* * *
—
THE FBI BALKED at an initial request by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the sharecroppers’ claims. Kenneth O’Reilly describes this resistance in his book Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972, telling how Civil Rights Division chief Harold R. Tyler, Jr., found the FBI’s General Investigative head, Alex Rosen, to be “very uncompromising.”
“He was stifling the lawyers in the Division, choking everybody with paper,” O’Reilly quotes Tyler as saying. Rosen penned “lengthy memos detailing the political affiliations of movement people in Tennessee and elsewhere,” O’Reilly writes, noting how Rosen’s views mirrored those of boss J. Edgar Hoover. “For Hoover, anyone who caused trouble for the Bureau was a subversive.”10
In the face of mounting political pressures, however, the FBI relented. It conducted extensive field interviews.
Among agents dispatched into the rolling countryside east of Memphis was the square-jawed Lawrence, then in his sixteenth year with the local field office. The forty-one-year-old G-man bounced along dirt roads in his Chevy sedan, traversing cotton fields and mud holes. On a hiatus from internal security work—the gathering of intelligence on real or potential domestic enemies—he and longtime partner Hugh Kearney interviewed penniless, semi-literate tenant farmers in their weathered shacks. It was tedious work. For a time, the pair explored the mundane case of two African American sisters jailed in Fayette County, who couldn’t pay fines for letting hogs run loose in their white landlord’s cultivated fields. The NAACP believed the women’s incarceration came in retaliation for voting. True or not, available records indicate the FBI found no evidence to support the claim.11
Lawrence and Kearney explored numbers of other voting discrimination leads, too, and their path soon overlapped with Withers’s.12
The two G-men encountered the photographer while, ironically, examining the allegations of an elderly white woman. Katherine Rawlins Davis said she’d been victimized with tactics generally reserved for Haywood County’s black underclass: she’d been blacklisted. A critical witness in court, the wizened landlady said merchants refused to sell her fertilizer and other goods after she failed to fire black tenants on her farm. One, Melvin Dotson, was treasurer of the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League, an organization established to encourage voter registration.
Lawrence and Kearney helped identify Dotson through a photo Withers had taken. The picture, a most ordinary black-and-white photograph, shows the sharecropper dressed in his Sunday best, smiling meekly as he posed with five others while visiting a Memphis law office. Attached to a December 23, 1960, report, it is the earliest-known occasion of Withers turning over a photo to the FBI.*3 Unlike later reports, this one doesn’t refer to the photographer as a confidential informant or source, but simply as “free-lance photographer Ernest C. Withers,” with a business at 319 Beale Street.13
* * *
—
WITHIN WEEKS, THE agents began testing out Withers as an informant.
Lawrence interviewed him on January 20, 1961, asking about the recent appearance on Beale Street of an exotic religious sect founded by African American activists in the urban North: the Nation of Islam. Better known as Black Muslims, members of the group had been congregating in a rented hall a few doors down from Withers’s studio. The FBI considered them a potential security threat. Listing the photographer as a “Prospective PCI (Racial)”—essentially a candidate for Potential Confidential Informant or a probationary informant reporting for the Bureau’s Racial Matters program—the agent learned the Black Muslim group had pulled out of the building at 343 Beale just before Christmas. Still, Withers said, members remained on the street, openly hawking The Herald-Dispatch, a Los Angeles–based African American newspaper that ran a column by Elijah Muhammad, the Chicago-based leader of the Nation of Islam.
In a pattern repeated over and over across the 1960s as Lawrence investigated a range of organizations and individuals, Withers helped the agent flesh out details of the group’s leadership and connect dots to sympathizers. He identified the father of one leading member. He also identified the Muslim’s live-in female friend—details the agent retained in files labeled “NOI”—FBI shorthand for Nation of Islam. “Withers will continue to be on the alert for information regarding the NOI and will attempt to specifically identify individual followers thereof,” Lawrence wrote.14
Four days later, on January 24, Lawrence returned with his partner, Kearney. Lawrence headed many of the Memphis office’s key subversion investigations, but Kearney took the lead on a variety of collateral security investigations, including the Nation of Islam. The two conservatively dressed agents showed Withers a photograph. They ran a series of names past him. He knew very little. But he did know this: he could identify a woman who lived with a leading Nation of Islam activist. The young lady, who Withers named, had tragically lost two young children in a house fire a year earlier, he said. Determined to flesh out their biographies—to catalog the Nation’s local members and supporters—the agents pushed for details: Where do these people work? Where do they live? Who are their associates? Are there any identifying pictures?
“Withers said that he thinks he has photos of [the Muslim leader’s female friend] which he took for the Tri-State Defender after her children burned in the fall of 1960. He will look for the picture,” Lawrence wrote.15
Withers knew of another self-professed Black Muslim, too: Robert Walker, a solidly built amateur boxer living in South Memphis. “He will endeavor to specifically identify Robert Walker,” Lawrence wrote. Later that day, Withers called back. He knew where the Black Muslims were meeting since leaving Beale—a rented space on Kentucky Street south of downtown Memphis.16
* * *
—
LAWRENCE MOVED QUICKLY. By February he sought approval to make Withers a full-fledged confidential informant. But it wouldn’t be so easy. The photographer’s checkered past as a policeman came back to haunt him.
