A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  “We did the same thing with the KKK—infiltrated them, got to know everything about them,” Jim grumbled. “They…became so mistrustful of each other with letters we would write: ‘Your wife is shacking up with so and so,’ you know that sort of thing, which I think is good tactics. They did not trust, they just fell apart as an organization. People had made it into, I don’t know, like it was some terrible subversive plot to destroy different people. In a way it did work that way. And we destroyed the boys in Mississippi, [through] the COINTEL program, broke up the White Knights down there…Anything you could do to disrupt them, anything you could do to create mistrust. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  Still, COINTELPRO wasn’t as virtuous as Jim presented it. Perhaps nothing about the counterintelligence program shocked the American conscience more than the revelations of the FBI’s fierce, five-year campaign against Dr. King. The agency began its investigation of King in 1962 after an informant told agents of King’s connection to New York attorney Stanley Levison, a former Communist Party fund-raiser who acted as a speechwriter and adviser to the civil rights leader. The Bureau convinced then–attorney general Robert Kennedy to wiretap King’s phone. The investigation never yielded any evidence of communist activity by King, yet it morphed into an obsession with the leader’s sex life. Bugging his hotel rooms, the FBI produced a composite audiotape of the married Baptist minister telling off-color jokes and entertaining women. Agents mailed a copy of the tape to King’s Atlanta office, along with an anonymous letter that seemed to strongly suggest he kill himself.5

  “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, fraudulent self is bared to the nation,” read the letter, opened by King’s wife, Coretta, in January 1965, just weeks after the civil rights leader’s crowning achievement—the Nobel Peace Prize, which he accepted to worldwide acclaim in Oslo, Norway. By 1967, when the FBI launched official COINTELPRO initiatives against a range of civil rights organizations it had labeled extremist “hate groups,” King’s moderate Southern Christian Leadership Conference was included as a target.6

  Loathe as Jim was to admit it, it was this history that fueled the very conspiracy claims he now ridiculed. Alarm over the FBI’s campaign to “neutralize” King grew so intense that when the U.S. House of Representatives voted in 1976 to reexamine the assassination, its chief suspect was the FBI. Exploring the question—did Hoover’s animosity toward King somehow morph into an assassination plot?—the committee searched for a link between the FBI and Ray, subpoenaing agents, interviewing Ray’s criminal associates, and reviewing informant files to see if the dots connected. They never found a link, but the search set nerves on edge in the Bureau.

  Despite the scare, Jim stood by the FBI’s intense scrutiny of King and his organization.

  “We did that with all organizations—the KKK, the Muslims [Nation of Islam], the National Rifle Association, you know, any organization that had the potential for violence and could expound violence,” he said. “Hell, that was one of our jobs as defenders of this country. That was what we were supposed to do, to make damn sure what their aims were, where they were going and who their members were and where they were coming from…The big problem we had with King was not with King himself, but with some of the people who surrounded him.”

  * * *

  —

  AS JIM GREW more comfortable I sensed an opening. What I really wanted from him was an accounting of the technical surveillance—the phone taps, the hotel bugs. The FBI had zealously pursued King with these tactics for years in cities all over the country. Tapping an informant inside King’s SCLC offices in Atlanta, skinny-tied FBI agents regularly had his itinerary, beating him to hotel rooms to plant listening devices. The Bureau had taps on his home, office, and hotel phones.

  Yet, in what remains one of the assassination’s lingering mysteries to many, the technical surveillance stopped before Memphis. In testimony before Congress, agents insisted there was no technical surveillance of King in Memphis in the days before his murder there. Were they lying? If not, how did they keep an eye on King? There was a possible story here, I felt, and I pushed Jim on it.

  “Did you use any electronic surveillance on King when he was in Memphis?” I asked.

  Jim shook his head.

