A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

* * *

  —

  AFTER ITS INITIAL burst in 1960 and 1961, the civil rights movement quieted in Memphis. Withers the newspaperman still scouted for big stories—finding many in the wider region, miles from Memphis. In 1963, he covered the funeral of slain NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, where police arrested him on a baseless charge and roughed him up. “My feet were half in the air and half on the ground as they hustled me to the truck,” Withers told The Memphis World of his arrest. “I was trying to hold onto my camera and trying to duck the blows all at the same time.”16

  Increasingly, as the movement slowed in Memphis, it picked up in rural West Tennessee. There, Lawrence used Withers and others to zealously pursue tips involving outside agitators. In a pattern that would bedevil the movement in and around Greater Memphis for years to come, the agent swapped information with military intelligence, local sheriffs, and city police—a critical detail revealing the FBI’s unvarnished view of the movement.17

  Some civil rights activists known to have been informers have said they cooperated with the FBI because they saw the federal agency as a safe alternative to racist local police. Yet, unknown to many, the FBI frequently collaborated with those same police, fostering a hostile environment for civil rights workers, especially those of the wrong political pedigree.18

  One such target was Eric Weinberger, a gaunt, somber-faced New York native who came to Brownsville in early 1962 to launch the Haywood Handicrafters League, an economic empowerment program. It produced jobs for impoverished African American women who made leather purses sold nationally as “Tote Bags for Integration.” By the time Weinberger left eighteen months later, he’d been jailed four times and allegedly beaten repeatedly. The wayward son of a New York attorney, Weinberger, then an occasional carnival worker and years later an advocate for the poor in Boston, was directed to leave town or face prison on tenuous charges of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy.19

  A member of CORE, SNCC, and the New England Committee for Nonviolent Action—groups the FBI viewed with great suspicion—the bohemian Weinberger drove a beat-up Chevrolet station wagon and reportedly lived with a black woman, vexing local mores. The FBI’s New York and New Haven, Connecticut, offices were instructed to search their indices for Weinberger’s “personal history data or subversive references” to share with Memphis.20

  On the ground in Tennessee, Withers passed on tidbits he picked up from the movement grapevine: He learned of Weinberger’s tote bag operation as CORE’s suave national field director, Richard Haley, passed through Memphis in early March 1962.*3 He gleaned some of Weinberger’s political leanings from Brownsville movement leader Odell Saunders.21

  Withers gave Lawrence a firsthand account of Weinberger’s release from the Haywood County Jail on March 22, 1962, a development significant to Lawrence because CORE covered the activist’s bail. Accompanying Tri-State Defender editor Thaddeus Stokes and Memphis attorney Shepperson Wilbun, Withers shot photos depicting the pale Weinberger as he walked from a two-week jail stint to a room above Saunders’s laundromat, where the smiling tote bag ladies were busy making purses. In his typically enterprising fashion, the photographer pulled double duty, selling Lawrence nine photos that the agent retained in files “for possible future reference” and peddling two others to the Defender. The pictures published by the newspaper omitted Weinberger but accompanied an article crediting the New York activist for the bag-making operation, noting his incarceration on a “trumped up charge of speeding.” He’d been “beaten and jailed twice,” the paper reported.22

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS AGAIN PROVED his shrewdness as an intelligence collector in October 1963 when New York feminist Marjory Collins passed through Memphis. She paid Withers a visit—already, he’d cemented his standing as a must-see resource in movement circuits. A gifted photographer in her own right, Collins, forty-one, was writing for the leftist National Guardian as she made a sweeping bus tour of the South. She was chronicling poverty, civil rights abuses, and repression. Lawrence zeroed in on her politics. In a fourteen-page report labeled “Communist Influence In Racial Matters” and circulated to headquarters and a variety of field offices, the agent summarized Withers’s meeting with Collins and a typewritten letter in her possession.23

