A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  In fact, Willis reported that Gov. Frank Clement and other state officials were so concerned about the “outside agitation,” they were encouraging the liberal Tennessee Council on Human Relations to intervene—to quiet the unrest by halting the demonstrations. A wild card, Willis said, was McFerren. “He said he had never had too much confidence in Viola or John McFerren as they were too easily influenced by outsiders,” Lawrence wrote of his conversation with Willis. “He felt, however, that if the whites in Fayette County will meet the Negroes ‘half way’ that much of the outside influence can be averted and sterilized.”19

  Lawrence checked with the Memphis Urban League. Like the NAACP, it, too, had been approached by the Voters Project seeking support. The agent was assured the Urban League wouldn’t cooperate either.20

  Though a small contingent of Voters Project volunteers returned the following summer, 1966, helping elect six African American candidates to the thirty-seven-member Fayette County Quarterly Court—the first blacks elected there since Reconstruction—the initiative ran out of gas. Touring the South in a rental car that August, organizers Bob and Vicki Gabriner made one last pass through Fayette County, where they bumped into their old friend, Withers, a meeting he dutifully reported to Lawrence along with a description of the couple’s car: a brown Valiant bearing a Shelby County tag, AU-7927.21

  *1 The Bradens faced repeated reprisals for their civil rights work. The couple was charged in 1954 under Kentucky’s sedition law after helping a black family obtain a home in a white Louisville suburb. Convicted, Carl Braden served several months in prison before the Supreme Court invalidated the law. He was imprisoned again for contempt of Congress in 1961 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which he and Anne considered a major enabler of segregation.

  *2 Withers’s informing on Evers was substantial. The author counted twenty-two separate reports between 1963 and 1969 in which the photographer relayed intelligence involving Evers. Withers also handed the FBI three photos of the activist. As early as 1963, the informant described a rift between the local NAACP and Evers, who criticized the organization as “conservative” and “indifferent” to the struggles of the poor.

  *3 Withers dutifully reported his personal contacts with Rib. The photographer told Lawrence in August 1965 that suspected subversive Rib was staying in Memphis at the Holiday Inn on Summer Avenue. The agent promptly contacted the hotel manager and checked Rib’s phone records. When Rib later mailed Withers a holiday card over the Christmas season, Withers gave it to Lawrence along with the activist’s new address and home and work phone numbers in New York.

  *4 Willis’s name is redacted in the report. However, his identity is easily discerned. He is listed as a “Negro,” with an address at 588 Vance, and “a member of the Tennessee State Legislature.” One person fit that description in 1965: A. W. Willis, Jr.

  18.

  JAMES LAWSON, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT

  THEY MARCHED IN SOLEMN PROCESSION. Pacing the Memphis streets, some carried placards—“War Is Wrong,” “Peace Now,” and “Make War on Poverty, Not on the Vietnamese!” Ernest Withers tagged along on this bright April afternoon in 1966, snapping pictures. One of the Mid-South’s first large demonstrations protesting American involvement in Vietnam, it traversed the city, winding from a point near Memphis Theological Seminary in Midtown to the main Post Office downtown, some five miles. The amiable photographer blended with the crowd. Flashing his press cards, he conscripted a student to scribble notes for him as he took a series of broad crowd shots and tight, focused close-ups of the participants:

  A young white couple sharing a laugh;

  A bearded, professorial-looking man in a light-colored suit jacket smoking a pipe as he paused on the side of the road;

  A thin African-American woman carrying a sign quoting progressive statesman Hiram Johnson: “In war, the first casualty is truth.”

  Truth definitely suffered that day. As Withers mingled with the crowd, he forged relationships with several of the forty or so demonstrators, convincing some he was a comrade in the cause. In time, he would receive invitations to coffees and small group discussions on the war. Once, he even offered his photography studio as a mailing address for a homegrown antiwar news publication under investigation by the FBI.

  But Withers wasn’t here to lend his support to the antiwar effort.

  He was on a mission.

