A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  For Withers, then thirty-eight, a war veteran and a former cop, cooperating with the FBI to weed out subversives wouldn’t have contradicted his values, or those of many Americans, for that matter. Indeed, Lawrence found plenty of other informers of one level or another in the black community: among the leadership of the NAACP, on local college campuses, in the business community, and on the streets.

  Yet for all the negative assessments he was getting from Withers and others about Forman, the activist’s reputation in the larger black community couldn’t have been more different.

  “The great Civil Rights fighter, James Forman, a Chicago school teacher, was in Memphis this week,” the Tri-State Defender reported a week before the North Carolina incident. “He was en route to Jackson, Mississippi, for the trial of the Freedom Riders and offered his services as a special correspondent.”6

  Forman built that reputation while volunteering in late 1960 in Fayette County’s Freedom Village. He huddled there under the stars with its denizens and battled the Christmas season chill next to campfires, listening to their hard-luck stories.

  A part-time journalist and a writer working on a novel about racial oppression in the South, he wrote tenderly of campers like Georgia Mae Turner, a middle-aged sharecropper “not thin and not fat, with a smooth, dark skin” and hands weathered “like a man’s from years of heavy labor.” Georgia Mae had worked in the cotton fields since she was eight—living in the same leaking shack for thirty-eight years—only to be evicted because she registered to vote. She left with a few possessions, three children, and a suffocating personal debt typical “of white cheating under the system of sharecropping, a modified form of feudalism,” Forman wrote. With equal passion, he condemned those he saw as his people’s oppressors—“white racists, southern sheriffs, countless police pigs, FBI agents, government officials”—articulating a worldview shaped by the racism he faced as a youth and at least two wrongful arrests, one with a vicious beating by police that drove him to the brink of insanity.7

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  —

  WHITE AMERICA EVENTUALLY came to know and fear a militant version of Forman, with his thick Afro and bib overalls symbolizing his identification with the downtrodden—the Forman who yelled into a microphone during a civil rights rally in a Montgomery church in 1965, “If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off!”8

  But in the winter of 1960–1961, when he came to Fayette County, he still wore the button-down shirts and pressed slacks of a schoolteacher.

  He was dressed thus, in a stylish topcoat and with a cigar in his mouth, when Withers shot his picture. There in Freedom Village, alongside the surplus army tents and huddled sharecroppers, Forman unwittingly became part of J. Edgar Hoover’s vast covert photo archive.*3

  Withers sold seven copies of the full-length photo for a dollar each to Lawrence, who was under pressure from his bosses to make a positive identification of the suspected subversive. The agent promptly shipped copies to headquarters and to FBI offices in Chicago, New Orleans, and Charlotte.9

  Forman went to Fayette County with backing from the New York–based Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, one of the so-called “Big Four” organizations at the forefront of the civil rights movement. CORE sponsored the Emergency Relief Committee, which Forman helped coordinate, one of a number of charities funneling money, food, and supplies to the evicted sharecroppers.

  After a fallout with McFerren, Forman left in July 1961 for Nashville on a trip that would alter his life’s course—and that of the civil rights movement.

  He spent time with Diane Nash, her future husband, James Bevel, and members of the Nashville Student Movement, the group that had led the successful sit-in demonstrations to desegregate lunch counters in Tennessee’s capital city a year earlier. Teaming with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, another Big Four organization, the Nashville students had boldly resumed the Freedom Rider campaign to desegregate interstate bus and train transportation—an effort CORE had abandoned that spring after racists firebombed a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama, and savagely beat activists with fists and metal pipes in Birmingham. Escorted by National Guardsmen, the activists managed to get buses through Alabama and into Jackson, Mississippi, where numbers of the young Freedom Riders—black and white—were arrested and shipped to Parchman, the state’s sepulchral work farm. Now, working with the older Forman, the student leaders considered new campaigns for the Freedom Riders.10

