Where she’d met a photographer named Ernest Withers.
“Dear Ernie,” Gabriner typed. “I’m looking at your card now and it says, ‘Pictures Tell The Story,’ and I remember that spread you had in your window of that guy who was killed in Viet Nam. Do you still have it up? By this time, Memphis has probably lost many more of her sons in that war.”
In her letter, Gabriner offered to buy copies of a photo Withers had shot. It showed her smiling sweetly on the steps of the “Freedom House,” a nondescript, cinder-block building where she and her fellow civil rights workers headquartered during that hot, liberating summer of 1965 in conservative Somerville. The town was home to a year-round electric cross that greeted visitors from atop the city water tower and to young white thugs who roamed the patchwork of winding dirt roads, dispensing vigilante justice to anyone who challenged the unforgiving Jim Crow code. Together with three to four dozen college-aged colleagues, Bob and Vicki Gabriner pushed hard against the local white establishment. Pushback came with equal force. Several of the young activists had been kicked, punched, spit upon, and threatened with death—one stabbed, another struck with a baseball bat—as they tested public accommodation laws in local restaurants, sitting together, black and white, demanding service. They marched. They registered voters. They organized a boycott of the segregated schools.2
Withers was there with his cameras to chronicle much of it. The youthful workers considered the older “Ernie,” then forty-two, a colleague in the cause. Some visited his Beale Street studio in Memphis. One even spent the night at his house. He liked his picture of Vicki so much he hung it on his wall in Memphis.3
“Have you been out to Somerville at all since the summer?” she typed. “There is still a small group working in the area…Bob sends his regards. Yours in freedom, Vicki.”
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WHATEVER SENTIMENT HE might have felt for Gabriner, it conflicted with a greater allegiance: Withers handed her letter over to special agent Bill Lawrence. Hungry for even the slightest news on their activities and associations, the FBI was assembling large files on the Gabriners.4
“Withers said he has sent the photographs of Vicki Gabriner to her and asked her for any news concerning other West Tennessee Voters Project personnel,” Lawrence wrote in a February 1966 report sent to the FBI’s Milwaukee office titled, “Vicki Gabriner, SM-C”—FBI jargon for Security Matter-Communist. “To date he has received no reply.”
Lawrence had made Gabriner and her colleagues one of his big projects of 1965. He worked intensely that summer cataloging the backgrounds, activities, and associations of volunteers working for the West Tennessee Voters Project, a civil rights initiative launched by activists at Cornell that had been staging actions to assist the movement in Fayette and Haywood counties since 1963.
Ostensibly, Lawrence’s investigation aimed to determine whether the Communist Party had infiltrated the group of young idealists. But just as the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee later uncovered wide abuse in the FBI’s scrutiny of communist influence in the movement, Lawrence’s probe dug deeply into the personal lives of the Voters Project volunteers. The agent traced lawful political activity among the volunteers and their family members, at times reaching back decades. He also invested considerable resources exploring relationships among white volunteers and local black youths.
There’s no evidence he directly sabotaged political support for the group, yet newly released records show his close working relationship with black leaders in Memphis helped ensure that the NAACP and other, more mainstream, civil rights groups would not assist the Voters Project as it fought against racist attacks, dubious arrests of its members, and public condemnation.