  An army veteran with conservative views that aligned with most of Middle America when it came to Vietnam and the Cold War, he’d been given explicit instructions from agent Lawrence to help catalog the blossoming antiwar movement in Memphis. Days after the march, he delivered eighty 8-by-10 photographic prints, pictures he’d shot for the FBI.

  “Ernest C. Withers…a Negro photographer who has a press card for ‘Jet Magazine’ and who also has a press card for The ‘Tri-State Defender,’ agreed to cover the proposed march…posing as a news man,”*1 Lawrence wrote in his after-action report, noting his informant agreed to “be alert to take photographs of every participant in the march including identification type photos; in other words, he would make every effort to get good facial views of the participants.”1

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  ONE PARTICIPANT OF special interest to the FBI was Rev. James Lawson, the intellectual United Methodist minister whose long and distinguished résumé as an activist bridged the civil rights and peace movements. In the eyes of the Bureau, both these struggles posed threats to the nation’s stability. But the FBI took a particularly dim view of the campaign to end the Vietnam War. As Hoover and foot soldiers like Lawrence saw it, this was an anti-American crusade, a scourge brimming with Communists, traitors, and subversives doing the bidding of Moscow and Hanoi, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And Lawson, a conscientious objector who went to prison in 1951 for refusing to report for the draft—a close adviser of Martin Luther King, Jr., credited with shaping his views on nonviolent struggle and his eventual opposition to the war—was seen as the very sort of dangerous radical the government needed to keep an eye on.

  From virtually the day Lawson moved to Memphis in 1962, Withers began reporting the clergyman’s doings back to Lawrence. Over the next eight years, the photographer passed on a stream of tips, telling Lawrence details of Lawson’s personal life; of a trip he planned to take to communist-bloc Czechoslovakia; of doctrinal differences causing strife between Lawson and his congregation; of discontent among the city’s conservative black leadership, who, Withers said, would prefer that Lawson leave; of the minister’s plans to coach young men on ways to dodge the draft.

  “If this is true, then Ernie abused our friendship,” Lawson said in 2010 as I first reported Withers’s secret role as an informant. Back then, we knew some of what the photographer had passed on regarding Lawson, but not much. When the FBI released more records after we settled our lawsuit in 2013, a fuller picture emerged: Withers had passed on nearly four dozen tips on Lawson between 1962 and 1970, all the while maintaining a personal and professional relationship with the clergyman.*2

  Yet when I shared these new details with him, Lawson seemed undisturbed. Somehow, his view had softened.

  “I of course was not aware of his using our kinship for reporting to the FBI—and that he was being paid for it,” Lawson said in a soft voice. With measured words, he condemned the FBI’s snooping. Yet, good soul that he is, he offered only reconciliation to his old friend, Withers.

  “Well, if I carried on a less transparent life,” the retired clergyman proffered, “I suppose I might think then that a friend who did this would be abusive. But I’m not going to break kinship with Ernie Withers.”2

  Lawson was eighty-six now, his full head of hair turned snow white. Though I’d interviewed him many times over the years, both over the phone and in person, he never ceased to amaze me. He was a legend. He had been a key adviser to the Freedom Riders. Vanderbilt kicked him out of its divinity school for leading the landm
ark Nashville sit-ins in 1960 that broadcast the nascent movement’s fervor like so many plenteous seeds among a generation of young student activists across the South. And it was Lawson who invited King in 1968 to Memphis, where the civil rights leader was shot while mobilizing the sanitation workers.

  His opinion carries significant weight.

  As he saw it, Withers likely failed to grasp the FBI’s purpose. In his clipped Northern accent that once was a familiar clarion call across his adopted South, Lawson blasted the FBI’s intelligence gathering, which he called “a waste of government money that helped to create enmity towards me and the movement.” But he refused to blame his old friend. His bottom line: the man he knew affectionately as Ernie simply had been used by people like Hoover.

