A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  The tension reached a peak on Sunday.

  When the Freedom Riders showed up at the courthouse that afternoon some 2,000 screaming counter-demonstrators—many of them Klansmen—stood waiting. As Forman began evacuating the protestors, a man with a shotgun struck him with the gun barrel, opening a deep gash on his forehead. Clearing the scene, police arrested Forman along with twenty-six Freedom Riders and their colleagues, plus a newsman, charging them with inciting a riot. No one in the white mob was charged, though they continued to riot.

  When armed whites and some police began shooting, Williams mobilized his neighbors. A policeman was wounded in the thigh. Despite police barricades, a white couple, Bruce and Mabel Stegall of nearby Marshville, North Carolina, wandered into the neighborhood and were held for two hours. Williams allowed them to call police, then walk from the neighborhood. Nonetheless, police soon began characterizing the development as a “hostage situation.” Sensing arrest, Williams fled that night to a safe house in Harlem. He eventually made it to Canada, then Cuba.16

  The FBI descended on Monroe. Its response to the “race riot” and “kidnapping” embittered Forman. The Bureau had told the Monroe protestors repeatedly it couldn’t offer them protection; that wasn’t its job. Neither did Williams’s complaint about the Klan’s attack on him in June spur the FBI into action. But now, federal agents went door to door in a massive manhunt for Williams as an all-white state grand jury indicted him on kidnapping charges.*5

  “The FBI was, and is, the enemy of black people,” Forman later wrote. “It wasn’t going to arrest any local racists who violated any and all laws on the statute books. Instead, it would play a game of taking notes and pictures. The files in Washington must have been growing thick even then with documents from the civil rights movement and with photographs of us all—doing everything but screwing and maybe even that.”17

  * * *

  —

  MONROE BECAME A public relations disaster for the nonviolent movement. Because King had given Brooks a letter of endorsement, the civil rights leader did some serious backpedaling. A statement by the SCLC condemned the violence by both blacks and whites in Monroe. “Any perpetrator of violence, regardless of his stated purpose, contributes to the shame of America,” SCLC executive board member Kelly Miller Smith said in the statement.18

  Williams spent several years in exile in Cuba. There, he broadcast his views across the South though his “Radio Free Dixie” program. Though the government viewed him as a terrorist, much of the movement embraced him. Folksinger Pete Seeger lauded him in a song, “Ballad of Monroe.” Williams returned to the United States by 1970, living out his days in Michigan. The state of North Carolina eventually dropped all charges. He was buried in 1996 in Monroe, where nonviolent movement icon Rosa Parks, his longtime friend and a militant activist in her own right, eulogized him, praising “his courage and his commitment to freedom.”19

  Forman, too, survived his tactical error. Despite the Monroe fiasco, which he called “a nightmare I shall never forget,” he was hired that fall as executive secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working directly across the street from SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. From his windowless office he inspired hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who fanned out across the South.

  Among them was a small platoon headed to Fayette County, where Bill Lawrence and his energetic informant, Ernest Withers, were waiting.

  *1 Lawrence’s payment to Withers is a critical detail. Following The Commercial Appeal’s initial 2010 report, some of the photographer’s supporters contended he was not an informant—he merely sold photos to the FBI. Yet repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, evidence says otherwise. Key to this discussion is a July 28, 1961, report released as part of the Withers settlement. The report, an FBI Form FD-209, documents monthly or periodic informant contact. (Agents were required to contact informants at least once a month.) It says Withers “was paid $15.00 for info furnished 7-19-61 re Free Bus Riders.” Pay records were not something the newspaper was to get as part of the settlement. But here, in an isolated incident, Lawrence copied the pay record into his Freedom Riders file, and it became subject to the settlement. Additionally, scores of reports record Withers passing oral intelligence to the FBI.

  *2 According to the Encyclopedia of African American History, Williams visited Cuba three times between 1960 and 1961. His visits helped foster a camaraderie between militant African American activists and Cuban revolutionaries.

