Withers was playing a dangerous game.*3
* * *
—
SHADOWS STRETCHED ACROSS downtown as Withers arrived on Beale Street, shortly before the shot sounded, before King fell.
There, along the famous corridor, he eyeballed the familiar sights, the rowdy clubs where he’d spent long nights snapping shots of B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and so many other great bluesmen; the professional offices, the shoppers, and the assorted street characters hanging about. In a few years, nearly all the windows here would be boarded. But for now, it bustled still. Within a block of his office were two barbershops, two pool halls, the Stardust Club and the Blue Stallion Lounge, and the old Elks Club where he once covered the grisly slaying of a prominent socialite; there was a tailor, a watch repairman, and the street curb where on his last day as a policeman seventeen years earlier he was arrested and kicked off the force for bootlegging. The rocking New Daisy Theatre was directly across the street, near the law offices of Hosea T. Lockard, later to become one of Tennessee’s first black judges.
Withers shared space with a dentist at 327 Beale.
Under a brightly lit, overhanging sign emblazoned with a red-white-and-blue Pepsi logo and a flourishing inscription, “Withers Studio,” the photographer stepped past baby pictures, military portraits, and wedding poses, into his office. He was forty-five. His worries were every man’s worries—money, family, mortality. A taste for home cooking was challenging the former high school quarterback’s once-sharp contours, and his wallet, as always, was overstretched. He had a mortgage and loved ones who depended on him—he and his wife Dorothy’s youngest child, Rosalind, their eighth, was only ten. They had four more at home and three grown sons in the military, one in Vietnam.
Many years later, when his secret finally came out, speculation would swirl about why he did it—why he collaborated with the FBI. Was it the cash? Or maybe patriotism? A World War II veteran, he was ten to twenty years older than many activists in the movement—a conservative, really—and he wasn’t sold on the more militant stuff, the marching in the streets, the confrontations. Or maybe it was his long desire to be a cop again. A
Joe Crittenden, who marched with Withers and traveled with him, said he never saw the photographer with FBI agents. “I never did,” he told CNN, shaking his head. “I never did.” decade after the civil rights era waned, he would become a policeman again, a gun-toting liquor agent for the state of Tennessee, a job he thought would finally bring financial security.
But for the moment, at least—as Marrell McCollough stood in the fading sunlight in the parking lot back at the Lorraine, as officer Richmond watched from the fire station, as a sniper poked a rifle out the window of a nearby rooming house—Withers’s worries dissipated. He’d been running hard now for several days, and he was tired. He put his feet up on his desk.19
He’d be running again, soon. Before the sun rose on April 5, he would huddle with King’s grieving staff up in room 306 at the Lorraine, he would shoot the first pictures of King in his satin-lined casket, he would even hold a piece of the fallen civil rights leader’s skull in his hands in a funeral parlor morgue room.
But for now, in his office, surrounded by his many prints and negatives, his pictures of King and Abernathy, of Roy Wilkins, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Forman, Medgar Evers, and so many others, he found a few moments of peace.
*1 McCollough testified to a congressional committee a decade later that he met Reverend Orange at Clayborn Temple and took him shopping “the whole afternoon.” The two then returned to the church before heading to the Lorraine around 6:00 p.m. with Bevel.
*2 Part of the FBI’s continuing skepticism involved younger members of King’s staff. Commanders at MPD told Lawrence its source at the Lorraine—most likely undercover officer Marrell McCollough—heard SCLC staff member James Orange say “he would be willing to work” with the Invaders. Orange also supposedly urged the militants to work with an Illinois-based pastor staying at the Lorraine, whose violent rhetoric included encouragement to commit arson. As Orange made return visits to Memphis that year, Lawrence secured a photo of the activist that Withers had shot at the Lorraine, evidently moments after the assassination.