Lawrence assembled large dossiers on the group by utilizing Withers and a handful of other informers on the ground in Tennessee and New York and by gleaning details from the files of other FBI offices and law enforcement agencies. He authored an indexed, ninety-five-page monograph distributed to headquarters and nine field offices in the South, Midwest, and Northeast, where the volunteers lived or studied. The document and a series of related reports detailed the probe’s findings: As many as fourteen of the project’s forty or so volunteers had “subversive references in varying degrees.” One was identified as a Communist Party member; two as “daughters of CP members.” Several others were “active members” of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America, a Communist-sponsored student organization. Lawrence warned that the group’s leftist leaders “are trying to build a cadre of young Negro teen-agers” in Fayette County. He feared the group had sent one particularly bright high school boy to Chicago for some type of “pro-Communist training.”5
He warned, too, of the dangers posed by “amorous” relationships that had developed among some volunteers and local black residents. “This tends to inflame the emotions and sensibilities of the whites and many of the Negroes,” he wrote.6
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WITHERS’S ROLE AT first was modest but vital. He passed on bits of information he picked up from contacts in the African American communities around Somerville and Brownsville. But his covert activities accelerated following a violent confrontation in downtown Somerville. Racists had attacked peaceful demonstrators there as they engaged in sit-ins choreographed by the West Tennessee Voters Project. Days later, Lawrence and Withers met to discuss the developments. Much remains clouded about their May 13, 1965, meeting, yet this much is clear: it didn’t involve investigating civil rights abuses. Rather, the focus involved targeting demonstrators—the “agitators” from the North who had staged the protests.
Records show Lawrence advised the photographer of the FBI’s “internal security responsibilities and intelligence responsibilities,” sharing his fear that Communists again were influencing the Fayette County movement. Part of the discussion involved local movement leader John McFerren and his ties to white Louisville, Kentucky–based civil rights activists Carl and Anne Braden. Segregationists had smeared the couple for years as communist sympathizers, and the FBI kept large files on them.*1
According to the agent’s report, Withers said, as far as he knew, McFerren wasn’t pro-communist. But, because of his “ignorance,” he could be “an easy dupe.” The Bradens “have completely ingratiated themselves” with McFerren, Withers told Lawrence. His evidence: the couple had helped McFerren obtain a $12,000 business loan for his grocery, he said. “For this reason,” Lawrence wrote, summing up Withers’s statements, “no one could logically convince [McFerren] that the Bradens or any of their associates were security risks.”
Nonetheless, Withers, planning another picture story in Fayette County for Jet magazine, agreed to pursue the agent’s leads.
“He will be alert for the identities of outsiders who are infiltrating Fayette County,” Lawrence wrote.7
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WITHERS WAS PARTICULARLY busy in 1965. His studio boomed. And he was chronicling another Memphis music renaissance. Stax Records opened in 1957. Through the 1960s, the label had a string of hits, broadcasting Memphis soul to the world. Withers knew and photographed all the big stars—Rufus Thomas, who bawled his gravel-voiced “Walking the Dog”; Rufus’s daughter, Carla (“Gee Whiz” and “Cause I Love You”); house band Booker T. and the M.G.s; and the biggest of them all, Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes. His Stax contacts included founder Jimmy Stewart and Al Bell, the eventual co-owner, the man who took the label into the ’70s with acts like the Staples Singers, soothing America’s wounded soul with classics like “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.”
“It was just changing times,” Withers told an interviewer years later about Memphis’s mid-’60s Stax scene. Changing musically—and politically, he told the FBI.8
Over the next years, he’d pass on a string of tips: Al Bell and singer Al Green (“Let’s Stay Together”; “Tired of Being Alone”) made cash donations to an arm of the radical Black Panthers, he said. A Stax executive donated to a
wing of the Communist Party; Bell paid a lot of attention to a militant activist-singer, John Gary Williams; Stax provides “some financial support” to the Black Arcade, an African culture clothing store viewed with suspicion by the FBI. He told Lawrence about an evening he spent at Stax owner Jimmy Stewart’s house, where comedian-activist Dick Gregory was visiting.
“Gregory described J. Edgar Hoover as a willing stooge of all presidents under whom he has served,” the agent wrote after debriefing Withers, who provided pictures, too. “He attacked Hoover’s personal views, and attacked him for having never married, saying that he therefore must be a homosexual.”9
But he found time that summer to venture out to Fayette County on news assignments, again doubling as an intelligence gatherer in rural West Tennessee. As Lawrence put it, his picture-taking informant met and “gained the confidence” of the Voters Project’s white volunteers, a development that filled FBI files with swaths of political intelligence: gossip, biographical details, summaries of strategic plans—and photographs. As many as forty-nine photos Withers shot appear in the Memphis office’s files on the Voters Project. Some are posed; others capture activists marching or picketing; still others are candid pictures shot behind the scenes.