  *3 Lawrence’s report of his August 14, 1961, conversation with Withers, which lists him as a “confidential informant,” indicates the photographer as the likely source of the phone number, though the report is not entirely clear on this point.

  *4 In two reports that July, Lawrence listed Withers as a “former PCI,” indicating he might no longer be considering the photographer for a spot as a full-fledged confidential informant. But following the flow of details Withers supplied on Forman, the Black Muslims, CORE, and Daniel Horne, Lawrence began listing him again as a PCI.

  *5 Despite the official charges, the judgment of history is largely scornful of the kidnapping allegation. Timothy B. Tyson writes that Williams “rescued the two whites from the mob.” The couple met two police officers on their way home but didn’t report an abduction. Mrs. Stegall later said, “at the time, I wasn’t even thinking about being kidnapped…the papers, the publicity and all that stuff was what brought in that kidnapping mess.”

  16.

  COMMUNISTS, SOCIALISTS, BLACK MUSLIMS, AND ASSORTED DO-GOODERS: 1962–1965

  IT STRUCK WITH A SICKENING crack! In an instant Ed Bromberg fell, clutching his bleeding stomach. A sniper had shot him with a pellet rifle as he marched in a picket line before Monroe mayor Fred Wilson’s dental office. It was only a flesh wound. But it could have been worse. Like Heath Rush worse.

  A gangly college student, Rush staggered in a daze after thugs beat him to the ground. For all their trouble, the two Freedom Riders, one shot and the other beaten, were thrown in jail, charged with inciting a riot. Still, they survived. They fled the hostile North Carolina foothills for the Northeast, where Bromberg, twenty-seven, returned that fall to his native Massachusetts, and Rush, twenty, to New Hampshire, working for a time with his stepfather, a Quaker farmer. Soon, the itch returned. In a matter of weeks they were headed back south, answering the call to aid the struggling tenant farmers in Fayette and Haywood counties outside Memphis.

  Lawrence’s surveillance network soon began buzzing. It was hard not to notice when they arrived sometime that November of 1961. The pair, accompanied by two other young men, all of them white, moved in with a series of poor, black farm families living around New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, a weathered country chapel tucked between cotton fields south of Brownsville, the Haywood County seat. Reports of sightings trickled through the local African American community, over to Ernest Withers in Memphis, who relayed them to the FBI.

  “Rush, Bromberg, et al., had formulated plans to have the ignorant and easily led Negro tenant farmers in Haywood County to picket the Haywood County Courthouse in order that they would get arrested,” Lawrence wrote after speaking with Withers. Listed as “Memphis Confidential Informant T-1” in this February 12, 1962, report, the photographer had picked up details about the white outsiders from a pair of black professionals—a preacher and a schoolteacher—active in the Haywood County movement.*1 “By the same token, they had no plans to make bond for these [sic] arrested. Thus it was all a publicity gimmick, using Negroes as tools.”1

  As was the case with so many of the FBI’s reports on outside “agitators” who came to aid the movement in Haywood and Fayette counties throughout the ’60s, the document is filled with hostile assessments. Lawrence suspected the pair of being sympathizers of the Socialist Workers Party, a leftist organization that supported the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee and had been placed on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. He made no concession to the
ir sacrifices or their contributions to the civil rights cause—no mention of Bromberg’s shooting or Rush’s beating or their outrageous arrests for “inciting a riot” in North Carolina, or their harsh treatment in Mississippi weeks before, where they were imprisoned for the “crime” of escorting a young African American coed into the segregated waiting area in the train station in Jackson.2

