A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  The seeds he planted finally took root and blossomed in 1960.

  That’s when the sit-ins erupted—the movement’s second great mass act of nonviolent direct action. Lawson was its central architect.

  The student-led sit-ins started February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina. They reached Nashville, Lawson’s home base, days later. Nashville’s movement soon rivaled Greensboro’s, branching out and inspiring dozens of similar efforts in cities across the South, including Memphis. Then a thirty-one-year-old divinity student at Vanderbilt University, Lawson had planned the sit-ins for weeks. Hollywood memorialized his role in the 2013 film, The Butler, dramatizing Lawson’s now legendary workshops on nonviolent action. He instructed student activists at historically black Fisk University, Tennessee A&I (later renamed Tennessee State University), Meharry Medical College, and American Baptist Theological Seminary on the power of soul force, the power to effect change through truth. He taught them, too, about what to expect when taking a seat at white-only lunch counters.15

  In 1960, this was radical stuff—and dangerous, too. Several students were beaten. One Nashville activist’s home was bombed. As Lawson would admit years later, the simple act of an African American taking a seat at a white lunch counter amounted then to “extremely militant behavior.”16

  For his role, the intense, bespectacled Lawson was arrested—charged with conspiracy to disrupt trade and commerce—and expelled from Vanderbilt. As police led him away from Nashville’s First Baptist Church, past a marquee on the lawn that declared, “Father, Forgive Them,” the world watched—including some disapproving members of his own race. Despite the Nashville Student Movement’s success in desegregating the city’s lunch counters and movie theaters, it remained controversial among black America’s older, more conservative leadership.

  Because of that, Lawson paid yet another price.

  It’s a point largely forgotten, but King wanted to hire Lawson in the wake of the sit-ins. However, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins blocked it. It happened like this: King offered Lawson a position on his executive staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where, as special projects director, he would recruit and train a “nonviolent army” consisting of hundreds of volunteers “on call” for ready deployment to trouble spots. But Wilkins wouldn’t allow it. The NAACP had been lukewarm toward the sit-ins (leaders of the Greensboro movement had solicited help from CORE after the NAACP balked), and Lawson didn’t help his cause when he publicly railed against the organization’s “timid” reaction. Wilkins fired off a letter to King in response. He warned the civil rights leader of an impending “break between our groups” if Lawson was hired.17

  The introspective divinity student took it hard. He retreated north, where he finished divinity school at Boston University, King’s alma mater. He returned to Nashville the following year to join his former student trainees as they embarked on a greater, even more dangerous, venture: the Freedom Rides. Diane Nash and her student colleagues elected to resume the integrated bus rides CORE had abandoned following the brutal attacks in Alabama. Now, where even King hesitated, Lawson jumped in: he agreed to ride. He was arrested along with other Freedom Riders on May 24, 1961, in Jackson, Mississippi, as they de-boarded at the city’s segregated bus station. Together, they spent the next several weeks behind bars, first in the Hinds County Jail and later at Parchman Prison, suffering through crowded cells, stopped-up toilets, and the stifling summer heat.

  None of it slowed him down. By 1962, Lawson was an ordained minister. The Methodist Church returned him to the South, first to a church in a small town near Nashville and then, that June, to Memphis.18

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS REPORTED LAWSON’S arrival on June 28, 1962, emphasizing the “Freedom Movement” advocate’s controversial past. Details Withers relayed that day came as part of an intelligence roundup, one in a series of sweeping updates on African American affairs that the photographer periodically gave Lawrence as a racial informant. This time, Withers had little to report: There was no new racial strife in Fayette or Haywood counties, he said. He knew of no planned sit-ins or “other Negro demonstrations in Memphis.” On the Nation of Islam front, sect member Henry Kelly had left a new copy of Muhammad Speaks at Withers’s studio while he was out; the photographer offered to re-contact the Muslim to ascertain his recent activities.

