While writing his history of the war in the 1950s and 1960s, Foote was a liberal on racial issues. He supported school integration, opposed Eisenhower's hands-off approach to Southern racism and openly championed Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Foote protested against the KKK's use of the Confederate flag, believing 'that everything they stood for was almost exactly the opposite of everything the Confederacy had stood for'. Foote was an outspoken supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, arguing in 1968 that "the main problem facing the white, upper-class South is to decide whether or not the negro is a man ... if he is a man, as of course he is, then the negro is entitled to the respect an honorable man will automatically feel to an equal.”