A Republican ward heeler, postman Withers registered voters on his tiny front porch in Scutterfield. Unlike many Southern cities, Memphis tolerated widespread voting by African Americans. Yet it often was a dubious affair. Voting in those days involved paying poll taxes. Both Crump’s ruling Democratic Party organization and Church’s Lincoln League covered the taxes of impoverished voters who couldn’t afford them. The subsidy typically came with an unequivocal suggestion to vote for certain hand-picked candidates, a directive often sweetened by additional enticements, like a bottle of liquor.9
Precisely what role if any Earl Withers played in the shenanigans is uncertain. But he clearly benefited from his involvement as a political foot soldier, and his family prospered.
Staying in Scutterfield, they moved in 1927 down the street into a freshly built house at 1062 N. Manassas. Pearl worked as a maid, and that second income helped the couple afford the $750 mortgage. With six children (Ernest’s younger brother Jake was born in 1924), it was terribly cramped—just four rooms and no indoor toilet. But it was new and it was theirs. At the time, only a quarter of black Memphians owned their homes.
Much of the family’s life was dominated by Gospel Temple Baptist Church, an imposing, double-spired white brick sanctuary located just five doors down. From the time he was small, Ernest witnessed the church’s fervent worship and mass baptisms, conducted at times outdoors in mud holes, under the blue heavens.10
Life was good.
But on December 19, 1930, Ernest’s world would change forever. His mother, Pearl, his “sweet mama” who so often had held him in her lap on the floor in joyful hugs, died following a bout with influenza. She was forty-two.
He was eight.
Years later he would reminisce about her death, parsing every detail: how the women from Gospel Temple held an all-night vigil in his home; how the undertaker came and took apart his mother’s bed; how the workmen sprayed sanitizer through the house as if it were just another routine treatment by pest control.
“My brother and I were in the bed and…we wet all over the bed, over both of each of us,” Withers recalled of his loss.
They buried her four days before Christmas.11
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WITHIN A YEAR, Earl married Minnie Bouldin, a seamstress. The family hardly missed a step. Big-hearted Minnie took up where Pearl left off, caring for the children; seeing to their education. Ernest’s stepmother was tender but firm. She sewed for prominent white families. She was a bit of a perfectionist, Ernest recalled, dispatching her stepkids on errands to buy colored threads—red, blue, green, turquoise—precise details that couldn’t be fudged.
“If it didn’t match,” Withers later recalled, “we had to go ten blocks back to make sure that the thread matched.”12
At Manassas School, Ernest thrived. He followed in older brother Earl’s footsteps, playing quarterback on the football team. Minnie stitched together the blue-and-gold uniforms for the school’s drum and bugle corps.
His pivotal moment, though, came in the eighth grade. His sister had given him a Brownie camera. He took it to school one day, when heavyweight champ Joe Louis’s glamorous wife, Marva, was visiting. To hoots and catcalls, Withers found the nerve to walk to the front of the school auditorium and take her picture.
“I got out of the back, the very back end of the auditorium…The children laughed. I sniggled, but went on,” he later recalled of a certain boldness that would color his long career.13
Graduating from high school in 1941, his future remained uncertain. He aimlessly took a job as a shoeshine man and a messenger. Then two life-altering events redirected his trajectory:
He married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Mae Curry, in a ceremony performed by the reverend L. A. Kemp, the same mud-hole-dipping Gospel Temple evangelist who had married his parents, Earl and Pearl, twenty-five years earlier.
And the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Two months after his first child, Ernest Jr., was born in February 1943, Ernest mustered into the army, landing in Camp Butler, North Carolina, where he was attached to the 1319th Engineer General Service Regiment as a clerk and jeep driver. There, he got a monumental break. Driving for the company commander, he learned of a vacancy at the army’s photography school in nearby Camp Sutton. He received permission to fill it.
Not only did he receive technical training, he learned how to run a business—including the crucial life skills of hustling and turning hardship into opportunity.