  And there was this:

  “Withers pointed out that as a matter of possible interest, Reverend J. M. Lawson, Negro, has been named as the new pastor of Centenary Methodist Church, 878 Mississippi Boulevard,” Lawrence wrote. The agent put the brief, two-page report titled “Ernest C. Withers, PCI”—Potential Confidential Informant—in Withers’s informant file and circulated copies to four other investigative files on racial strife and subversion.*5 He regurgitated a summary of Lawson’s controversy—his role in the Nashville sit-ins, his expulsion from Vanderbilt, his ties to King—then wrapped up with a few biographical details. “He is married and has a baby son.”19

  Over the months, as Lawrence kept a suspicious eye on the intense Methodist minister, Withers fed him a range of information: Lawson had been in Birmingham helping King in his fight there against Bull Connor’s police dogs, the photographer said in May 1963; that November, Withers secured a letter that seemed to link Lawson to suspected communist sympathizer Carl Braden, the Louisville, Kentucky, civil rights icon. Withers reported the following March that Lawson and others had met with a wealthy New York couple viewed suspiciously for their ties to civil rights. Again that fall, the photographer helped gather information on meetings at Lawson’s church. He confirmed that Freedom Rider C. T. Vivian had spoken at one event there but that Braden had failed to appear.20

  The FBI hungered for news on Braden, the stalwart civil rights champion smeared for years as a Communist. Withers didn’t disappoint. He reported this sketchy link between Braden and Lawson in June 1966: Making his rounds, the photographer had run across letterhead for Braden’s Southern Conference Educational Fund, or SCEF, a civil rights organization branded by segregationists as a communist front. It listed Lawson’s boss and close friend, United Methodist bishop Charles F. Golden, as a “key officer.” Withers “pointed out that for this reason Lawson would be the type who would normally engage in any possible SCEF activities, should any occur in the Memphis area,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing the photographer-informant.21

  It was the sort of jaundiced, guilt-by-association assessment that had colored the McCarthy era. Nonetheless, it was the sort of tip Lawrence welcomed. In his world of conspiracy and subversion, such an act of “connecting the dots” was a useful tool. As he would later testify to Congress, the movement was like a bus. He needed to know what direction it was headed. He wanted to know who got on, who got off, who stayed for the long haul.22

  While Lawrence likened his approach to a bus ride, preeminent FBI surveillance historian Athan Theoharis described it as more like a vacuum cleaner: sucking up as much information as possible for potential use later. So it seemed in October 1965 when Lawrence aimed his great intel sweeper and drew in an account from Withers about a schism at Centenary Methodist over Lawson’s interpretation of the Bible.

  “Withers said that members of Lawson’s church are up in arms over the fact that Lawson in a recent sermon raised an issue, questioning the virgin birth of Christ,” Lawrence wrote in the two-page memo focused on opposition to the Vietnam War by Lawson and others.23

  Fifty years later, Lawson said he had no idea the FBI had collected such information about him. If the Bureau ever used such detail to try to undercut his career or standing in the church, he wasn’t aware of it.*6 Yet, even after the passage of five decades, the revelation stung. He called the FBI’s interest in his doctrinal teaching a heavy-handed intrusion into his constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion.

  “I never really questioned Virgin Mary doctrine as such,” he said, feeling compelled to defend himself against insinuations of sacrilege f
rom a half century ago. The New Testament includes two virgin birth accounts, he explained, but also incorporates three other passages in which Jesus is “born in an ordinary fashion”—an inconclusive dilemma for the ever-questioning Lawson. “Why is this a bona fide dogma?” he asked.24

  * * *

  —

  THOUGH WITHERS HAD failed his reliability test in 1961, as late as 1966 Lawrence still referred to him at times as a CI—a Confidential Informant—despite his status then as a Confidential Source, a sort of FBI reference desk in the black community. Still, records show Withers at times received assignments, reflecting a certain ambiguity about his status. Perhaps there was no great need then to push him into a full confidential informant position. The struggle in Memphis was moving at a slow pace, fostered in part by the FBI-NAACP alliance. Indeed, when the tempo changed, Withers’s role ramped back up. He would return to the status of a confidential informant, as ME 338-R, but that wouldn’t happen until late 1967 as unrest rocked Memphis.25

  Though the FBI didn’t release pay records as part of the Withers settlement, it seems logical that most of his pay came after his designation as ME 338-R.

