And when public demand grew for news of racial violence on the Mississippi Delta, the young photographer met it with his startling photos.*8 Withers’s pictures of the half-naked corpse of an eleven-year-old boy found with a broken neck on a Mississippi plantation road ran across the top of the Tri-State Defender’s front page in the weeks after the Till trial.21
Withers shot more photos when martyred civil rights icon Rev. George Washington Lee’s NAACP colleague Gus Courts was shot in his Belzoni, Mississippi, grocery. Given the huge reader response to Till, the Defender knew this could be a big story. Withers took photos of Courts in his hospital bed and another depicting his bullet-riddled store. Courts survived.22
As the civil rights struggle blossomed following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Defender increasingly paired Withers with writer L. Alex Wilson. The two traveled in 1955 to Hoxie, Arkansas, where segregationists from around the region rallied to thwart the local school board’s decision to integrate the schools. A year later, Withers and Wilson hid in a darkened filling station in Clinton, Tennessee, riding out the storm of a white mob that rioted to obstruct school integration efforts there.
They traveled that December to Montgomery, Alabama, to record an incredible moment in history.
The bus boycott that had started a year earlier when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man was drawing to a triumphant close. Now, the Supreme Court found the city’s segregated buses unconstitutional. The Defender’s two-man news team arrived in Montgomery on December 20, 1956, as Martin Luther King, Jr., rallied the faithful inside cavernous Holt Street Baptist Church. A year earlier, as the boycott began, King had preached from this very same pulpit, under the overflowing balcony and the magnificent stained-glass windows, sweeping away the doubts of decades of Jim Crow second-class citizenship.
“If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong,” he’d told the cheering throngs that spilled out the doorways onto the street.
“If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong! If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong!”23
The scene was much the same the night Withers and Wilson arrived. The church pulsed with electricity. Shouts sounded. Yes sir! Amen! As King addressed the crowd again, he delivered news of victory. He read a decree ending the boycott. Though a seasoned newsman, Wilson, forty-eight, was moved to his core. Tall, bespectacled, studious, he captured the night in his notebook—the voices, the faces, the electricity of the crowd—along with the momentous events of the following morning:
MONTGOMERY, Ala.—I saw this city, “The Cradle of the Confederacy,” give enforced birth to integration on local buses Friday.
It was an inspiring and exhilarating experience to observe true, Christian democracy function deep in the heart of bias-ridden Alabama and deep in the heart of Dixie…
At a mass meeting Thursday night, I saw hundreds of united, foot-weary Negro citizens, as a result of the High Court’s order, give a rousing, standing vote to return to the buses on a non-segregated basis…
By 6 a.m. Friday morning, when it was time for many to leave home for various duties, the excitement had mounted in intensity in the Negro neighborhoods. In the hearts of many, too was the prayer, deeply impassioned, offered by Rev. H. H. Johnson Thursday evening at the mass meeting:
“You have kept us in your hands…Oh Lord…Now keep your arms of protection around us…We need you…Right now…Tomorrow morning.”
At 6:30 a.m., I boarded a bus, along with my photographer, Ernest Withers, at S. Jackson and High St. There were only two Negro women on the bus and they were seated on the first seat, left of the vehicle.24
Years later, Withers recalled that morning with humor and affection. He and Wilson stayed in a small hotel near a bus station. They rose early that morning, at 4:00 a.m.
“C’mon here, boy. Let’s go,” he recalled Wilson telling him. They got on the first bus at six. They rode about two hours before they finally found King downtown.25
Wilson ordered Withers to shoot photos as the two-man news team approached the still somewhat obscure preacher on the street. The young shutterbug dutifully obliged, aiming and clicking as Wilson and his subject walked side by side, each wearing a broad-brimmed fedora and a business suit, King barely reaching the six-foot-four newsman’s shoulder.