  Forman traveled to Atlanta with Nash and Bevel. There, he conferred with Ella Baker, executive director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King gave a letter of endorsement to Forman’s companion, Freedom Rider Paul Brooks, to investigate the racial tension gripping Monroe, North Carolina, where controversial movement leader Robert F. Williams was engaged in a summer-long fight to integrate public swimming pools. President of the local NAACP, Williams had helped rouse international political pressure three years earlier to release two black boys, ages eight and ten, who’d been jailed on molestation charges after they traded kisses with a white girl during an afternoon of play. Though the “Kissing Case” drew attention to Williams and the injustice faced by blacks in racially oppressive Monroe, the leader’s militant rhetoric—he called for armed resistance to the Klan-backed violence local blacks encountered—became an embarrassing point of controversy for the budding nonviolent civil rights movement.11

  Arriving on August 5, 1961, Forman received a startling introduction to Williams’s “meet violence with violence” philosophy of self-defense: facing death threats, Williams, a burly, ex-Marine, had assembled an arsenal, as many as forty rifles, stacked in his living room. Forman and Brooks spent the first night of their visit with guns in hand, keeping watch on Williams’s front porch.*4 In an arguably ill-advised decision, Forman and Brooks consented to Williams’s request that a team of integrated Freedom Riders join the Monroe protests.12

  Forman left by train on August 8, heading west to Mississippi to sign up Freedom Riders to bring back to Monroe and the eventual disaster awaiting them. But first, he made a quick swing up to Chicago. He passed again through Memphis—through agent Lawrence’s intelligence gauntlet.

  *1 See chapter 12 for a discussion of Withers’s September 28, 1958, visit to the FBI’s Little Rock field office, where he and other newsmen reported suspicions about Forman and leftist writer Louis Burnham.

  *2 Fayette County movement leader Scott Franklin alleged McFerren issued unauthorized checks from a sharecropper relief fund and failed to give an accounting of supplies. Franklin was quoted in a January 28, 1961, report by The Commercial Appeal as saying McFerren and Forman “have disrupted our meetings” and “have never given an accounting of the food and clothing received and distributed.” McFerren denied the allegations. He countered that he was legally authorized to sign the checks and that rivals were working to destroy the civil rights organization they established in 1959, the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League.

  *3 Withers’s photo is believed to be the first the FBI obtained of Forman. According to FBI reports, it was shot “in the Fall of 1960,” and turned over to Lawrence a year later, on November 30, 1961.

  *4 Tension had been building since June when Williams alleged that a Klansman in a fast-traveling automobile tried to kill him by bumping his Volkswagen from behind into a ditch along a highway. Williams reportedly gave police a license tag number, but they never arrested anyone.

  15.

  A PROLIFIC INFORMANT: SUMMER 1961

  WEEKS BEFORE FORMAN RETURNED TO Memphis, Ernest Withers was arrested. It happened in the sit-in demonstrations downtown. As protestors vied for seats at the segregated lunch counter at Walgreen’s Drug Store, the ubiquitous photographer aimed his boxy Rolleiflex camera. The store manager objected—he’d forbidden press pictures. Soon, policemen arrived. They took Withers and his photography partner, George Hardin, to jail.

  A judge fined them $26 each.1

  It was no small sum
for a man raising eight children, his youngest still just two years old. But, it didn’t slow him a bit. Withers shot a series of striking photos of the protests that summer: Young women in pressed skirts and blouses picketing outside a restaurant. They smile faintly. A young white girl passes. Placards hang from their necks—“Communists can eat here. Why can’t we?” and “This Store Integrates Your Money, But Segregates You.” Then, there’s this masterpiece: A man pushes a small girl in a stroller. A police cruiser pulls up—right next to him. The cops and the father trade suspicious stares. He totes a hand-crafted sign—“Daddy, I Want to be Free, Too.”

  Withers wasn’t just shooting news pictures. He was aiding the movement.

  “I assisted Freedom Riders when they got back to Memphis,” he said years later of that momentous summer when the movement began awakening. “But we didn’t go down there [to Mississippi] photographing the Freedom Riders because they wanted to be unescorted and unidentified by the press, by the black press, because this would draw more attention for us to be there taking their picture.”2

  But he did more than aid Freedom Riders—he informed on them, too.

