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LAWRENCE APPEARED CALM and collected under the crystal chandeliers of the Caucus Room in the colonnaded Cannon House Office Building. But the scene must have troubled him. In this very room thirty years earlier the House Un-American Activities Committee had pursued Communists and subversives, people Lawrence and his patriotic FBI colleagues had zealously investigated for disloyalty.
Now, it seemed, his government was after him: after the good guys. After the FBI.
For good reason, many thought.
These were the days after Watergate. Never had public opinion of traditional government institutions been so low. The public learned of CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders. Investigations exposed the FBI’s harassment of political activists—how it had bugged Dr. King’s hotel rooms, tapped his phone, and waged a dirty tricks campaign to destroy him, how it had gone after others, too, using similar underhanded tactics.
Still, Lawrence couldn’t see how any of that involved him. He’d never participated in dirty tricks against King. There’d been little chance.
The civil rights leader visited Memphis sparingly in the ’60s, and the FBI’s local security file*1 on him never grew very thick there.2
Lawrence did press his racial sources once about an extramarital affair King was rumored to have had, but nothing came of it.3 But the congressmen interrogating him didn’t seem to know or care much about any of that.
It was a Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving 1978. Perhaps they were tired. Perhaps their minds already had drifted home for the holiday. They stuck largely to the assassination and to the surveillance surrounding it.
No, Lawrence told them. There was no electronic surveillance of King in Memphis. Lawrence never used such stuff. He used informants. Though he had many unpaid confidential sources providing bits of information, he said he had just four or five “racial informants”—controlled, paid sources—continually reporting on the strife surrounding Dr. King’s visits to Memphis in March and April 1968.4
Now, those handful of paid informants were at the center of the committee’s investigation.
One by one, their files were examined. Under an arrangement with the Justice Department, their names were excised from paperwork to protect confidentiality agreements. But the details of their work were laid bare, as the committee explored a widely circulated conspiracy tale.
As the story went, the FBI had planted “agents provocateur” among the marchers in that disastrous, March 28, 1968, mass demonstration Dr. King led through downtown Memphis. It erupted into violence. Windows were smashed. Stores were looted. When King came back a week later to show he could lead a peaceful march, he was assassinated.
As certain “assassinologists” tell it, the FBI planted saboteurs—men in dark sunglasses and Afro hairstyles posing as young militants—who incited the crowd to violence. They aimed to embarrass King, to lure him back to Memphis, like a moth to a flame, to lead a reputation-saving, peaceful march—right into the crosshairs of a sniper. The story stood on shaky ground; no credible evidence seemed to support it.*2 Yet the committee felt duty-bound to investigate it to its ends.5
FBI agents and ex-militants were interviewed. Stacks of paperwork from informant files cluttered the committee’s staff offices.6
Congressional investigators came to focus on one informant who appeared to have influence over the young militants in question, the homegrown Black Power group known as the Invaders. Lawrence testified that he met virtually daily with this informant, that he gave him specific instructions and assignments. Committee staff then approached the FBI. They wanted to interview the informant. He agreed. Lawrence’s secret source would meet behind closed doors only. Asked to go public, he declined, evidently fearing repercussions.7
The informant was never named—but the handwritten notes Betty Lawrence found identify him as Ernest Withers.8
Those notes reveal more than just the frustration and desperation that gripped Lawrence as he learned that his valued informant was about to go before the committee. They show he also offered Withers a healthy dose of witness coaching when he finally reached him on the telephone at his son’s Washington home at 8:15 on the morning of Wednesday, November 22, 1978, as the photographer was headed to a closed-door meeting with the committee.9
“I told him…that I had never revealed or disclosed his identity & did not know how committee learned of his identity,” Lawrence wrote in his distinctive, doctor’s-prescription scrawl.