Doing a background check, Lawrence paid a visit to J. C. Macdonald, the Memphis police chief who had fired Withers ten years earlier for splitting illicit profits with a bootlegger. The gruff police boss unceremoniously admitted his dislike of Lawrence’s Potential Confidential Informant, calling him “untrustworthy”—an “opportunist” who “required an excessive amount of supervision.” He allowed only that Withers “might be cooperative with any governmental agency if he thought it would be to his advantage to do so.”
“In view of the above, it is not believed that Withers can meet the Bureau’s reliability requirements as a PCI (RAC) wherein his activities can be directed or controlled,” Lawrence wrote in a February 7, 1961, memo.*4 But he wasn’t ready to give up on his promising source, either.
“However, because of his many contacts in the racial field, plus his indicated willingness to cooperate with this Bureau, as attested by his recent furnishing of information, it is recommended that Withers be considered as a PCI,” Lawrence wrote. “He will be contacted regarding general criminal matters. If in the course of these contacts he volunteers any information relating to security matters or racial matters, it of course will be accepted. It will be understood, of course, that his activities will not be directed in any manner with regard to racial matters or security matters.”17
* * *
—
LAWRENCE’S MEMO WAS something of a ruse. Despite limitations it set, the special agent nevertheless gave Withers cash and assignments, at times directing him as he would a controlled, confidential informant. He made the photographer a Potential Confidential Informant, reports show, keeping him in that probationary status—a PCI—for as many as two years before temporarily downgrading him to the lesser rank of “Confidential Source.”*5 By 1967, he’d found a way to make him a full-fledged racial CI—a directed Confidential Informant reporting on “Racial Matters,” the FBI’s program monitoring unrest in black America.18
Withers
became an integral component in the broad intelligence network the FBI built in and around Memphis—an invisible sieve of surveillance that filtered the flow of activists, politicians, and civil rights soldiers of every stripe who passed through. In the name of national security, the FBI policed their politics. With his camera and his notebook, Withers pulled double duty as a photojournalist and an FBI informer who helped identify and inventory a series of individuals and organizations answering the call of Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote of the plight of the oppressed West Tennessee sharecroppers in her nationwide newspaper column. Danger loomed—not only for volunteers but for newsmen like Withers, too.19
“These roads that he had to travel [were] deep, dark. And in some cases, the FBI was the only protective” force, Withers’s son, Billy, would say years later, defending his father. Protection from racists—often, the local police—definitely might have factored into Withers’s FBI relationship. Its precise origin—who approached whom—may never be known. But, Billy Withers offered, his father may have felt he had little choice. Once an FBI agent starts asking questions “it’s like an obligation to discuss it,” he said.20
Available records don’t say how Lawrence convinced his supervisors to allow the clever balancing act that made Withers an informer despite failing a reliability test. But if connivance indeed was a factor, a precedent already had been set: Withers might have been working with the FBI in an unknown capacity for as many as three years when Lawrence first attempted to sign him as his personal CI. FBI records first identify the photographer as a PCI in January 1958. Likely, he wasn’t working then in racial matters or internal security but simply as a regular criminal informant.*6 It’s difficult to say for certain what, if anything, the FBI had him doing between 1958 and 1961; the government released only a handful of records from this period.21
But the three-year gap in Withers’s file is bookended by a singular topic: James Forman, the bold, militant civil rights activist whose trailblazing work would land him a place in the pantheon of the movement’s greatest heroes.
*1 The author counted references in reports to as many as 144 photographs Withers supplied the FBI from Fayette and Haywood counties. The FBI released seventy-one actual photographic prints from “Tent City”–related files. The rest are missing. The FBI’s Memphis office at times shipped prints shortly after they were shot to other field offices to facilitate identification and intelligence gathering. Others simply weren’t released despite the government’s legal settlement with The Commercial Appeal.
*2 The suit was one of the first brought under the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Congress’s first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, the law gave the federal government new powers to prevent suppression of voting rights, and created the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to investigate voting discrimination.
*3 The author located the photo in the University of Memphis Special Collections. The picture appears in the Tent City Collection, among Justice Department records released via FOIA. There was no effort to redact Withers as the source of the photo and no indication that Lawrence was using him as an informant at that point.
*4 PCI is the FBI’s shorthand for a Potential Confidential Informant; RAC designates a subcategory, racial informant. PCI also can designate a Potential Criminal Informant. Throughout the Withers papers, however, the term confidential—not criminal—is used.
*5 Generally, a Confidential Source is a variety of informant who is not controlled and who does not seek out information but who supplies information on demand—details “readily available” to the person through his or her work. Confidential sources can include bankers, telephone company employees, police officers, and landlords, among others.
*6 A key indicator of Withers’s possible initial role as a criminal informant, rather than a security or racial informant, rests in the designation of his original file, No. 137-907. A 137 designation is the FBI classification for a criminal informant. His file was renumbered as 170-70 in 1964, when the FBI created the 170 classification for “extremist informants”—racial and security informants reporting on radical political organizations and activists.