Shipped out to the Pacific Theater, to the island of Saipan, Withers discovered that homesick servicemen were willing to pay him to take pictures to send home to their families. First, though, he had to overcome obstacles—like a shortage of photography supplies. Withers’s unit had none. But a nearby Air Force photography lab did. Withers had no money to pay the lab for supplies, but he did have beer. Every week, soldiers in his unit received a ration of six cans of beer; Withers didn’t drink his, he traded them for supplies. He found through bartering he could get more beer from others to trade for even more supplies. In time, he built a business, charging soldiers—black and white—to take their portrait beside a palm tree or a jungle bush.14
Discharged in 1946, he returned to Memphis, as uncertain of his future as ever.
As the FBI’s Bill Lawrence settled into his new digs on the Sterick Building’s twenty-fourth floor, looking to rid Middle America of communism, Ernest Withers pounded the pavement for work.
Already, he and Dorothy had three children. For a time, Withers thought his fortune lay outside Memphis, up north or on the coast. It’s a path all his siblings would take: Earl left for Washington, D.C., where he became an accountant for the Department of Defense; sister Alice married and moved to California; Vivian relocated to Chicago; James went to Howard University and became a pharmacist. Little brother Jake, too, would leave for Washington, serving as a deputy U.S. Marshal. In early 1946, Ernest hopped a train to Chicago to scout a new life, leaving his wife and kids temporarily behind. He considered photography school. He didn’t last long—by April he was back.
Taking advantage of his G.I. Bill benefits, he and brother Jake opened a photography studio in a duplex in North Memphis, not far from their father’s home. Business was slow. Studio photography in Memphis’s black community was dominated by established downtown businesses: the Hooks Brothers on Beale Street and Blue Light Studio. By 1948, Withers closed shop. His father urged him to take a job with the Post Office.15
Once again, uncertainty clouded his future.
Finally, in July 1948, opportunity came from an unlikely source: Boss Crump. The graying leader bowed to political pressures and allowed the Memphis Police Department to hire a small contingent of African American officers. The spark for this monumental addition to the city’s all-white force involved the savage beating of a meek Firestone employee, Eli Blaine, who had complained to police brass that two patrolmen stole ten dollars off him. As Blaine confronted the pair at police headquarters, one punched him in the eye, breaking his eyeglasses—right in front of police supervisors. Ordered to take Blaine to city-owned John Gaston Hospital, the officers beat him so severely on the ride over, his eye had to be surgically removed.16
The two cops testified that Blaine injured himself while trying to escape from the moving squad car, tumbling out the door onto the road. Charged with assault with intent to murder, one of the patrolmen was acquitted. The all-white jury convicted the other of simple assault and battery and fined him $51. The local black community newspaper, The Memphis World, ran photos of the disfigured Blaine on its front page and editorialized about other injustices, including the alleged rape of two young women by patrolmen.*4
Civic leaders argued that such atrocities could be minimized by assigning black officers to patrol African American neighborhoods. Other Southern cities already did that, including Atlanta, Nashville, Chattanooga, Charlotte, Houston, and Dallas.