In winding, even artful, run-on sentences he wrote:
“I would Not tell him what to say—However, IF his confidential relationship with me had been based on and motivated by his concern for the peaceful and effective preservation of the Civil Rights movement; a concern aimed at trying to prevent or deter its exploitation and possible counter productive destruction or diminution of effectiveness, that he should say so.—And that if the fact that he had been a former law enforcement officer & thus cognizant of the need for peaceful and orderly attainment of goals vis a vis attainment by force & violence as the only permanent & lasting solution, that he should say so. And that if his purpose in cooperating with FBI was to detect and deter violence—either by furnishing info or by counseling (when & where possible against advisability of force & violence) that he should say so; And if his cooperation was based on patriotism and concerns of civic morality—aimed at protecting his family, race and community from destructive violence, and not for mere monetary gain, that he should say so…”*3
The Commercial Appeal published Lawrence’s notes along with another expansive narrative I wrote on December 19, 2010.
By then, we’d filed a lawsuit against the FBI. We sued in U.S. District Court in Washington, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, seeking access to Withers’s informant file. The odds were against us. The laws protecting identities of informants were just too strong. That went for all informants, even dead ones like Withers, whose long-dormant work arguably had more to do with politics than law enforcement.
Indeed, the FBI gave no ground when we sued. Its lawyers fought zealously. Despite Lawrence’s handwritten notes and all the other evidence we made public, attorneys for the Justice Department suggested in pleadings that Withers hadn’t served as an informant at all. Nothing we put in the public domain seemed to matter.
Still, it was clear to me and my editors that Withers was an exceptional FBI source. He was paid. He met almost daily with Lawrence. He received instructions and assignments.
Less clear was how it happened. Why did he become an informant? What precisely did he do for them? What motivated him? How did he and Lawrence meet? When did it all start?
We were nowhere close to answering those questions.
It’s odd. Even screwball conspiracy stories*4 can lead to something legitimate. This story brimmed with troubling questions about government surveillance and its potential abuse of individual rights. Whatever Withers was doing for the FBI, it clearly involved some intensive snooping, and we felt it was an important piece of recent untold history worth pursuing.
Despite advice to the contrary, Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal, agreed to push forward with a suit. It wouldn’t be cheap. Chuck Tobin, a media-law attorney we retained in Washington, told us we could expect to pay a large sum—money precious to a paper that had laid off half its news staff amid seven years of declining revenue. But Peck, a gaunt, eclectic Westerner with a droopy cowboy mustache, a degree from Stanford, and Big Sky–sized ambition, always was a bit of a dreamer.
I like to think, too, he could see the big picture. To him, the emerging image of shutterbug Ernest Withers—chronicler of the blues, Negro Leagues baseball, and the movement, friend to King, Medgar Evers, James Meredith and so many others, and, now, it seemed, an FBI informant, too—was nothing short of spectacular.
Like so many compelling tales, the story of Ernest Withers started simply: in a cramped, four-room house in North Memphis, two generations removed from sla
very.
*1 The security file involves the FBI’s investigation of King’s alleged ties to communism and subversion. These are materials involving his political and personal life, separate from the large files assembled on the investigation of his assassination in Memphis.
*2 The story was popularized in a docudrama, King, broadcast on network television in the fall of 1977. In it, an actor portraying a young militant says he and others were paid to disrupt the march. Asked who paid them, he responds, “The FBI.”
*3 A critical issue the author faced before publishing the notes was authenticating them. Betty Lawrence had been immensely helpful in sharing her father’s papers. But what if she was a kook? What if she forged them? The author explored that frightful possibility through various tests. First, the handwriting seemed to match known samples of Bill Lawrence’s handwriting appearing in margins of FBI documents. Historical dates lined up, too. For example, information matched perfectly with the date of Lawrence’s testimony before Congress. Details about an unknown informant interviewed by the committee’s staff synched as well. The clincher came when the author contacted the public library at the District of Columbia. A helpful librarian there located a copy of the 1979 DC phonebook. He scanned and e-mailed a page listing Ernest Withers, Jr.’s phone number—(202) 232-1517—the same as in Bill Lawrence’s notes. Betty Lawrence was no kook. She eventually gave The Commercial Appeal a sworn affidavit attesting to her discovery after the paper filed suit against the FBI for access to Withers’s informant file.