*3 Despite Lawrence’s efforts to hide the relationship, there were times, it seems, when he and his source got sloppy. Withers’s old friend, Mark Stansbury, says he recalls meeting Lawrence once in Withers’s studio, sometime around 1962. “I only saw him that one time,” Stansbury told the author in 2017. He said he never knew that Withers passed information to the agent. When the story of Withers’s informing first broke in 2010, surviving friends and family expressed near-universal surprise. Close friend
3.
THE AGENT’S TALE
FALL 1997
HE SAT DOWN AWKWARDLY ON the sofa and eyed my notebook with a hint of contempt. Jim wasn’t used to this sort of thing. Over his long career in the FBI he was the one who asked the questions—he was the one who made the other squirm with discomfort. Threats, coercion, pleasantries, he’d used them all. Anything to keep the subject talking. Still, he was at peace. He’d resigned himself to this. Probably twenty to thirty researchers had contacted him over the past three decades, he said, each asking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s assassination and the belief by many that the FBI somehow had a hand in it.
He had turned them all down—until now.
“I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. But I see no great danger now,” Jim said in a soft, flat baritone. My hopes jumped with his pronouncement. I hoped to get a big story out of this. But like a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July, my spirits soared, crackled, then quickly fizzled back to Earth. Jim made it clear this interview was not for attribution. It was background only; I couldn’t quote him. My newspaper would have no scoop.
“Most of this stuff, I’ll probably deny if you ever put it in print,” he advised sternly. “I don’t want to get anybody hurt.”
Secrecy was a habit Jim* found hard to break. He’d retired fifteen years earlier; his hair had grayed and his face hung in fleshy pouches at the jowls. Yet even now—1997—he acted like a Cold War spy. He arranged for us to meet at a neutral site, a modest frame house in a marginal neighborhood of weedy lawns and weathered cars on the north edge of Memphis. Jim answered the door with a nod and a stoic half-smile. Like many of his colleagues, he went into private security after he left the Bureau. I came to wonder if it was boredom that led him to talk. Maybe he’d longed for a moment like this, when a reporter would ask about his glory days as an intelligence agent—doting on his every word—before luring him, like forbidden fruit, to break his vows and tell what he knew.
One thing was certain—Jim’s life once was a whole lot more interesting.
Back in the 1960s, he was attached for a time to the FBI’s security investigation of Dr. King and his circle of advisers. Tapping King’s phones and bugging his hotel rooms, the FBI waged one of the most notorious inquisitions in history, trying to prove that the leader of the American civil rights movement was a traitor to his country. It would get nasty. Under the leadership of FBI’s curmudgeonly director, J. Edgar Hoover, who detested King and assailed him as a “degenerate,” a “Tom cat,” and “a liar,” the Bureau invested enormous resources trying to prove that King was not only a Communist but a wife-cheating philanderer as well.
It’s difficult to comprehend today. On the third Monday in January, Americans take a day off from work to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a national holiday. Schools and streets are named for him; colleges teach courses on him. Years after his death, the personal papers of the martyred civil rights leader would fetch $32 million. Even the most arch-conservative had to concede that the FBI had landed on the wrong side of this history. It was a sore spot that Jim eased into ever so gingerly.
“They’re making him into a saint. I mean, he was anything and everything but a saint,” Jim said, hinting at King’s legendary weakness for women and repeating t
he FBI rationale that his inner circle was populated with Communists and dangerous militants. “There was a definite fear among the government that he might swing his organization into the Communist Party. We didn’t know which way he was going to go.”
Though he wouldn’t go on the record, it was amazing to me that Jim was even talking. He didn’t trust reporters. He’d used plenty of them, though. Back in the day he’d plant stories with them, aiming to discredit the target of an investigation, someone the government couldn’t pin a specific crime or illegality on yet still wanted to “neutralize” through negative publicity. Maybe he hoped to use me, too. I never would know for certain why he agreed to meet. But in the news business, sources always have an angle. You take them as they come.