When Memphis agreed to join their ranks, more
than 160 young black men applied, Withers among them. The struggling twenty-six-year-old photographer survived a large round of cuts as the city shortlisted the applicant field. Police brass sent him to three weeks of training at the police academy along with fifteen other candidates. Nine finished—including Withers. On November 4, 1948, the city issued him a badge and swore him in as one of the “Original Nine,” the city’s first black policemen in the twentieth century.*5
Not since the advent of Jim Crow in the late 1800s had there been African Americans patrolling Memphis streets.17
* * *
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ERNEST STRUCK A dashing figure in his dress blues and cap, his badge number—278—emblazoned in gold on the crest. The popular patrolman walked the night beat past rowdy juke joints and pool halls on Beale Street; he came to know its patrons and shopkeepers well, along with its hustlers, dice men, and streetwalkers. He once twisted an ankle chasing down a purse snatcher. He corralled drunks, thugs, and confidence men. In time, he got a patrol car, making the rounds in the black-majority Orange Mound neighborhood, where he and his partner, slender Wendell Robinson, became beat cop heroes.18
“We feared the white policemen, to be honest. And it was a breath of fresh air to see Negroes or African American policemen patrolling Orange Mound,” said University of Memphis communications professor David Acey, who was a young boy when MPD’s color barrier fell. “It was almost like Joe Louis winning the heavyweight championship.”19
If Withers’s police activity brought him into contact with Bill Lawrence, then entering his fourth year with the FBI in Memphis when Withers joined MPD, there is no record of it. Though the young G-man’s anticommunist work increasingly took him into Memphis’s black community, there was limited opportunity for interaction. Black officers could not arrest white suspects; they could only hold them until white officers arrived to cuff them and haul them to jail. Many of the white cops resented their new colleagues.20
But the young black officers felt a sense of fraternity—and pride. They rode together to and from work. They took their wives out on collective picnics. When Withers and his wife, Dorothy, had their fourth child in 1950, they named him Wendell, after Ernest’s beloved patrol partner.
“We were like a family,” recalled Jerry Williams, who, at twenty-one, was the youngest of the black policemen. Withers was like an older brother. He took Williams under his wing. Looked out for him. “He was a good policeman,” Williams said in his old age. “He knew what he was doing.”21
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YET, IN THE type of astonishing twist that would define his life, Withers’s police career came to an abrupt halt in the early morning darkness of August 25, 1951. Williams watched in disbelief that day, when, around 3:00 a.m., officers placed Withers, still in uniform, into the back of an MPD paddy wagon on Beale Street. He was under arrest.
A police supervisor alleged he’d caught the young patrolman red-handed as he divided up illicit cash profits with a local bootlegger. The incident would haunt Withers for decades.
His arrest followed a weeks-long investigation by Lt. Lee “Big Red” Quianthy, a gruff and ambitious officer with a pasty white complexion who made a name on the force for helping capture George “Machine Gun Kelly” Barnes in 1933 and for other daring arrests, including once knocking a pistol from a murderer’s hand with his nightstick.
When Quianthy reported his suspicions about Withers to a major, he was told he needed to catch the photographer-turned-cop “in the act.” According to police reports, he did just that. Quianthy followed Withers to the home of Lyncha Adolphus Johnson, a bootlegger with a minor police record. The redheaded lieutenant entered the living room with his pistol drawn as the pair divided up a night’s profits from selling whiskey on Beale Street.22
For years afterward, Withers said he was set up. A biography produced in 1995 by the local public television station in Memphis reported he’d “been framed.” Withers told an interviewer in 2003 he was targeted by “a mean lieutenant.” In Pictures Tell The Story, Ernest’s glossy coffee table book of civil rights photos published in 2000, he contends his dismissal stemmed from jealousy over his photography business, which he operated on the side—and racism. “Apparently, Ernest was set up in a way that made it appear that he was taking money from bootleggers,” F. Jack Hurley writes in an essay in the book based on interviews with Withers.23
Given the degree of racism on the force and in Memphis at large, his claims cannot be dismissed out of hand.
However, the balance of evidence points strongly to Withers’s guilt. His police personnel file shows that Chief J. C. Macdonald held a speedy hearing, interviewing five witnesses, including alleged bootlegger Johnson and his mother, both of whom said Withers shared in the profits from whiskey Johnson sold. Withers denied he was a partner in the scheme, but admitted to Macdonald that he had loaned Johnson money on two occasions to buy half-pints of Old Hickory and Heaven Hill whiskey from a liquor store that the unlicensed Johnson then resold at concerts at the Hippodrome, the famed Beale Street ballroom and skating rink.*6
“Withers, as a police officer did you know you were aiding and abetting Johnson in bootlegging?” the intense Macdonald asked him.
“Yes sir,” Withers answered. “I knew.”24
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THE CASE AMOUNTED to petty corruption. Withers wasn’t charged with a crime. But he was dismissed from the force for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” In one of his many varied explanations, Withers told an interviewer in 1975 that Quianthy, by then deceased, targeted him because the young patrolman had inadvertently jeopardized the lieutenant’s own illicit affairs.