*4 Official investigations found no credible evidence supporting the alleged sabotage of Dr. King’s march in Memphis. Yet the story survives in recent writings on the assassination. We likely can expect new embellishments. Some may come with the revelation that Withers worked as an informant who reported on the Invaders. Another new wrinkle involves statements Withers made late in life that he had used a power saw to cut the 2-by-2 wood sticks that organizers attached to placards for the demonstration. Youths removed those sticks during the march and smashed storefront windows, igniting the melee.
10.
A TARNISHED BADGE
SILAS WITHERS’S FINAL, HORROR-FILLED MOMENTS came in the muck of a Mississippi cypress swamp. No one knows much about what happened. Or even much about Silas.
Born a slave around 1825, it’s believed he worked west of Holly Springs on land owned by Albert Quarles Withers, an early nineteenth-century settler from Virginia. By 1860, the enterprising pioneer had built a thriving plantation, a medium-sized cotton operation with fifty-four slaves, in North Mississippi’s bucolic Marshall County. According to family legend, Silas fled as General Ulysses S. Grant’s liberating army made its march from Shiloh through Holly Springs, down to its fateful siege of Vicksburg.
The runaway Silas joined the Union Army, but returned to the plantation after the war to visit family.
He was never seen alive again.
Reportedly, he was lynched for his disloyalty somewhere in the dreary mist of Pigeon Roost Bottom, a boggy stretch between Holly Springs and Memphis, once so thick with passenger pigeons that the sky blackened and tree limbs were said to break under the birds’ weight. An obituary published in 1970 upon the death of Silas’s grandson, Earl Withers—Ernest’s father—retold the family legend about how searchers scoured the trail to Memphis but could find only “bits of clothing” Silas had worn.1
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THE STORY OF Silas’s descendants and how they escaped the brutal Mississippi society that killed him is the story of many Memphians.
At first, Silas’s son, Christopher Columbus Withers, made a go of it in Marshall County, working as a tenant farmer in the blistering heat of Reconstruction. Sketchy records provide few details. But all available evidence suggests it was a miserable life: plowing fields behind a mule, picking cotton under the oppressive Mississippi sun, sharing the modest profits of his sweat with the white owner.
In 1876, young Withers, who went by his middle name, Columbus, married Medora “Dora” Falkner.*1 They had as many as ten children. Among them was Ernest’s father, Arthur Earl Withers—called Earl—born in 1889 in the gently rolling hills some ten miles west of Holly Springs. By 1900, it had become too much, and so they moved, heading up dusty Pigeon Roost Road, bound for the greener grass of Tennessee.2
They settled just north of Memphis in the undulating countryside near Millington. The family prospered. Columbus learned to read and write. Son Earl attended nearby Woodstock Training School, the celebrated rural institute that became the first high school for African Americans in Shelby County. He learned his ABCs and a keen work ethic that benefited him the rest of his life.*2
By 1917, the mild-mannered Earl had moved to Memphis, working as a porter and a truck driver. There, at twenty-eight, he married Pearl Davis, a city girl, and joined the army as the United States was drawn into World War I. He shipped out across the gray Atlantic with the 368th Regiment of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, the famed “Buffalo Soldiers” that saw action in the Battle of the Argonne Forest in France.3
Once back in Memphis, Earl went to work raising a family. He and Pearl had four children in four years. Their fifth, Ernest Columbus Withers, was born August 7, 1922, in North Memphis, where the family bought a small, four-room house in the heart of a thriving black middle-class neighborhood surrounded by a sea of poverty and chaos. Here, Ernest grew up, coddled and secure, learning the social skills he would deploy with great effect the rest of his life: an engaging personality; a gentle, easy manner; a disarming, ubiquitous smile.