  “No. No. There was none. None by us or the Police Department,” he said. Agents didn’t need any technical surveillance, he explained: they had Memphis covered with informants. “We had too many good sources. We felt like we were getting complete, factual information verified from four or five different sources, plus the Police Department sources. They all jibed.”

  One of those sources stirred a panic within the FBI on the day of the assassination. He was caught in news photos kneeling over King’s body on the motel balcony where King fell. The source was Marrell McCollough, the undercover cop posing as a Black Power militant. Standing in the parking lot when the shot rang out, McCollough rushed to the balcony and was kneeling over King when his picture was taken. He raced to King to assist him—to staunch the bleeding. But conspiracy theorists saw something else: evidence of a government assassination plot. The undercover agent was there to spot King for the shooter, they argued. To make sure he was dead. When Congress reexamined the assassination a decade later, McCollough, by then working for the CIA, was called to testify, triggering conspiracy tales that still reverberate today.7

  With the FBI on trial, the secret identities of other informants were in jeopardy. The identity of a key Atlanta informant in King’s SCLC offices was revealed; the committee’s staff dug through the confidential files of more than a dozen others.

  “We had to divulge the name of one Memphis informant,” Jim said, shaking his head.

  My heart rose. Would Jim really give up the name of an informant? I wanted to ask, but hesitated. Every reporter, whether he works for The New York Times or The Salt Lake Tribune or the Key West Citizen, has a moment like this while on the hunt for a big story. There’s a fear—and a thrill. If I dared to ask, Jim might clam up. My inquiry would be over. Maybe, though, he’d tell me something huge. I swallowed and decided I’d never know if I didn’t ask.

  “Who was it?” I prompted.

  Jim hesitated.

  “Ernest Withers.”

  Withers? The name floored me. Ernest Withers had been the premier photographer of the civil rights era. He was a Memphis legend. He was in his seventies now and still kept an office down on Beale Street, where a building was named for him. A nearby brass Blues Note commemorates Wither’s his photographic contributions documenting the blues scene, Negro Leagues baseball, and black life in Memphis. On any given day passersby might catch a glimpse of him, gray now and typically sporting a kufi, a brightly colored African cap, as he waddled through his old haunts down the celebrated street, now adorned in touristy neon.

  I recalled a striking photo Withers once took of Dr. King reclining on a bed at the Lorraine. The great man was at ease, almost oblivious to the photographer. Clearly Withers was an insider, someone with incredible access.

  Jim tried to move on, but I brought him back to Withers. Was he really an informant?

  “Oh, yeah. He’s been an informant,” Jim confirmed. “He’s the one that furnished all the photographs. He was a good informant. But other than that, I’ve got problems with this. And a lot of things I’m not supposed to talk about.”

  Jim sensed his mistake. He grew stern again. He gave me the FBI hard line on informants: they are protected—always. Whether he’d slipped up or whether he deliberately wanted me to know about Withers, I couldn’t tell. But he was crystal clear on one point: he wouldn’t go on the record. The whole thing put him in jeopardy, he said. He raised the prospect of a prison term and a financial fine for revealing the name of a confidential informant.

  “The names of informants—that can come back and hurt you in the end. So we don’t even talk about that.”

  Now, I had no
choice. I acquiesced. Jim moved on to the day of the assassination. Yes, the FBI watched King in Memphis, he said. But agents were more concerned with preventing any violence against King, the city, or the country.

  “The greatest fear that I had was that some S.O.B. would kill him,” he said as he described precautions the FBI took to prepare for King’s visit to Memphis. “We had that place pretty well controlled. Now, we started the next day looking into the various houses [around the Lorraine Motel] and people around there. We always do, see, if we had a potential problem. And we didn’t finish the job.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  This was truly interesting ground. Jim was describing how the FBI had failed to thoroughly canvass the neighborhood around the Lorraine, to make sure no crazy person or white supremacist would try to kill King. But I had a problem—I was still stuck on Withers. Now, that was a story. All this conspiracy stuff was crap, a bunch of circular stories that went nowhere. But writing a story that outs an informant? It just isn’t done. Especially an informant so steeped in such rich history. As Jim continued, I couldn’t shake the thought.