In one, Memphis community leader O. Z. Evers, then forty, puffs a pipe as he huddles alongside a parked white sedan with four young activists: two white, two black. Evers became a local civil rights hero in 1958 when, like Rosa Parks, he successfully challenged Memphis’s segregated public buses. Withers had trumpeted Evers’s fame then, shooting a gritty news photo on the steps of the federal courthouse in Memphis depicting the activist’s victorious attorneys. This photographic print, however, shot in rural West Tennessee, was bound for the FBI’s cloistered intelligence vaults—Evers had grown increasingly militant in recent years, forming a chapter of CORE, branded by the FBI as a “black nationalist hate group.”*2
Withers’s picture of a long line of marchers carrying placards reading “Freedom Now!” and “Black and White Together” ran on the front page of the Tri-State Defender; an identical photo landed in the Voters Project files. Again, Lawrence scrawled in key details: Leading the march was local CORE leader Rev. James Edward Smith, a fedora-sporting African American minister; and Stuart J. Mitchell, a tall, white Cornell student from New England with smoke-black sunglasses. A couple steps behind, Jerry Jenkins, a black teenager from Somerville, walked under a broad straw hat. He became the focus of a months-long inquiry.10
Jenkins attended academically stifling Fayette Training School, where black youths received vocational and agricultural instruction. The school’s academic term started in August and recessed in the fall for the cotton harvest. Protesting the split term and degrading conditions, the CORE-Voters Project team organized a crippling boycott. It kept four of every five black schoolchildren at home, threatening the closure of Fayette County’s “Negro” schools before the boycott finally lifted. But Jenkins didn’t return. He caught a ride north to Chicago. Word filtered back to the FBI through Withers and others that he was living there with a white family, suspected subversives. “It tends to appear substantially that pro-Communist oriented persons in the WTVP have singled out Jerry Jenkins for further training hoping to use him as a tool,” Lawrence wrote, theorizing “they may be planning to subversively indoctrinate this young Negro.” Agents in two states checked school records and interviewed witnesses.11
“They were way off track,” Jenkins said decades later. Yes, he spent a year in Chicago. He went up with a white couple from the Voters Project. But he didn’t do it for communist training. He left fleeing Fayette’s inferior schools and his mother’s financial troubles. Authorities cut her from welfare rolls after she registered to vote, he said. “I was very adamant about trying to get a decent education. An opportunity was afforded me,” said Jenkins, who eventually left Fayette County for good for a long career in the army. “And that was really the end of that story.” Despite persistent contentions in Lawrence’s reports that Voters Project volunteers might be teaching Marxist principles to Fayette County’s black youth, Jenkins said he never saw any of that. “They organized the students in protests against white supremacy. Protests of Jim Crow. And discrimination,” he said. “That’s it.”12
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HEEDING LAWRENCE’S DIRECTIVE—ESTABLISH the identities of the “outsiders”—Withers shot numbers of individual portraits: Here is Cornell graduate Bob Gabriner, in his shirtsleeves, huddled with a couple of local African American activists. There is a close-up of his wife, Vicki, beaming into the camera, her hair drawn up in a bun. The Gabriners are under suspicion for their ties to the Bradens and for a tenuous connection to the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America. Another picture shows a young man sitting on a stool wearing large, horn-rimmed glasses. Henry Balser, Lawrence notes, was among students who’d disrupted a Reserve Officer Training Program ceremony at Cornell in protest of the Vietnam War. Self-described “Jewish Quaker” Deborah Rib appears in several photos: relaxing under a shade tree; talking with a local black leader; gesturing to make a point.13
A recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin, the outspoken Rib stirred controversy as she organized the school boycott. Typically harsh in his assessments of suspected subversives, Lawrence recorded an informer’s cruel observation that Rib “is a most unimpressive person, fat, ugly, and one who has a repulsive personality.” Withers reported more that would rankle the conservative Lawrence. Spending time with the Voters Project volunteers, the photographer overheard Rib brag she’d once invited black separatist Malcolm X to speak in Madison. She also hoped to bring Black Muslims to Fayette County to teach African American history.*3 As Lawrence recorded it, Withers said Rib was “well aware” of “stories going around Fayette County” of “the brazen and open inter-racial sex life being promoted by WTVP leaders.” Indeed, stories ran rampant. As Lawrence noted, some Voters Project workers “became openly demonstrative, in an amorous fashion with the young Negroes” during a public march.14
Not only did the incident trigger violent reprisals from Fayette County’s Old South community, it helped foment a giant public relations disaster that would augur the Voters Project’s ultimate demise. It’s uncertain if the FBI’s intense investigation into the black-white relationships helped undermine the Voters Project. Yet Lawrence’s reports make it clear the FBI was at least prepared to undercut the group.