Then, another great moment of serendipity arose. When Withers ambled onto a bus, he found himself alone with King and his small entourage. Then he shot it—that remarkable photo of King and Abernathy sitting near the front of the bus, all those white faces behind them. But the version that the Tri-State Defender ran was so tightly cropped, it lost its ironic beauty. It ran in a panel of four otherwise ordinary pictures documenting the evening rally at Holt Baptist and the tumultuous morning of integration.26
At the bottom of the front page lay another gem: a lone white demonstrator who came to protest the court decision had screamed racial slurs as a black man boarded a bus and sat in a frontward seat. Withers approached the man and took a photo of him as he got in his sedan to leave. It ran under a simple caption: “An Agitator.”
Withers was becoming a bold photographer, a trait that would serve him well through the rough years ahead.
*1 Moses Wright later testified he saw a third man, who appeared to be black, because he “stayed outside” and did not come into the house. His account supplements those of other witnesses who said J. W. Milam brought black workers with him that night, possibly to help identify the youth, Emmett Till, who reportedly had talked “dirty” to his sister-in-law, Carolyn Bryant.
*2 Humphreys County sheriff Ike Shelton reluctantly investigated the murder. He initially attributed Lee’s death to trauma from the car crash. He later contended Lee was a womanizer who’d possibly been killed by a rival. A federal probe came to focus on two local white men. FBI agents even confiscated a shotgun owned by one of the men. But the Bureau didn’t believe it had enough evidence of a racial motive to make a civil rights case. Agents turned evidence over to state prosecutors, but no one was charged. The murder remains unsolved.
*3 Till’s Chicago funeral drew thousands of mourners, who were horrified by the open-casket presentation of the mutilated teen. Publicity surrounding the case escalated when Jet magazine ran sensational photos of Till’s body in the morgue room of a Chicago funeral home.
*4 After their acquittal, Milam and Bryant told their story in a paid interview published January 24, 1956, in Look magazine. The men contended they’d planned to only whip and frighten Till, but the defiant youth refused their demands to say he was inferior. “I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble,” Milam recalled telling Till. “Goddam you. I’m going to make an example out of you.”
*5 Many believed the trial was rigged from the start. For one, authorities conducted no autopsy of Till’s body.
*6 The photo is now owned by Corbis Images of New York. The author attempted to track the picture’s path to the photo gallery without success. A Corbis representative said its archives don’t reveal the photo’s origin. One possibility is that the firm obtained the rights when it acquired photos of the Bettmann Archive, which in turn had acquired United Press International’s photo archive. John Herbers, ninety years old when the author interviewed him in 2014, who covered the Till trial for UPI, distinctly recalled the “Thar he,” photo but didn’t know who shot it.
*7 These are amounts Withers reported to his supervisors at MPD. Years later, he suggested his Negro Leagues photos were more lucrative. In Negro League Baseball, a 2004 book featuring Withers’s baseball pictures, he told essayist Daniel Wolff he could make $35 a day selling photos at Martin Stadium—and as much as $150 on good days. “Compare that to the Red Sox players getting around three hundred dollars a month, and Withers saw his baseball photographs making ‘a lot of money,’ ” Wolff wrote.
*8 The tabloid nature of the Defender’s treatment of the death of Tim L. Hudson, eleven, stemmed
in part from the reverberations of the Emmett Till murder. Not wanting to underplay what might be the next blockbuster racial murder of a child, the Defender seemed uncertain of what it really had. “…did he die by accident?” writer L. Alex Wilson asked in the Defender’s front-page story. “That is the big question in the latest mysterious death of a Negro in Mississippi.”
12.
THE BREAKTHROUGH
L. ALEX WILSON FELL TO HIS knees. As a mob of angry white men closed in, the newsman hung his head. A leather shoe struck his rib cage with a crushing thud. Another landed on his spine.
He had hoped to talk his way out of this. Now, he would be lucky to get out alive.