  The pair had returned South in answer to another call from CORE. The organization was working in Haywood and Fayette counties alongside other relief groups, including the Ohio-based Operation Freedom. The FBI viewed both with equal suspicion. Operation Freedom was led by Maurice McCrackin, a Presbyterian minister imprisoned once for refusing to pay income taxes on the grounds they financed America’s war efforts—a man Withers once summed up for Lawrence as a “crack-pot” pacifist. Also heading the group was Virgie Hortenstine, a tireless Quaker peace activist. Withers would follow her across the ’60s. Operation Freedom provided cash, loans, food, and supplies to local sharecroppers. But what really irked the people of conservative Haywood County was its open protests and acts of civil disobedience. McCrackin and Hortenstine both went to jail there, engaging in public fasts to protest Jim Crow.3

  Like numbers of other civil rights activists who passed through the Memphis area, neither Rush nor Bromberg, McCrackin nor Hortenstine could be tied even remotely to any violence, sabotage, or subversive plots. Yet the FBI expended great resources investigating their politics—their militancy, their associations, and their ties to suspected Communists.

  “It is felt that if this Bureau is to properly discharge its security matter and racial matter responsibility that we must keep abreast of this situation and insure that any pertinent information is properly and promptly disseminated,” Lawrence wrote when dispatching Withers to Haywood County. Writing that his informant “will clear with this office before going,” Lawrence said the photographer will “do a ‘picture story’ re this operation” and “on a strictly confidential basis, he will endeavor to learn as much as possible about the activities, plans and evidences of influences being exerted by Rush and Bromberg.”4

  “He will be alert for any information regarding Heath Rush, Edward Bromberg, and any other possible subversive influences and will be alert for any connection of these two with McCrackin…and Hortenstine,” the agent wrote.5

  Though Withers grew familiar with Hortenstine and McCrackin, he never did find Rush or Bromberg. Out of funds, the pair had left West Tennessee by the end of January. Years later, Rush would say he never knew the FBI had such an interest in him. He was no threat to national security—simply an idealistic young man exercising his lawful right to assist the needy, to organize dissent.

  “It’s really ludicrous that they could be so stupid. And so misinformed. And so prejudiced,” a seventy-four-year-old Rush said in 2015. “Their fear of the Communists is so great that it clouds their thinking.”6

  * * *

  —

  THE YEAR 1962 was a great one for Withers. His photography business flourished. So did his family. His father Earl basked in his retirement from the postal service; Perry, Ernest’s second-eldest son, was bound for Howard University, where he would march with its champion Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps drill team. Meantime, Withers continued making vital contributions to the civil rights struggle.7

  Demonstrating his commitment to the movement—and his photography business—he played a key insider’s role that fall in James Meredith’s admission as the first black student at the University of Mississippi. He helped hide the targeted scholar with relatives in tiny Cascilla, Mississippi, and in Memphis. He took pictures as Meredith relaxed on a living room sofa to watch Dr. King speak in a nationally televised interview and as he chatted with his attorneys. Withers and Jet associate editor Larry Still followed a heavily guarded caravan down to Ole Miss, where, despite a federal order, Gov. Ross Barnett refused to admit Meredith. Then, he got another tip: Meredith would be air-lifted onto campus from the Naval Air Station in Millington, Tennessee, north of Memphis. There, Withers shot pictures of armed troops surrounding a military helicopter awaiting the flight down. Back down at the Ole Miss campus he braved rioting mobs, documenting the aftermath of a night of gunfire and tear gas.8

  “We were in the Lyceum building when all of that shooting went on down there,” Withers recalled years later. “They confiscated hundreds of rifles.” He shot the piles of firearms seized from the rioters as two FBI agents stood watch, gazing stoically into his camera.9

  During this period, Withers’s photography studio became a gathering place, not just for movement figures but for Black Muslims, too. They often congregated on Beale Street to worship or sell newspapers, at first The Herald Examiner and later Muhammad Speaks, the sect’s official news organ. They liked Withers; they trusted him. They told him secrets—secrets he often passed to the FBI.