  * * *

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  THOUGH LAWSON KNEW of no specific act by the FBI to undermine him, records suggest the agency did just that, in a roundabout way: Lawrence leveraged his close working relationship with the Memphis branch of the NAACP to keep the minister’s outspoken activism in check. It’s long been known that young mavericks like Lawson had a tough go of it when they pushed the white establishment to end segregation. Less known, however, is how they often had to battle conservative black leaders, too. In Memphis, cooperation between the FBI and NAACP leaders seemed to turn on the mutual interest in fighting segregation gradually, within the system, favoring litigation over agitation and demonstration.

  Lawrence had worked with the NAACP as far back as 1953, teaming with then–branch president H. T. Lockard to keep Communists from joining the organization. By the 1960s, the enterprising agent found three other recruits among the NAACP’s leadership—executive secretary Maxine Smith; her husband, dentist Vasco Smith; and banker Jesse Turner, Sr., the local branch president. Historian David Garrow first outed the trio in his groundbreaking 1981 book, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis, explaining in the endnotes that the FBI’s files listed each as an “extremist informant.” The revelation caused quite a stir. The Smiths sued for libel—and lost. Late in life, Maxine remained vexed. Like Lockard, she said she was never paid—an important distinction considering what we later learned about Withers.3

  “No one has ever offered Vasco and me one penny. No one dare say that,” she told me in 2009 near her indoor pool in the couple’s spacious home along South Parkway East, the tony neighborhood that’s been home to Memphis’s African American elite for the past six decades. Then nearly eighty, the First Lady of the Memphis movement grew fiery as she thought it over. Yes, she said. She and Vasco cooperated with Lawrence. But she came to regret it.4

  “He used to come out here a whole lot—right here,” she said, angrily thrusting a finger toward the living room floor. She related the same story Jim had told me all those years before, how Lawrence used the mutual love of jazz to build a rapport with Vasco.*3 It started sometime in the early ’60s, she said. By then, Lawrence already was talking regularly with two NAACP board members, prominent civil rights attorneys A. W. Willis and Russell Sugarmon, she said. Perhaps it was unavoidable. The FBI was a power few could resist. Thurgood Marshall cooperated. The NAACP Legal Defense attorney and future Supreme Court justice occasionally passed confidential details to the Bureau in the 1950s, reportedly for a mixture of reasons: to help purge Communists from his organization, to secure help in investigating civil rights crimes, and to fuel his own personal ambition to connect with powerful people. NAACP leader Roy Wilkins cooperated, too, though allegedly for more suspect reasons, principally his jealousy of Dr. King.5

  For the Smiths, the FBI posed a safe alternative to the Memphis Police Department, which had brutalized and harassed the black community for decades. “We thought it was for our own protection,” she said. “We had nothing to hide.” Her sentiment isn’t uncommon. FBI files are filled with do-gooders and dupes—individuals who unwittingly were coded in Bureau files as informants because they answered the questions of a friendly agent. Having the Smiths and Turner as allies was huge. Though younger activists often viewed the NAACP leaders dimly, they were accomplished civil rights warriors. At great personal risk, Turner had pushed to integrate Memphis libraries as early as 1957; Maxine Smith tried to integrate Memphis State the same year.6

  What exactly the Smiths shared with Lawrence she wouldn’t say. A few reports have come out. They show that during the combustible 1968 sanitation strike, Maxine and Vasco helped the FBI gauge the mood of the black community. They passed on news of plans, sentiments, and anxieties of insiders, as well as tidbits on petty rivalries threatening to undermine the movement. All in all, the details helped Lawrence gauge the struggle’s direction. As extremist informants, the Smiths also no doubt helped identify at least some true “extremists.” Yet, in the agent’s skeptical view, extremists ranged from everything from revolutionary black nationalists to moderates like Lawson and King.7

  Lawrence could now use Withers to help measure the effectiveness of his collaboration with the NAACP—and to help keep an eye on troublemakers who would disrupt the alliance’s delicate balance.

  Troublemakers like Lawson.

