 During the 1950s, Thurgood Marshall developed a friendly relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.In 1956, for example, he privately praised Hoover's campaign to discredit T. R. M. Howard, a maverick civil rights leader from Mississippi.During a national speaking tour, Howard criticized the FBI's failure to seriously investigate cases such as the 1955 killers of George W. Lee and Emmett Till.