  On July 19, Lawrence placed an urgent call to his fledgling informant: a Greyhound bus had left Chattanooga with Freedom Riders onboard. It was rumbling toward Memphis, the agent said. He wanted details. Bracing for possible racial tension, the Bureau had already learned the bus was carrying five Freedom Riders, including two Jewish rabbis. Agents knew little else. Where were they headed? Did they plan to stay overnight? Most Freedom Rider buses departed from the operation’s base in Nashville, heading due south—into Alabama and Mississippi. They bypassed Memphis. This was unusual. But when Lawrence phoned Withers he caught the photographer cold—he knew nothing.3

  No problem. Withers agreed to check into it. He called Lawrence back—an employee at the NAACP offices told him the Freedom Riders would spend the night in a dormitory at Memphis’s historically black Owen College. Carloads of police and federal agents followed the activists’ taxicab from the bus station to the school that night. The show of force adds intrigue to a bitter contention that spread across the era: lawmen often were eager to investigate Freedom Riders and other “outside agitators” but wouldn’t offer to protect them. Unlike some Freedom Rider excursions, no angry mobs awaited this group. They passed through Memphis without incident.4

  Lawrence paid Withers $15 (roughly equivalent to $120 in 2018) for the intel.*1 He was proving his worth. Repeatedly, the agent turned to the in-the-know photographer that summer as CORE, the Black Muslims, and other nontraditional organizations began opening shop in Memphis, and as individual Freedom Riders returned home from their excursions.5

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  WITHERS SECURED A mother lode of information on August 13, a Sunday, the day James Forman passed through Memphis on his fateful trip back to Monroe, North Carolina. But as he kept an eye on Forman’s visit, he also visited a makeshift mosque belonging to another subject of FBI interest—the Nation of Islam.

  With cameras in tow, Withers attended the small operation, located in a frame house in the thriving, middle-class African American neighborhood surrounding Kentucky Street and South Parkway—the same place he’d tipped Lawrence and Kearney to six months earlier. There, the enterprising photographer gave the FBI its first fly-on-the-wall glimpse inside the sect’s Memphis activity.

  He shot a series of posed photographs, two depicting NOI cleric Bolden Lawson intensely jabbing a finger, as if preaching, as he stood behind a wooden pulpit bearing Islam’s crescent moon and the hand-painted inscription, “There is no God but Allah.” The exotic images from inside the mosque—labeled “the temple” in FBI reports—no doubt kindled curiosity in Lawrence, a Baptist turned Lutheran, and his devoutly Catholic partner, Kearney. Among the photographic prints—each ink-stamped on back with Withers’s imprint and slogan, “Pictures Tell The Story”—is one depicting eleven women and girls. Standing shoulder to shoulder or sitting side by side in folding chairs, each wears a hijab, or Islamic headscarf. Another picture depicts six men and boys, dressed in ties and suit jackets, ceremoniously clasping hands around the pulpit.6

  In a sharp scrawl on the backs of the prints, Lawrence recorded identities of those pictured: names, addresses, occupations. Blood relationships also were noted. Lawrence didn’t get these details from Withers. Instead, another secret informant—listed in Lawrence’s notes by a code number, ME 170-S—identified the participants a week later.7

  In a pattern Lawrence would follow that summer and across this entire volatile era, he cut up some of Withers’s group portraits into face shots he then divided into individual files. He constructed hundreds of such dossiers. The vast data collection was aided by regular, periodic meetings between Lawrence and Withers. In lean times, the two might talk every couple weeks or so. During the eventual chaos of the 1968 sanitation strike it became virtually a daily routine. The resolute internal security agent had no doubt the program played a vital role in U.S. national security.8

  “We had a duty to protect the country as best we could through finding out those who were potentially or actually dangerous,” he later testified to Congress. “We had a concomitant duty to detect and so report those who were innocently involved as being dupes or through other unconscious connections which they may have had.”9

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  IT WAS MONDAY before Withers and Lawrence spoke about Forman’s brief appearance in Memphis the day before. It’s unclear who called whom. But when they finally compared notes, they seemed to share a deepening suspicion.