“I arrested a bootlegger he was protecting,” Withers said. “It wasn’t so much a racial thing. It was politics.”25
Withers’s friend and fellow black patrolman, Jerry Williams, validated that assessment. Though he eventually retired as assistant police chief, Quianthy, too, was bootlegging, Williams contended.
“Fifty percent of the department was corrupt,” he said. Indeed, Memphis police had a long history of taking payoffs from bootleggers. At the same time, Williams made no excuses for his friend. It was well known Withers was taking kickbacks—a common practice among enterprising officers in need of extra cash.
“Ernest brought it on himself,” Williams said.26
Regardless of how it went down, Withers was done as a cop. He was shamed; and hurt financially. The loss of the regular income and benefits was a critical blow to his growing family.
But he was hardly finished. Once again, he focused on his photography.
As it turns out, losing his job as a police officer might have been the best thing that ever happened to him.
*1 Ernest Withers would say years later that his roots lay in the “Faulkner herd in Mississippi,” an indication that his grandmother may have been a slave held by Col. William Clark Falkner, great-grandfather of the renowned author, William Faulkner. A marriage certificate from 1876 spells Dora’s surname without a u, just as Colonel Falkner spelled his. Still, the connection is tenuous. Bobby Joe Mitchell, the unofficial historian of Marshall County, told the author he doubts any connection to William Faulkner, whose roots lay miles away in Tippah and Union counties.
*2 Earl Withers’s obituary says he attended Woodstock Training School, but details remain obscure. The school opened in 1913 when Earl Withers was twenty-four. It’s possible he attended as a young adult or perhaps earlier, when Woodstock maintained only elementary and middle schools.
*3 The story of Martin, a physician, drug store proprietor, and co-owner of Negro League baseball’s Memphis Red Sox, illuminates Crump’s racial and political intolerance. During the 1940 elections, Martin hosted political rallies featuring speakers who criticized the Crump regime, including its rampant police brutality. In response, Crump stationed police officers outside Martin’s South Memphis Drug Store for weeks, frisking customers as they entered and left. Martin fled to Chicago whe
n police began investigating his long-known side occupation as an unlicensed bondsman. He was arrested during a return visit in 1943, when he was told to leave town for good. For a detailed discussion of Crump’s harassment of Martin, see Elizabeth Gritter, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865–1954 (2014), 141–50.
*4 Despite compelling evidence against them, the officers were acquitted by an all-white jury. Nonetheless, as in the Blaine matter, the case evidenced a growing willingness by white authorities in Memphis to buck prevailing attitudes and pursue white-on-black crime.
*5 Withers owed a measure of his achievement to his father, Earl. His personal references included two powerful black Republican Party luminaries, insurance executive Lt. George W. Lee and banker J. E. Walker. He got help with the written test, too. “My father had paid a lady to train me,” Withers said years later, explaining how a tutor helped him study as his father pushed him to take a job with the Post Office. “It was just a stroke (of luck) in life that I had been boned up to pass the civil service examination.”
*6 The first incident occurred in April 1951 when Withers purchased twelve half-pints of Old Hickory whiskey at Midway Liquor Store at the corner of Fourth and Beale, arranging for Johnson to pick up the booze later that night. Johnson told police he sold most of the whiskey at the Hippodrome during a concert by jazz man Earl Bostic and then split the proceeds with Withers. Johnson said the August sale netted $15—roughly $142 today. He was dividing the money with Withers in his home when Lee Quianthy burst in. “Withers flashed his flashlight about the room and Mr. Lee came in with his pistol drawn,” Johnson told Chief Macdonald.
11.
AN ACCUSING FINGER: THE EMMETT TILL CASE
CRICKETS CRIED IN A MOONLESS night as the men drove past rows of ripening cotton and towering cedars, rolling to a stop at Moses Wright’s darkened home.
A Spy in Canaan Page 13