A disturbing example involves another of Withers’s photos—a picture of Voters Project leader Danny Beagle, twenty-one, holding a teenaged African American girl in his lap. Lawrence sent it to headquarters, to the personal attention of William C. Sullivan, Hoover’s director of COINTELPRO—its dirty tricks operations. “The fact that it was called to Sullivan’s attention is, I think, very suggestive,” said FBI surveillance historian Athan Theoharis, who reviewed the records. “They were really trying to find ways to contain these activists because they couldn’t prosecute them.”15
The photo—a group picture shot outdoors—is clearly posed. More than fifty years later, Beagle said he had no memory of it. But when he saw it, he questioned what Withers had been up to when he shot it.
“It looks flirtatious at the very least,” he said. “And, also, what’s clear is that he got us because we trusted him. He got us to relax and to just be goofing around in a way that looked like something that it wasn’t.”16
Theoharis concurred.
“Withers is no innocent,” he said. “These people are caught off guard. What’s he doing? He breaches that wall of privacy. He is no innocent. He knows what the Bureau wants.”17
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THOUGH THE VOTERS Project had enjoyed broad support among local movement leaders the previous summer, their alliance began dissolving in May of 1965, around the time the FBI began its intense focus.
Cornell professor Douglas Dowd, cofounder of the project, came down to Somerville that June hoping to mend fences. He thought he’d done just that
. But after his return to New York a surprise awaited him. Whitacker Stokes, Jr., a Nashville attorney representing Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League leaders John and Viola McFerren, wrote a letter published in The Ithaca Journal criticizing the project for “crimes” against the people of Fayette County, chiefly sexual immorality and deploying the “direct action” tactics of CORE and SNCC—sit-ins, marches, and the aggressive demand for equal access to restaurants, bathrooms, and other public accommodations.
In a blistering response, Dowd admitted some improper conduct, saying violators had been sent home. But he astutely focused on criticisms of the project’s tactics.
“Don’t you see that your accusations against the Project are exactly the same as those leveled against the civil rights movement by the racists in the South?” he wrote. “The essential difference between the Project this year, and the six or so people in the League who are against the Project, is that the Project is trying to continue to work with the overwhelming majority of the people in the county who know that there is a long way to go if the people are to have freedom, and to have any kind of decent life; whereas you opponents think that everything is going to come out fine if you work with the whites in Somerville.”18
The sudden, “drastic” shift “very much made me wonder what was going on behind the scenes with you and the others,” Dowd wrote.
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ONE THING GOING on behind the scenes involved Lawrence. He was working his many political contacts. Following the chaotic demonstration on May 1, the resolute agent reached out to the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the largest in the region. For the better part of a decade now he had enjoyed an amiable, even influential rapport with its leadership. When he spoke on May 7 with A. W. Willis, the venerable NAACP attorney who’d been elected the previous fall as the first African American member of the Tennessee General Assembly since Reconstruction, he learned they were on the same page.*4 The NAACP would not cooperate with the Voters Project.
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