  It’s unclear whether the letter, sent special delivery from Cincinnati to Memphis during Collins’s stay, was purloined, given to Withers, or simply misplaced.*4 But it was rich in detail. Reproduced verbatim in Lawrence’s report, the letter from Operation Freedom, the sharecropper relief agency, provided a range of leads the agent deemed worthy of pursuit. It named contacts in the Memphis area—people the FBI viewed with suspicion—including Rev. James Lawson, the articulate war protestor and Nashville sit-in leader who’d recently begun pastoring a church in Memphis. Pamphlets in the envelope drew links between Collins, Operation Freedom, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, or SCEF, a New Orleans–based civil rights organization viewed by the Bureau as a communist front. But the best lead of all came in a handwritten note on the back of the envelope: a New Orleans phone number and a name—Dombrowski.24

  SCEF’s executive director, James Dombrowski, cofounded the Highlander Folk School, a training camp for organized labor and civil rights activists situated in Middle Tennessee’s rocky Cumberland Plateau. The state of Tennessee shut down the school in 1961 following years of complaints from segregationists who branded it a training ground for Communists. Days before Collins passed through Memphis, Dombrowski, a Methodist minister and one-time Socialist Party member, was arrested in New Orleans, charged along with two others with violating Louisiana’s Subversive Activities and Communist Control Act. The men had refused the law’s requirements that they register as pro-communist subversives. They were arrested—their homes searched at night at gunpoint.25

  Withers later received a follow-up letter from Collins, mailed October 27, 1963, from New Orleans, where the liberal activist had traveled to write about Dombrowski’s arrest. She reported in her letter that the charges against the three men had been dismissed.26

  Now, Collins was ecstatic.

  “Don’t think the wire services even carried the story so you may not have seen it,” Collins wrote, enclosing a press release. “Get the story around! It’s really an important victory.” The photographer did get the story around to at least one person. He gave this letter, too, to Lawrence.27

  * * *

  —

  FIFTY YEARS LATER, it’s hard to grasp the FBI’s thinking. None of these outside “agitators” that Withers helped track—college student Heath Rush, do-gooder activist Eric Weinberger, liberal intellectual Marjory Collins—posed any real threat to their country. They were simply trying to help the less fortunate. Nonetheless, each serves as a chilling reminder of the paranoia of the time. By harassing many Communists and their associates, the FBI played into the hands of the segregationists, retarding the growth of civil rights.

  The Communist Party was civil rights’ greatest ally in Memphis in the 1940s and ’50s, before Lawrence and his partners at the FBI obliterated it by shadowing activists, tracking their mail, sabotaging their employment, and driving its members to flee to other cities.

  It was classic overreach stirred by palpable fear.

  Daughter Nancy Lawrence Mosely recalls her father’s fervor following the Cold War’s earth-shattering events—the Soviets stealing America’s atomic bomb secrets, China falling to the Communists, American boys dying in the Korean War.

  “The atheist aspect of communism, for him that might have been as strong a reason as anything to be fearful of them,” she said of her stern father, who was raised Baptist in Ohio but converted to Lutheranism in Memphis. “He never did trust a Communist.”

  One of Nancy’s earliest memories as a child in the early 1950s involved nighttime drives with her father in his indistinguishably ordinary black Chevy sedan. “Do you want to go by a house?” the agent would say. Nancy and her sister B
etty would erupt in giggles of joy. Even as children they understood. Daddy was a G-man. He collected evidence. He watched people.28

  Years later, they put it all together: from the shadows along the curb, their father was snooping on meetings, writing down license tags.

  He was tracking Communists.

  “It looked pretty ordinary. But we kind of knew he was trying to pick up some information,” Nancy recalled. “It was always evening, after dark. It’s always exciting going with your father.”

