestry was always a subject of speculation within the FBI, because of his lack of documented heritage that was always required when someone joined the FBI.
Wesley Swearingen, a former FBI Special Agent (from 1951 to 1977), and author of the 1995 book FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Exposé, said that it was always viewed as a mystery the lack of documented evidence on Hoover’s background:
“Because for all the FBI agents, they’d go back and check everything about your family, your relatives, and everything else, to make sure they’re squeaky clean . . . and here, the Director, and nobody knows really where he came from . . .”