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ALL AROUND HIM he saw success. His neighbors included a physician, an insurance executive, a pastor, a barber, several porters, and a range of workers employed at well-paying industrial plants such as General Motors and Memphis Hardwood Flooring Company. Years later, Ernest would reflect with fondness on the “good and decent people” here in Amos Woodruff subdivision, popularly known as “Scutterfield,” a neighborhood platted in the 1880s by white land developers and built out in the early twentieth century as an oasis of black middle-class prosperity.4
Life offered plenty of adventure for a boy in Scutterfield. Ernest and his neighborhood pals roamed the oak-lined streets, engaging in spirited games of football and baseball on vacant lots, running free through the green, open fields that stretched north to the Firestone plant and Manassas High School, the local Negro school. On hot summer days they’d walk over a mile to swim at the city’s segregated Colored Pool, or saunter down busy Manassas Street to see Ernest’s grandmother, who treated him to gingersnaps and other sweets.
The hikes fueled more than childhood adventure: they provided valuable life lessons for an African American youth growing up in Jim Crow Memphis in the 1920s and ’30s.
A simple walk, however, came with complications, even danger. Ernest’s grandmother lived several blocks to the south. To get there, he passed Humes High, the all-white school from which Elvis Presley would graduate in 1953. It sat six blocks south of Ernest’s Manassas School, attended in the early ’60s by famed funk and soul singer Isaac Hayes. Though just a mile apart, the two schools operated in different worlds. Ernest’s grandmother took care to keep those worlds separate. When she walked the boy home, she avoided Humes and its surrounding white neighborhoods, navigating along side streets, through the reassuring familiarity of black North Memphis.5
For good reason.
In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan emerged from its rural cloisters as an open and ominous force in Memphis. The terrorist organization even ran candidates for political office. One, future congressman Clifford Davis, won election as a Memphis city judge in 1923 running on the official KKK ticket.6
Edward H. Crump, the wild-haired political boss who controlled public affairs in Memphis for decades, despised the Klan, but not necessarily because he held vastly divergent views on race. A segregationist born in Holly Springs, not far from the Withers plantation, Crump believed in opportun
ity for blacks—just not equal opportunity. He employed ruthless methods to keep them, as he said, “in their place.” Despite his ties to the Klan, Davis was Crump’s pick as police commissioner in 1928, a position he held until 1940, when the equally harsh Joseph “Holy Joe” Boyle took over.7
Davis’s goons beat and nearly killed black labor leader Thomas Watkins as he tried to organize workers along the riverfront. Boyle’s cops drove African American businessman J. B. Martin into exile in Chicago.*3
Crump’s oppression extended even into the arts. Lloyd T. Binford, chairman of Crump’s Board of Censors, protected Southern sensibilities by routinely banning Hollywood films that portrayed African Americans in a positive light. He edited silver screen appearances by Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong, and banned the showing of black boxer Joe Louis’s heavyweight championship victory over German rival Max Schmeling. Binford once publicly opposed a petition calling for the deportation of black Americans to Africa, quipping “I wanted to go with them. Otherwise, where would I get servants?”8
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YET FOR ALL his tyranny, Crump allowed African Americans who danced to his tune to thrive: To vote. To ascend in business. To share, if only in small degree, in political patronage.
Such opportunities opened to the Withers family in the 1920s.
A truck driver, Earl Withers landed a job delivering mail for the Post Office. As a branch of the federal government, it paid the same wages to both white and black employees, something local government and most private businesses refused to do. These were patronage jobs. The ticket to such a good-paying position for an African American in Memphis came through Robert Church, Jr., a wealthy, black Republican Party leader who oversaw much of the local spoils system for the Republican-dominated White House of the Roaring Twenties. In turn, Earl Withers became a cog in the local political machine.
A Spy in Canaan Page 12