  “Foreman [sic], on August 13, 1961, said he had just arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, from Monroe, North Carolina, where he had been in contact with the controversial Negro leader Robert Williams,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing his photographer-informant. The agent noted Williams has “advocated violence to gain racial desegregation.” Lawrence’s report recounted an even more alarming fact: Williams had visited Cuba a year earlier, after it had fallen to Castro.*2

  Forman quickly was becoming a hot item at FBI headquarters—and Lawrence was delivering critical, real-time intelligence on the activist’s movements, courtesy of his newfound informant, Withers.

  “Foreman was somewhat evasive regarding his contacts with Williams but did say he wanted to return to Monroe, North Carolina, by Tuesday night, August 15, 1961, to attend some big rally, of an unknown nature, in which Williams is allegedly to participate,” Lawrence wrote.10

  Withers evidently spoke with Forman as the activist attempted to get press credentials from the Tri-State Defender to cover the Freedom Rider trials in Jackson. It was one piece of a puzzle. Agents tracked Forman’s every step through Memphis. They obtained a local phone number he used. A crisscross directory listed it to a yardman in Memphis’s Orange Mound neighborhood.*3 The man, a family friend, denied knowledge of Forman’s activism. Withers, in turn, characterized Forman as “an enigma,” one who “always seems to make appearances at trouble spots,” Lawrence wrote.11

  Withers’s work on Forman set a tone for the constructive relationship he and Lawrence shared for another nine years, through the very heart of the civil rights movement, until the agent finally retired in 1970.

  First, it established the photographer’s reliability.*4 Despite his past at the Memphis Police Department, despite Chief J. C. Macdonald’s crushing criticism, Withers could be trusted. At the time, the FBI desperately wanted to figure out Forman. The Bureau wasn’t even sure if the James Forman observed at all these different civil rights skirmishes was in fact the same person. Withers tied it together for them. Yes, he told Lawrence: this is the same James Forman he observed in Little Rock in 1958, traveling with suspected Communist Louis Burnham; the same Forman who injected himself in the Tent City struggle; the same one who is now headed to Monroe to protest with suspected subversive Robert Williams.12

  Second, it demonstrated hustle. When outspoken Freedom Rider Daniel Horne came to Memphi
s that August to launch a chapter of CORE, Withers used his insider knowledge to dig up essential information: Horne is lodging at the YMCA, he told Lawrence; he’s “loafing” on Beale Street. In the field of civil rights, CORE posed the first real challenge in Memphis to the NAACP, the old-guard organization whose local board included at least three FBI informers. Lawrence had cause to keep increasingly militant CORE out of the city. Withers reinforced his view. The photographer said “conservative Negroes” see Horne as an opportunist, Lawrence wrote. Withers reported the young activist’s biting criticisms: the NAACP is “too conservative,” he said; it moves “too slow.”13

  Third—and perhaps most significantly—it established Withers as an authority in “racial matters.” Lawrence had good sources in the black community. Few, however, were as well-versed on so many fronts—politics, the movement, religion, law enforcement, the media—or knew so many people. The truth was that the lily-white FBI understood little of what it meant to be black in America. It needed an interpreter. Withers’s opinion, quoted voluminously in FBI reports throughout the era, mattered.

  “Foreman [sic] has never made any pro-communist or anti-American statements in the presence” of Withers, Lawrence wrote. It was an objective observation that helped assess Forman’s puzzling and dangerous flirtations with the movement’s radical fringes.14

  But things were developing quickly.

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  WHEN THEY RETURNED to Monroe, Forman and Brooks brought seventeen Freedom Riders with them—fifteen of them young, white idealists from the North. It was an uneasy alliance. The Freedom Riders planned to make a moral stand for nonviolence; Williams hoped to use the young activists to force police to arrest the Klansman who’d tried to kill him earlier that summer. For days, mobs harassed and beat members of the integrated protest group as it peacefully marched around the Union County Courthouse in downtown Monroe. One was even shot with a pellet rifle. By Saturday, August 26, local youths began to fight back. They threw stones at advancing whites. They pulled a driver from a car and beat him.15