12 Details of Lawrence’s participation in Fayette County civil rights investigations are found in FBI reports in UM’s Tent City Collection, box 10 folder 1. For the “hog” investigation, see box 10 folder 6.
13 FBI memo (NW), “Re: Robert Kerr Archbell et al.; Currie Porter Boyd et al.—Victims; Civil rights, election laws,” (December 23, 1960) located in box 10 folder 16, Tent City Collection. Also, Trezzvant W. Anderson, “Whites Tell of Depopulating Plan: U.S. Lays ‘Squeeze Plot’ Open Before Whole World,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 31, 1960, 3.
14 FBI report, James Cogshell file, ME-100-3774-4 (January 31, 1961).
15 FBI reports, 100-3774-4 (January 31, 1961) and ME-100-3774-6 (February 9, 1961).
16 Ibid.
17 The account of Lawrence’s background check on Withers comes from FBI memo, “Ernest Columbus Withers, PCI” (February 7, 1961), released May 15, 2012, pursuant to The Commercial Appeal’s litigation and identified as FBI-Withers-893 and 894.
18 Withers’s evolving informant status is seen over a wide range of records released by the FBI. Some of the early files (see, for example, “Racial Situation in Tennessee, Fayette and Haywood Counties, Racial Matters,” ME 157-184) list him alternately as a Potential Confidential Informant or a Confidential Informant. The PCI label disappeared from reports in March 1963. Between 1963 and 1967 he largely was listed as a CS—Confidential Source. Thereafter, he is listed as Confidential Informant ME 338-R. Retired FBI agent Bob Campbell told the author two years was a long time to be kept in PCI status; generally, that involves a matter of months. The move likely guaranteed Lawrence some freedom. Confidential informants are overseen in Washington, but PCIs are not, Campbell said.
19 The former first lady wrote about Freedom Village in her news column carried by many papers on January 4, 1961, deploring the violence and intimidation faced by evicted sharecroppers.
20 WMC-TV Channel 5 interview with Joshua “Billy” Withers, July 15, 2012, uncut version.
21 Another indicator of Withers’s possible initial role as a criminal informant between 1958 and 1961 involves the notation, “Re Serial 60,” at the top of Lawrence’s February 7, 1961, background report on Withers. In releasing records to The Commercial Appeal, the FBI redacted serial numbers that would indicate the volume of reports in Withers’s informant file. It appears censors missed this redaction. If in fact “Serial 60” refers to a report in Withers’s “137” file, it indicates he played a role as a criminal informant in sixty different reports between January 1958 and February 1961.
Chapter Fourteen
1 James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 196–98; also Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 409–10.
2 FBI Little Rock report, 1–10.
3 FBI Little Rock report, 2–3.
4 The account of Withers’s March 16, 1961, meeting with Lawrence comes from FBI Little Rock report, 2–3. Various accounts of McFerren’s dispute with rival leaders include: “Fayette Vote Founder ‘Ordered’ To Resign,” The Tennessean, January 28, 1961; and “Negro Factions Hurl Charges,” CA, January 31, 1961.
5 See “37 Groups Are Scheduled To See Filmstrip on Reds,” CA, January 8, 1961, III, 7. Also, “Four-Hour Anti-Red Show To Attract 6,000 Today,” CA, December 4, 1960, 1; and “Mock A-Bomb Hits Memphis,” CA, April 29, 1961, 17.
6 This item appeared in the weekly column,
A Spy in Canaan Page 38