Warily, we circled like boxers, sizing each other up. If Jim was Muhammad Ali—dancing, bobbing, laying back on the ropes as he feigned injury and prepared to spring—then I was Joe Frazier, straightforward and direct. I wanted to know what happened in Memphis. King was shot and killed there by a sniper on April 4, 1968, as he tried to rally the city’s striking garbagemen, a collection of poor, black city workers who’d suffered years of abuse. I knew my skill as a reporter wasn’t enough to get Jim to talk. But I had something else going for me: timing. The assassination was back in the news—and Jim was deeply agitated by it.
* * *
—
ALL THROUGH THE spring and summer of 1997, and now into the fall, the news in Memphis was dominated by the scintillating King assassination story, driven by a series of pleadings before the Criminal Court. King’s convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, was trying to win release from prison. Shriveled and slowly dying of liver disease, Ray, sixty-nine, made a case for medical hardship. And, he claimed, he had new evidence. He was framed, he said—the rifle found with his fingerprints on it was planted. In court papers, Ray even named the man he said masterminded it all—a hunched, retired autoworker named Raul who had immigrated here from Portugal and retired to the suburban sprawl north of New York City. Ray demanded a new trial, and he wanted to live out his final months at home, in the care of family.
Ray’s claims would have gone nowhere—the evidence against him was overwhelming—if not for a publicity-conscious judge named Joe Brown. A handsome, bearded, quick-witted man who bedeviled prosecutors by entertaining a long chain of defense motions and who would go on to star in his own television show, Judge Joe Brown, he claimed an expertise in firearms. Skeptically, he questioned whether the bullet that killed King actually came from Ray’s rifle. Brown ordered the gun to be retested. As news cameras whirred, the high-powered Remington deer-hunting rifle that Ray bought in Alabama a week before the assassination boomed again as men in white coats fired it in a crime lab in Providence, Rhode Island. Scientists later examined the bullets under a powerful electron scanning microscope at the University of Pittsburgh.
Brown gave prosecutors nightmares. But I certainly couldn’t complain. When I approached him at the bench after a hearing one day, he signed an order on the spot granting my photographer and me exclusive media access to the rifle testing. Wearing sound-insulating earmuffs, we watched in a tiny lab room as Ray’s .30-06 pump-action rifle roared into a giant water tank.
“This is the kind of thing the newspaper should cover,” Brown said with a giant, toothy smile.
As the story snowballed, I interviewed Ray in his prison cell in Nashville, where he repeated his claims of innocence from a wheelchair.
“No, I didn’t [do it],” the pale convict said meekly. Meanwhile, his lawyer, William Pepper, pitched a much-criticized book he wrote that suggested several government agencies and individuals—the FBI, the CIA, the army, the Memphis Police Department, even President Lyndon Johnson’s White House and retired autoworker Raul—played roles in a massive conspiracy to kill King.
The news grew all the more unbelievable when King’s family embraced Pepper’s accounts. The slain civil rights leader’s younger son, Dexter, visited Ray in prison. On television screens all over the world, Dexter King—handsome, mustachioed, and very much the spitting image of his father—was seen shaking Ray’s hand. “I believe you,” he told Ray. “And my family believes you. And we will do everything in our power to see you prevail.”
Now, here was Jim, snickering and sneering, fed up with it all.
“These people are nuts,” he scoffed. “They just couldn’t stand the thought that some little punk like Ray could have killed King just like they couldn’t stand the thought that some little punk of a Communist would have killed Kennedy. They’ve got to make a conspiracy out of it.”
“Everyone says it had to be a conspiracy because he couldn’t do this by himself,” Jim would complain over a series of meetings. He mocked the oft-cited conspiracy argument that Ray, an escaped convict, lacked the means or intelligence to flee the country and make it all the way to London, where he eventually was arrested. “Anybody in prison with any sense, that knows anything about the system, knows you can get a passport for sixty or even twenty-five dollars anywhere in the world.”