Wilson came here to Little Rock on this sultry September day in 1957 with photographer Ernest Withers determined to cover the next big story: the integration of Central High School. In answer to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision three years earlier, the local school board adopted a conservative plan. It involved slow-walking integration into the public schools by enrolling just nine gifted African American students—the so-called Little Rock Nine—at Central High.
When white mobs resisted even that glacial pace, Gov. Orval Faubus joined them, calling in the Arkansas National Guard to keep the black students out. The situation soon grew ugly.
The mob surrounded Wilson as he approached the school on foot with three other black journalists. Perhaps it was inevitable that the thugs would target him. He was hard to overlook: Six-foot-four. Dark-skinned. Somber-faced. A broad-brimmed fedora on his head.
Despite his pleas—he was a newsman simply reporting on developments, he told them—they closed in. Wilson was punched. Kicked. Knocked to the ground. Some witnesses said they saw a man with a brick deliver a vicious blow to his head.
Wilson’s wife would always believe his death five years later was somehow connected to the awful beating he took that day.
“He refused to run,” said Moses Newson, Wilson’s former employee, who was there that day reporting for the Baltimore Afro-American. As Newson recalled, he and James Hicks of the Amsterdam News sprinted to safety. They couldn’t convince Wilson to do the same. Wilson had run once from a mob in Florida. A proud man, he never felt right about it.
“He promised himself he would never run again,” Newson said.1
Wilson wrote courageously in the next edition of the Tri-State Defender about his attack that morning, September 23, 1957:
Any newsman worth his salt is dedicated to the proposition that it is his responsibility to report the news factually under favorable and unfavorable conditions…
I decided not to run. If I were to be beaten, I’d take it walking if I could—not running.
Withers had already left for Memphis when it happened, on his way to deliver film to the Defender’s offices. But he returned the following day for a major development. Inflamed by the mob chaos, and the beating of Wilson, President Dwight D. Eisenhower mobilized the Arkansas National Guard. He also called in units of the elite 101st Airborne Division—the “Screaming Eagles”—in a display of overwhelming force. Now, instead of repelling the nine black students, the soldiers escorted them.2
Withers positioned himself that morning in front of the school as a dark army-owned Country Sedan pulled up with The Nine aboard. When three female members of the group apprehensively climbed out of the car, they saw a sea of hostile white faces—their classmates—staring from the school steps across the yard. In that tense moment, one of The Nine, Minnijean Brown, absent-mindedly dropped a sheet of paper. Wearing a crisp polka-dot dress, she stooped over to pick it up off the pavement—just as Withers depressed his shutter. It was the perfect balance of malice and innocence: a schoolgirl, lost in a moment of everyday tedium, even as treachery awaited her.
He had taken another picture for the ages.3
* * *
—
LITTLE ROCK OFFERED more than just another big story for Withers. It opened up another sideline job—this one with the FBI.
It was here, a year after the integration of Central High, that Withers’s first known interaction with Bureau agents took place.
This is how it happened:
By the fall of 1958 the school crisis had escalated. Though Central High was nominally integrated, Governor Faubus won passage of a law that would allow him to thwart desegregation altogether. Under an act passed by the state legislature, he could close schools and lease them to private companies that would reopen them as nonpublic schools. That September, a year after the initial crisis, Central and the rest of Little Rock’s high schools sat largely idle—students stayed home as authorities tried to sort out the mess.
Withers was back in Little Rock covering the developments. There, on September 28, he paid a visit to the local FBI office. Though the full context of the meeting is lost to history, records make it clear he discussed two black activists—one from New York, the other from Chicago—who were believed to have ties to communist organizations.
By then, the photographer was stringing for Jet, the popular weekly news magazine that had first published the graphic photos of Emmett Till’s mutilated face. The pocket-sized magazine would become known as “the Negro Bible” for its searing, comprehensive coverage of the budding civil rights struggle—many of its stories accompanied by photographs shot by Ernest Withers.