14.
TRACKING JAMES FORMAN
BLOOD RAN IN CRIMSON STREAMS down James Forman’s forehead. Standing in a daze, he could make out a large white man—and the barrel of a shotgun aimed at his face.
A crowd assembled behind him. There were hundreds of them. Some waved Confederate flags. Others carried signs: “Nigger Lovers,” and “Open Season on Coons.” They were yelling.
“Kill him!”
“Kill the nigger!”1
By all accounts, the events of that steamy Sunday afternoon of August 27, 1961, outside the courthouse in Monroe, North Carolina, were as tangled and complicated as they were brutal. The day’s developments would jump-start the FBI’s deepening interest in Forman, a middle school English teacher from Chicago, whose intellect and disaffection led him into the front lines of one civil rights skirmish after another.
“James Forman seems to have a penchant for showing up and getting involved in racial incidents throughout the South,” agent Bill Lawrence wrote to headquarters from Memphis ten days after the North Carolina incident. Forman had operated largely under the FBI’s radar until then. But now, Lawrence’s report highlighted Forman’s flourish of activity: a trail winding across five states, from Memphis to Little Rock and its 1957 school crisis, back over to racially tense Fayette County, down to Jackson, Mississippi, where Freedom Riders had been beaten and jailed, and, finally, covering six hundred miles to the east, to Monroe, a city of about 11,000 people nestled in the rolling countryside along the South Carolina border, home to the ultraconservative Jesse Helms and a thriving Ku Klux Klan klavern. The twelve-page memo stitched together those isolated incidents, opening what would become a bulging dossier that tracked the resolute activist’s movements and eventually landed him on the Security Index, the FBI’s list of radicals deemed most dangerous to the country’s internal stability.2
Lawrence pieced together his report with help from a stable of informers, most significantly an amiable news photographer he’d been courting alongside the sharecropper shacks and refugee camps in Fayette County named Ernest Withers.
In the FBI’s archived files, Lawrence read how Withers had first shared details about Forman in September 1958 in Little Rock during the unrest surrounding the desegregation of schools. The civil rights advocate had come under passing suspicion then because of his association with a suspected Communist.*1 It would be the first of at least five incidents in which Withers informed on Forman. The rest came in 1961, as Lawrence resolved to learn more of the turbulent voting struggle in Fayette County and of Forman, the articulate Chicagoan who had thrust himself so prominently into the middle of it.
Withers came through for Lawrence in a big way. He delivered photos and relayed details about the teacher-turned-activist’s political views and plans, as well as particulars of Forman’s role in a deepening fissure that was developing within Fayette County’s once-unified black leadership.
Withers “could not help but conclude that Forman…had some ulterior motive; otherwise, he would not have come all the way from Chicago, Illinois, to Fayette County,” Lawrence wrote following a March 16, 1961, meeting with his fledgling photographer-informant. By then, Forman had become a key adviser to local movement leader John McFerren, a wiry, outspoken grocer who ran a small store outside Somerville, the Fayette County seat, and whose life had been in constant danger since leading the first voter-registration drives there in 1959. Picking up on infighting among Tent City leaders, Withers told Lawrence that some in the Fayette County movement felt Forman was “hoodwinking” McFerren.3
While privately echoing criticisms of Forman, in public, Withers seemed to support the Chicagoan.
Weeks before meeting with Lawrence, the photographer hosted a press conference in his Beale Street studio. There, before both black and white news crews, McFerren defended Forman, rebutting insinua
tions by rivals that the pair had been siphoning relief funds intended for evicted sharecroppers.*2
The incident does more than illustrate the two faces—one public, one private—of Withers. It shows him as the consummate insider he’d become. In the ten years since he’d left the police force and focused on photography, he’d become widely known and trusted, a fixture in the budding civil rights movement comfortable with controversy and the range of activists who often congregated from across the country in his cluttered offices. His position of trust—and his willingness to talk—were gold to the FBI.4
* * *
—
IT’S IMPORTANT TO consider Withers’s informant work in the context of the times.
Forman was an outsider—an “agitator”—a suspected subversive with purported ties to Communists at a time when such an association couldn’t have been more unpopular.
Ninety miles off the U.S. coast, Cuba had fallen into communist hands. President Kennedy was about to launch the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion he hoped would topple Fidel Castro. All that winter in Memphis, the American Legion pushed its “Crusade on Communism,” a program featuring a frightening film that warned of foreign invasion, Communism on the Map. It was shown to thousands of Mid-South schoolchildren, citizens, and civic leaders, even to a rare joint session of the Tennessee General Assembly. The film found a zealous co-sponsor in the hometown newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, which published a series of articles trumpeting the need “to make the public aware of the extent of communist encirclement and infiltration of this country.” That spring, a civil defense exercise complete with blaring air-raid sirens warned of a five-megaton Soviet atomic bomb that if dropped here would blast “a 750-foot deep hole” in Memphis and unleash “a lethal dose of radiation.”5
A Spy in Canaan Page 18