Jim was right—Ray was guilty. Ray admitted buying the rifle in Birmingham. His fingerprints covered the gun and related items found near his sniper’s nest, and evidence indicates that he stalked King through the South before catching up with him in Memphis. It would take pages to cover all the evidence against him; in fact Ray’s typed guilty plea involved fifty-six separate stipulations of material fact spread across dozens of pages. Ray was the gunman, no doubt.
But it would have been all but impossible to get Jim to consider the second finding of Congress’s official examination of King’s murder: that while Ray shot King, he likely didn’t act alone. Reopening the investigation of King’s murder in 1977–1979, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations found evidence of a $50,000 bounty that a group of racist St. Louis businessmen put on King’s head. Ray might have acted on the offer, which circulated among inmates at the nearby Missouri state prison in Jefferson City while Ray was housed there in 1967. Complicating matters, the committee found that while the FBI had conducted a thorough fugitive investigation to find King’s killer, it failed to conduct an adequate conspiracy investigation.1
But this was touchy stuff for Jim. So we didn’t go there, we stuck to what he knew. And that was domestic intelligence—the FBI’s secret spying on American citizens.
* * *
—
A GREAT FIRESTORM erupted in Memphis in 1976. Its cause wasn’t faulty wiring or a smoldering cigarette left on a nightstand, but something far more combustible: a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Memphis Police Department alleging widespread, unlawful political surveillance. But before the ACLU could get its claims before a judge, Lt. Eli Arkin struck a plan—and a match. The head of MPD’s just-exposed domestic intelligence unit, the dark-haired, mustachioed Arkin emptied the drawers of ten filing cabinets containing scores and scores of paper files MPD had assembled since the 1960s on local citizens: Vietnam War protestors, civil rights advocates, student activists at Memphis State University. Before ACLU lawyers could even serve city officials with legal papers, he burned most of the evidence.2
Despite the incineration, the ACLU won a landmark consent order forbidding MPD from engaging in future political surveillance. No longer could the police agency compile data on citizens’ beliefs, opinions, associations, or their exercise of First Amendment rights. Eventually, the larger story emerged: MPD didn’t conduct this surveillance alone. As in other cities, the FBI had assisted local police in Memphis in creating a secretive domestic intelligence unit, sometimes called the Red Squad, to help keep watch on citizens whose political beliefs frightened the government. This shared duty involved cataloging a storehouse of information: dossiers of photographs, newspaper articles, and internal reports detailing the activities and associations of these “subversives.”3
Part of this effort involved something even more sinister.
The public fir
st learned of the FBI’s counterintelligence program—COINTELPRO—in 1971, when an anonymous group of daring activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole armloads of files. Through news reports and congressional hearings over the next several years, the ugly details would emerge: the Bureau kept files on civil rights activists and Vietnam War protestors, using often illegal measures to spy on some and target others in a “dirty tricks” campaign. It included smearing leaders with embarrassing details leaked to the press or trying to break up marriages or get individuals fired from jobs—anything to weaken or derail their movements. An extreme case often cited by FBI critics involves Fred Hampton, a black militant Chicago activist shot dead in a police raid after a Bureau informant sketched out the floor plan of his apartment.
First launched in 1956 against the American Communist Party, COINTELPRO was designed to protect the country’s domestic security and guard against subversion, violence, and disorder. It did this by identifying the root causes of disorder—or potential disorder—and then working to counteract them. The program was illegal from its very inception—it lacked any legislative or executive branch authority. That it persisted for so long demonstrates the FBI’s view of the program as an effective tool in protecting domestic security. At the height of the Cold War, when most Americans viewed communism as a palpable threat, the FBI used COINTELPRO to smash the party’s inroads here. The Bureau later unleashed COINTELPRO to splinter and deflate the Klan and other white hate groups.4
But in the court of public opinion the FBI never overcame the initial images of secret-agent sabotage of innocent college students exercising First Amendment rights to protest the Vietnam War and black Americans fighting for basic rights.
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