  “The guy who ran that investigation said there was only one [place from where someone might take a shot at King], in that flophouse, and just one bathroom window,” Jim said as I scribbled and tried to focus. “And supposedly when he asked the proprietor about that window, the guy said, ‘You can’t see anything out of it because it’s too high.’ ”

  I couldn’t help myself. I swallowed and stopped Jim again.

  “And Withers was paid?” I asked, worried that this time he’d toss me out.

  Jim looked me in the eye.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Ernest was in it for the money.”

  * Not his real name. Jim feared repercussions and wanted his identity protected.

  4.

  A BOLD PHOTOGRAPHER

  SIRENS PIERCED THE MIDNIGHT AIR as smoke billowed from a dozen dying fires across Memphis. From the chaos, Ernest Withers stepped into the morgue room of the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home, cameras dangling from his neck, pursuing the biggest story of his career.

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was dead.

  Police finally had curtailed the rioting. But Withers’s work was only beginning.

  As a standout photographer for America’s black press, the bold newsman often went places where technically he had no right to be. It was almost a sense of entitlement, really, as if he innately understood his special place in history. He’d covered the civil rights movement from its very dawn in Mississippi in 1955 with the murder of Emmett Till. He’d shot so many of the big stories—Montgomery, Little Rock, Ole Miss, the lynching of Mack Charles Parker and the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, where Withers was manhandled by police—that years later the movement’s thankful leaders knighted the underpaid newshound with his own precious but informal title, the “Original Photographer of the Civil Rights Movement.”1

  So it was in the late-night madness of April 4, 1968, that Withers navigated Memphis’s riot-torn streets, determined to see King one last time.

  He made his way from the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot, tagging along with the fallen leader’s grieving party, with Ralph Abernathy and the others, to the Lewis Funeral Home, a stately, two-story frame house adorned with a red-tiled roof and a columned porch overlooking the massive Foote Homes public housing project, home to one of America’s largest concentrations of poor families. There, he found King’s unclothed body on a cold embalming table.

  “I just took it on my own and went to the morgue and walked in and there he was,” he would recall years later.2

  Nothing in Withers’s thirteen-year career had prepared him for this.

  As he readied his camera in the morgue room, arranging to take the first news photos of King in death, he found himself looking at someone—at something—he hardly recognized.

  Jagged, white bone protruded from a large bullet hole in King’s jaw. There was an even larger wound in his neck—this one big enough to poke a fist into.

  The injuries came in a horrific, one-two punch when a sniper’s bullet whistling at 2,900 feet per second spiraled through his jawbone, exited under his chin, then reentered his body at the neck. Tumbling end over end on its reentry, the lead slug cut like a ripsaw through his upper spine, severing it, before finally coming to rest just under the skin behind King’s left shoulder blade.

  But the greatest horror came at the sight of King’s head. The top of it was gone—completely missing. Autopsy surgeons at St. Joseph’s Hospital had sawed out an 8-by-5-inch oval section of King’s skull to remove and examine his brain.

  Withers saw the severed skull piece on the embalming table next to King’s body. He picked it up. It was soft and fuzzy on one side where the hair and scalp still clung to the bone. In this surreal moment, cradling the head crown of America’s greatest civil rights leader in his fingers, Withers gazed into the open cavity. Then, ever so gently, he fitted it back on top of King’s head.

  “His head was full of paper,” Withers would recall years later, describing in his peculiar, singsong voice how “I put his skull back in his head.”3

  Withers didn’t take any pictures—not yet. He could have photographed the gore and profited from it. But he opted instead to wait on undertaker Robert Lewis, who’d known Withers for years and who approved his visit to the morgue that night. It was only after Lewis completed his work, dressing King in a dark, silk suit and fleshing out the horrendous injuries, that Withers snapped pictures of King in his casket—the very first of many media pictures taken of King’s body in the aftermath of his shocking murder in Memphis.