  * * *

  —

  ONE PERSON ALMOST certainly attending those meetings Lawrence observed from the shadows was William E. “Red” Davis, a stocky, auburn-headed riverboat deckhand and Communist Party organizer for Tennessee who drew special attention as an ex-Marine trained in military weaponry. Lawrence and his FBI cohorts trailed him through the city, watching his house, logging names of his visitors, and placing a mail cover on his postal address to ascertain his correspondents. This was done pursuant to an initiative called DETCOM—shorthand for Detention of Communists—that aimed to identify Communist “shock troops” and round them up in the event of a war or political crisis involving the Soviet Union.29

  Over an intrusive, six-year security investigation, the FBI found no evidence of violence or stockpiling of weapons by Davis. But the boatman was forced from his position as port agent for the National Maritime labor union, and he fled his native Memphis for St. Louis.30

  His brother-in-law, Larry E. McGurty, paid a heavy price, too. A labor activist who joined the Communist Party in 1946, the gangly McGurty was driven from Memphis by anticommunists in the government, media, and business. “I couldn’t get a job,” the raspy-voiced McGurty testified during a U.S. Senate hearing on communism in 1957. “I couldn’t hold a job.”31

  McGurty and Davis both openly supported civil rights in a place and time when such ideas were immensely unpopular.

  The FBI’s thick files on Davis show agents followed him in 1949 to a meeting at the segregated, black-only Abe Scharff YMCA; that he had ties to the Civil Rights Congress, a blacklisted organization on the Attorney General’s List; that he had been arrested protesting the execution of Willie McGee, an African American electrocuted by the state of Mississippi for raping a white woman in a case many consider a wrongful conviction. Neighbors and coworkers told agents Davis once said, “Negroes are our brothers,” and that his wife referred to her apartment building janitor as “Mr. Jamison,” stating, “He is just as good as she is.”32

  McGurty tried to join the local branch of the NAACP, but was blocked—compliments of Bill Lawrence and the FBI. Several times, McGurty mailed membership fees to the organization, but they were returned at Lawrence’s instruction.

  “I sent him his money back,” said H. T. Lockard, a prominent African American lawyer who began receiving regular visits from Lawrence at his Beale Street law office after becoming local NAACP president in 1953. The FBI agent had warned Lockard to be on the lookout for McGurty and other Communists who might try to infiltrate the organization.33

  By the early ’60s, when Lawrence latched onto Withers, the Communist Party had been so thoroughly cleansed from the Memphis area there were few leftists other than itinerant activists to watch. A September 1964 memo the Memphis office sent to headquarters defending its lack of counter intelligence actions against Communists speaks to this absence. The memo reminded the bosses in Washington that the Communist Party hadn’t been active in the Memphis area since 1957, a void that grew in part out of the FBI’s cooperation in sensational public hearings with segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland and also from Lawrence’s November 18, 1954, arrest of communist leader Junius Scales. The arrest fostered such fear and suspicion within Communist Party-USA that its Memphis chapter collapsed.34

  * * *

  —

  FOR ALL THE mileage he got out of Withers, Lawrence made a change. He converted Withers’s status in March 1963 to Confidential Source, a classification where he’d parked other key movement informers, including NAACP leaders Vasco and Maxine Smith. Withers stayed in that classification for four years. As a Confidential Source—a “CS”—he was a much-tapped reference on racial matters. He still received some assignments during this time. But, more often than not, he simply picked up information during the normal course of his business. Similarly, as the decade unfolded, Withers’s reporting on the Nation of Islam became irregular. The FBI tapped other unnamed informants as well as undercover officers in the Memphis Police Department for in-depth surveillance—covertly attending mosque gatherings and collecting copies of membership rosters, receipts, and minutes of meetings.35

  The FBI’s pursuit of the Nation of Islam filled a hole left by the absence of a true communist threat.