  “James M. Lawson is in favor of as many mass racial demonstrations as possible, despite the fact that the local NAACP leadership is more conservative and is generally averse to demonstrations,” the agent wrote in a July 12, 1963, report after speaking with Withers. Calling Lawson “a thorn in the side” of the city’s traditionalist black leadership, the photographer said Lawson was “put on” the executive board of the Memphis NAACP branch, evidently as a way to placate him. Withers emphasized, however, that despite Lawson’s NAACP membership, he “is primarily affiliated” with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.8

  And that was a critical distinction in mid-1963.

  Though it’s popular today to side with King, the now-sainted martyr of civil rights, at that moment in history his tactics remained divisive within the movement, even in places like Birmingham and Memphis where segregation and police brutality were especially pernicious.*4

  The term most associated with King, nonviolence, didn’t mean the same then as it does now. Many people today think of a nonviolent activist in its simplest form—one who opposes violence. The image of a peaceful proponent of change comes to mind. That image is often contrasted with the black revolutionary, the Black Panther, the advocate of force. Though it’s a valid illustration for the late ’60s, when ultra-militancy replaced the movement’s early innocence, in 1963 nonviolence was code to many for something far different: An agitator. A troublemaker. An instigator of chaos.

  Nonviolent action meant “direct action”—disruptive demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts—rather than traditional means, such as suing in court and letting the slow wheels of justice grind.

  So when Withers reported to Lawrence that Lawson was “a self-admitted advocate of non-violence,” that he was traveling back and forth from Birmingham to assist King and that he was trying to orchestrate sympathy marches in Memphis—tips the photographer relayed over Lawson’s first year in Memphis—these weren’t attempts at praise or hollow bits of information. In the FBI’s view, they were insightful nuggets of intelligence from a paid informant to help contain a potential security threat.9

  “We represented a leadership that wanted to speed up the process of dismantling Jim Crow law and segregation and racism,” Lawson recalled years later. “Conventional American leadership at that time in the white community and the black community was of the mind that if we played along, the stuff would disappear of its own weight.”10

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  LAWSON FIRST STUDIED nonviolent direct action on a three-year Methodist Church mission in India. Teaching and ministering in Nagpur, on India’s tropical peninsula, he endured long days of stifling heat by reading up on the Indian independence movement and the teachings of its recently assassinated spiritual leader, Mohandas Gandhi. He took particular interest in nonviolent resistance—satyagraha—or soul
force, the Gandhian tactic of civil disobedience. He took his ideas with him when he left India in 1956, enrolling in graduate school at Oberlin College in northern Ohio—a trajectory that led to Martin Luther King, Jr.11

  In his old age, Lawson could still recall the day he met King—February 6, 1957—reciting it with the familiarity of a birthday or an anniversary. King was speaking at Oberlin when Lawson introduced himself. They went out to dinner. “King and I hit it off immediately,” he said. They were the same age, twenty-eight, both sons of preachers. “I mentioned to him that eventually when I finished graduate degrees I would probably work to get a United Methodist pulpit congregation in the Southeast. And King immediately responded by saying, ‘Come now. Don’t wait.’ ” The South needed him, he said. The movement needed him. Lawson took it to heart.12

  He dropped out of Oberlin and took a job with the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nashville. His boss there: Glenn Smiley, the Methodist minister who rode that first integrated bus in Montgomery with King and Abernathy—the white man in the fedora and black-rimmed eyeglasses who appears in the foreground of Withers’s famous photo.13

  As a FOR field secretary, Lawson zealously traversed the South, spreading word of the coming movement like a biblical prophet. He held workshops through the late ’50s, teaching about soul force—the strategy of nonviolence. Gandhi had said nonviolence is misunderstood. It’s not passive resistance, he said. It’s not inaction or weakness. It’s action. It’s strength—forcing an oppressor to concede to the truth, to the right of the oppressed to be free. These were points Lawson emphasized as he organized workshops across the South, traveling to backwaters like Anniston, Alabama, and Savannah, Georgia, and to Dixie’s urban outposts: Jackson, Mississippi; Charlottesville, Virginia; Columbia, South Carolina; and Little Rock, Arkansas.14