  Among his many tips, Withers told Lawrence of the opening of another mosque in a Beale Street storefront in 1964; he reported the arrival from Birmingham of minister Nathaniel Meadows, handpicked by the Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago to run its Memphis operations; he passed along Meadows’s car tag number. He told Lawrence about plans to open a Muslim restaurant downtown; he said Black Muslims now are driving taxicabs. He passed on the names of individuals selling Muhammad Speaks. He reported the sect’s involvement with a drummer and a trumpet player in Doodad’s Orchestra, a popular Memphis jazz and blues band; he noted the comings and goings of out-of-town Muslims. He reported that two NOI members had paid a visit to Fayette County activist John McFerren.10

  Some reports read almost like a community newsletter, chock-full of seemingly ho-hum developments. A June 1964 report, for example, records Withers saying that one Robert Hunt had applied for a janitorial job at the public library; his wife was working in a school cafeteria. Withers said that Nathaniel Meadows had made two recent trips to Birmingham.11

  The reports seemed trivial—but they were highly intrusive. The broad sweep of the FBI’s collection of personal data in the black community was staggering—an effort that reached far beyond the Nation of Islam. In one meeting in November 1961, Withers reported that Freedom Rider Carl Bush was back in Memphis and working as a salesman; that another Freedom Rider was staying at the YMCA; that many blacks now support conservative white police commissioner Claude Armour; that the Nation of Islam had been particularly quiet. In September 1963, he provided the names of three civil rights activists at odds with the established NAACP; he told how the trio had participated in Dr. King’s march on Washington. He reported that a pastor had plans to picket a local supermarket; he said he’d shot pictures of a recent NAACP parade and could make copies available as needed; he reported that a local Black Muslim was now working as a pastry cook. He handed Lawrence five copies of the Mississippi Free Press, a controversial pro-integration newspaper, and provided the Memphis address where it was printed. In November 1964, he discussed a range of political personalities vying for leadership in the black community, sardonically reporting that “they will begin to backbite each other and dissent among themselves in their jockeying for power.”12

  Withers provided powerful insights into the thinking of the Nation of Islam’s leadership. Minister Meadows told Withers he believed the FBI had tapped his phone. Was it paranoia? Available records don’t say. But two things are clear: Meadows had deep-seated worries. And he trusted the personable Withers with those secrets. Once, the minister confessed that “actually he does not hate all white people as he preaches in his sermons,” but only does so to manipulate his followers, to keep them “interested and enthusiastic.”13

  Much of the personal detail Withers collected is redacted from FBI reports.*2 But the documents make clear that when Meadows and his cadre of twenty-five to thirty followers didn’t readily reveal information, Withers could find a way to get it. So it was with NOI recruit Jim Lynch in 1964. “Withers recently took a surreptitious photograph of Lynch but as yet has not developed same,�
� Lawrence wrote. “It was made at night and may not be too clear. He feels, however, he can ‘con’ Lynch into having a photograph made and Withers will furnish a copy thereof to the Bureau.”14

  It was around this time that the longtime Memphis radio personality Mark Stansbury got to know Withers. He was a kid then, just nineteen. He’d dropped out of college and needed a break. He asked Withers for an internship at his studio. The photographer agreed and it changed Stansbury’s life.

  “He knew everybody,” Stansbury later recalled. “He introduced me to everybody from the chairman of the board to the janitor. He got me back in school.” Withers tapped his connections to secure recommendations from Tri-State Defender editor Thaddeus Stokes and WDIA disc jockey Nat D. Williams to enroll Stansbury at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee—to get him a scholarship. “I didn’t have a dime,” he said. “I don’t have nothing but good things to say about Ernest.”15

  But Stansbury recalls a day, too, around 1962 or 1963, when a thin white man in a suit came into the studio. “Ernest introduced me to him,” he said. It was Bill Lawrence. Stansbury recalled little else of the encounter; he believes the agent stopped by to pick up some pictures. He never saw him again. Stansbury didn’t think much of it. Lawrence might not have either. The agent often appeared in public—on his way to secret meetings or to interview a witness. Ernest never mentioned the FBI again, and Stansbury says he never had a clue his boss was working with them.

  “He never did say anything about that.”