  Founded in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Nation preached an inflammatory theology of black superiority and disgust for the white race—the “White Devil.” It also subscribed to a creation account deemed bizarre by many Christians and Muslims alike: a satanic figure, Yacub, an evil black scientist, created the white race in a misguided experiment that used murder, deceit, and lies to keep the black race—the Original People—from reproducing. The Nation’s reputation for enmity mushroomed under its charismatic leader, Elijah Muhammad. “…The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a closely knit militant organization. It is blatantly antiwhite and a constant and relentless critic of our present form of government,” reads an October 1969 FBI report citing the group’s “hate-filled propaganda” as a reason “to be considered as a potential threat to the internal security of the nation.” Even today, the venerable civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, considers the Nation a “deeply racist, anti-Semitic” extremist group.36

  Despite such assessments, historians now believe the FBI greatly overestimated NOI’s threat. Unlike militant groups such as the Black Panthers, whose platform included vague aims to overthrow the government, the isolationist NOI was apolitical. Violent rhetoric aside, it posed no real threat to the white population, says leading civil rights–era historian David Garrow. “This is what is so hard for white folks to get,” Garrow told me in 2013 as I prepared the first news article about Withers’s work for the FBI in monitoring local Nation adherents. Arguably, the Bureau’s biggest mistake was failing to understand the attributes that made the sect appealing to many African Americans: its emphasis on black pride, faith, family, and self-reliance. That appeal surged with the national profiles of professed Black Muslims such as Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali.37

  In Memphis, the FBI gave little deference to individual rights as it kept suspicious watch on the Nation’s adherents. Photos Withers shot in the mosque on Kentucky Street document little more than the lawful practice of religion—an intrusive overreach by the FBI. The many bits of intel revealed no terrorist plots. No one was the wiser. Years later, one longtime Memphis Muslim marveled when I told him some of what Withers had been doing.

  “Everybody more or less knew him. He was Brother Withers,” Muhammad Ziyad told me in 2014 over a plate of vegetables at The Cupboard, the venerable Midtown eatery. “And he would walk into a meeting and you would just relax.

  “Who’s going to turn Brother Withers down?”38

  The soft-spoken Ziyad bristled when I asked him what consequences Withers might have faced had his informing been found out back in the day.

  “To be frank with you, I think there would have been some very detrimental, harmful reactions. Not from me, now,” he said with a slight grin, “but from the people he was informing on. It could have been harmful.”39

  *1 The designation T-1 was not a permanent informant number. A T-designation is a temporary label used to identify an informant within a single report only.

  *2 Under The Commercial Appeal’s agreement in settling its suit against the FBI, it could not appeal any redactions.

  *3 Withers is listed as the sole source of Lawrence’s March 9, 1962, report, though phrasing indicates others could have contr
ibuted. One possible contributor is an unnamed Memphis lawyer who refused to provide legal services for Weinberger because he was “somewhat suspicious” of the militant CORE.

  *4 Though it’s possible Lawrence could have obtained it through other means, indications point to Withers. The photographer is listed in the first line of the November 15, 1963, report as the source of the subsequent information. In discussions over two successive days, Withers identified persons mentioned in the letter and addressed handwritten notations on the envelope. Though there is no direct evidence, one must consider the possibility, however, that the FBI seized the letter (Collins kept her belongings in a locker at the Greyhound bus station) and then used Withers as a sounding board. Regardless, Withers had a history of handing private letters to the FBI. One was a January 25, 1962, letter addressed to him from Quaker activist Virgie Hortenstine, who foretold a protest in Haywood County, where activists intended to get arrested for civil disobedience.

  17.

  THE ELECTRIC CROSS:

  THE FBI GETS TOUGH, SUMMER 1965

  VICKI GABRINER ROLLED A SHEET of stationery under her typewriter ribbon. Already, winter was setting in at the University of Wisconsin. As an icy wind rattled outside on the isthmus separating the choppy waters of lakes Monona and Mendota, she pecked out the date, December 2, 1965.

  Raised in Brooklyn, in a politically active Jewish family, the idealistic, twenty-three-year-old graduate student had matriculated from Cornell University, where she first answered the call of civil rights, marching in picket lines and tending to the poor in Harlem. By the time she and her husband, Bob, enrolled at UW in 1964, they were immersed in radical politics, eventually becoming deeply involved in the budding antiwar movement in Madison, home to the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam. But on this day her thoughts were far away, in rural Fayette County, Tennessee, where she’d spent the previous summer living among poor black families; where she had helped lead a divisive voter registration drive.1