  “I didn’t take any pictures until Mr. Lewis got him dressed because I thought, ethically, I had no business totally in there,” Withers said. “And so I wouldn’t embarrass the undertaker by taking pictures within his private morgue room.”4

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS TOLD THIS most sensational story at different times over his life and it intrigued me. I can’t recall when I first heard it. But the more I learned about him the more curious I became. If Jim was right about Ernest being an informant, it seems the FBI couldn’t have found a more resourceful person for the job.

  Since its early years in the 1920s the FBI had taken a very jaundiced view of the country’s African American population. Because so many black Americans were impoverished and oppressed, Hoover saw them as ripe for subversion—potential rebels who needed to be watched. In Memphis, the FBI had Withers. He monitored local politicians and activists, Jim said, and logged the comings and goings of outside agitators—anyone agents deemed as potential trouble.

  It certainly seemed the perfect cover. As a Beale Street studio photographer who shot baby pictures, weddings, and family portraits, the friendly, quick-smiling Withers doubled as a freelancer for the local black newspaper, the Tri-State Defender, making it his job to know every cop, politician, activist, preacher, undertaker, banker, barber, bartender, and bluesman in Memphis.

  “He did a tremendous job for us,” Jim said. “Anybody of any importance he got photos and reports on.”

  I was interested in pursuing this as a news story, but there was little to go on. In a series of conversations on a range of topics in the fall of 1997, Jim weighed the possibility of going public. But his instincts ruled it out.

  “He’s the one person,” Jim said flatly, “I wouldn’t want to be quoted on.”

  Though eventually I would assemble thousands of pages of records pursuing this matter over a course of years, in the beginning there were only Jim’s not-for-attribution allegations and some old stories to sift through, accounts Withers passed on through general media interviews and later through books he released on his career in photography.

  One thing, however, was absolutely certain: Ernest Withers enjoyed one of the longest, most productive careers in the history of American photography. His massive portfolio of black life in the South, sh
ot over the course of sixty years, is poignant and substantial. Though he remains obscure to many, arguably Withers is one of the pivotal photographers of the twentieth century.

  * * *

  —

  BORN IN 1922 as one of six children of a cleaning woman and a postal worker, Withers came of age in the Great Depression, when political boss E. H. Crump ruled the city through coercion and stuffed ballot boxes. Memphis was one of the few Southern cities that tolerated widespread voting among blacks. Yet those votes often were bought or coerced, sometimes with a bottle of whiskey. Withers witnessed the city’s political machinery up close—his father, Earl, was a Republican ward boss who registered voters on the family’s front porch in North Memphis. Crump let blacks vote, yet he kept most locked in unrelenting poverty. Their best options involved menial labor—cleaning the city’s bathrooms, taking out its trash, working in its steaming kitchens.5

  Withers’s prospects were better than most. He fully expected to follow his father into the relatively easy life of a letter carrier—but then he discovered photography. He got his first inkling of his future career as an eighth-grader at Manassas High School in North Memphis when Marva Louis, wife of then–heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, visited the school. Armed with a Brownie box camera he had gotten as a gift from his sister, Withers assertively worked his way to the front of the school theater and, to the jeers of classmates, took Mrs. Louis’s picture. “I was a student. I didn’t have any business up there,” Withers said. “From that day forward I was somewhat identified as a photographer.”6

  He learned the trade of photography while in the army during World War II. He was a jeep driver in a road-building regiment until he learned of an opening in the army photography unit. There, he learned to mix lab chemicals and shoot in the field. Withers soon learned he could make money on the side. Stationed in Saipan, he collected two cents from servicemen for a picture they could mail home. “It just grew to be a commercial business,” he said.7