According to an FBI report memorializing the incident, Withers showed up at the Bureau’s Little Rock field office in the company of Jet’s Washington bureau chief, Simeon Booker, whom he’d met covering the Till trial. Also along was Charles L. Sanders, a gifted pianist and a writer for the Cleveland Call & Post newspaper, who later became managing editor at Ebony magazine. The focus of the visit: recent activity in Little Rock by Louis Burnham, a writer for The National Guardian, a leftist newspaper published in New York. Traveling with Burnham was James Forman, then a little-known activist. A fiery Chicago schoolteacher, Forman would become one of the pillars of the movement. He built a name by constantly slipping south: To rally Freedom Riders. To coordinate protests. To aid sharecroppers kicked off their land for registering to vote. But on this day, he was still an unknown—just another suspected communist agitator causing trouble.4
Withers and his two fellow newsmen complained to agents that Burnham and Forman “were not representing magazines or publications as they claimed” but used “legitimate news people” to get into news conferences and to interview students.*1
* * *
—
DURING THE VISIT, Booker reportedly passed on a particularly dim view of Burnham. He said his employers at Johnson Publishing Co., the Chicago firm that operated Jet and Ebony magazines, knew Burnham as a communist associate.5
“Booker said that his boss, Robert Johnson, managing editor of ‘Jet’ magazine, told him that Burnham was a former head of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and that he had worked closely with James E. Jackson, then of New York, who was an indicted member of the Communist Party,” the report said.*2
Burnham’s presence in Little Rock rattled the anticommunists in the FBI. The veteran activist, who’d long been a voice for the underprivileged editing Harlem’s Freedom news magazine, had once served in the Young Communist League. He worked, too, as executive secretary of the Youth Congress, founded by the aforementioned James E. Jackson, an early civil rights pioneer and a Communist Party member indicted in 1951 under the Smith Act. As the report noted, the Youth Congress was listed as a suspected subversive organization under Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450.
Forman, too, concerned the Bureau. An intense, studious man, he’d begun appearing at civil rights skirmishes across the South. Over time, Withers would pass photographs of Forman to agents and give updates on his activities as he passed through Memphis. In Little Rock, the FBI meticulously tracked Forman and Burnham. Agents checked registration papers at the hotels where they stayed, interviewed innkeepers, and debriefed school officials with whom the pair had contact.6
Years later
, Booker discussed the general contours of his relationship with the FBI. “How do you think Jet and Ebony got all those stories down South?” he told The Washington Post in 2007. “I know what all the civil rights people have said about Hoover and the FBI. But the FBI was of great help to me…When I left for the South, I always told the FBI where I was going. I wanted to get back home! The FBI was really a kind of co-engineer with us. Jet and Ebony never would have been what we were without the FBI.”7
Booker’s outlook might have influenced Withers. Then too, Withers might already have begun a relationship with the FBI. Nine months before his Little Rock visit, the FBI’s Memphis office considered the photographer as a PCI—a Potential Confidential Informant.*3 Again, the detail is sketchy. Yet it happened at a critical moment. As the civil rights struggle spread, agents increasingly reached out to leaders in the black community—ministers, politicians, and journalists—seeking their assistance in identifying Communists, radicals, and individuals suspected of sowing subversion.8
“They were building relationships,” recalled newsman Newson. He never was approached while at the Tri-State Defender but received visits several times from agents in the 1960s when editing Baltimore’s Afro-American. Newson said he had little to tell them; the agents eventually left him alone.9
Did agent Lawrence reach out to Withers? Did he plant the seed in Memphis before the photographer walked into the Little Rock office that day?
And why, when so many other recruits managed to become only fleeting sources, did Withers get in so deep?10
Many questions remain, yet this much is clear: we know of Withers’s 1958 Little Rock meeting because of the lawsuit my newspaper filed in 2010 following my initial stories. A record of it appears among a trove of documents the FBI released through our suit—thousands of pages of previously censored reports and hundreds of photographs that Withers shot for the Bureau. Our long-shot lawsuit paid off.
A Spy in Canaan Page 15