Remembering the Cold War in the South

Reading Olen Steinhauer, especially 36 Yalta Boulevard, takes me back to the Cold War of my childhood in the 1960's.

I remember having a sheet of stamps like the ones above.  My father must have given them to me.  I suppose that he had contributed to or had been a member of the United States Anti-Communist Congress.  I stuck some on my trumpet case.

 In Florida, every high school student was required to take a course called "Americanism versus Communism."  The text for the course was Masters of Deceit, a book about the U.S. Communist Party by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Among segregationist Southern whites, Communists were believed to be behind the Civil Rights movement.  I remember these billboards:

It is a picture of MLK at the Highlander Folk School, which, while not a "Communist training school", was a center for labor and civil rights organizing.  Close enough, to the segregationist mind.