  So what motivated him in these lean years in the mid-1960s?

  Jim had said Withers did it for the money. Yet as a friend of the NAACP, his cooperation likely was forged, too, in the organization’s more traditional, more conservative outlook. Historian F. Jack Hurley gives what might be Withers’s only public account of his view of the direct-action movement—and of Lawson. Hurley writes in Pictures Tell The Story: Ernest C. Withers, Reflections in History that the photographer “reserved his strongest contempt for confrontationalists like the Reverend Jim Lawson, whom he considered a self-promoting troublemaker.”26

  So it seems, despite their friendship, Withers was motivated in part by his general disapproval—his dislike—of Lawson’s tactics. Perhaps Withers wasn’t the patsy Lawson thought he was.

  Playing the role of an armchair psychologist, the photographer characterized Lawson in 1963 as a frustrated attention seeker who “has received very little publicity or recognition” since coming to Memphis.

  “Lawson, in one sense, has an inferiority complex and at the same time has an extreme ego,” Lawrence wrote in July 1963 after debriefing Withers. More than a year later, in November 1964, the photographer indicated that Lawson’s ambitions had got him nowhere in Memphis—he and his supporters had been kept in check. “Withers does not feel, based on his contacts with Negro leaders, that there will be any demonstrations or difficulty in Memphis; that the leadership is currently firmly entrenched in…the leaders of the NAACP,” Lawrence wrote.27

  Even before Lawson arrived in Memphis, the city’s leadership seemed set against him. NAACP leaders begrudgingly supported the 1960 sit-ins Lawson inspired from Nashville, but they didn’t entirely embrace them. The organization paid legal fees for a group of black students from LeMoyne College arrested that March for defying segregation at the Memphis Public Library, even as its leaders urged the young protestors to stop. After relocating to Memphis, Lawson argued in vain for demonstrations to end school segregation: the NAACP opted instead to stick with a court-ordered plan that slow-walked integration and helped keep thousands of black children in inferior schools for decades. In August 1961, when thirteen black children from elite families were admitted to previously all-white schools, Withers shot a photo now famous around Memphis depicting a smiling Dwania Kyles, daughter of prominent pastor Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, on her way to school.28

  As the photographer told Lawrence, Lawson had no momentum—no support—to take the larger black community’s cause to the streets.

  Lawson simply can “not go it alone,” the photographer told Lawrence.29

  Yet the militant pastor remained a force to be reckoned with—even feared.

  “Withers said many leading Negroes fear Lawson, feeling he is too outspoken and too prone to criticize the U.S., but can do nothing to get him to leave Memphis, as he remains in Memphis at the pleasure of Bishop Golden of this district of the Methodist Church,” Lawrence wrote in April 1966. “Golden is originally from Memphis and Lawson is one of his ‘fair-haired boys.’ ”30

  * * *

  —

  PERHAPS THE BEST testament to Withers’s value to the FBI is a single black-and-white picture shot by The Commercial Appeal’s Fred Griffith in June 1966: with a camera hanging from his neck, Withers walks down a remote Mississippi road alongside Dr. King, black power militant Stokely Carmichael, and the immaculately dressed Lawson, defying the late spring heat in a suit jacket, smoke-black sunglasses, and his ever-present white clerical collar. This was the March Against Fear, a 200-mile campaign down the spine of Mississippi to protest the shooting of James Meredith.

  Withers passed reams of detail about the march to Lawrence, including intel on Lawson’s role in organizing it—a role made possible by the minister’s close relationship to King. Lawson’s return to the spotlight proved embarrassing to NAACP leaders who were forced into the margins, the photographer said.

  Withers “pointed out that the march was given some impetus in Memphis by Reverend James Morris Lawson, Jr.,” Lawrence wrote in a July 1, 1966, report. “…This was done by Lawson to the chagrin and disapproval of the main body of the NAACP in Memphis. Lawson allowed his church to be used as a sort of rallying headquarters for the marchers who came to Memphis to join the march and this developed considerable friction within his church.”31

  Lawson’s connection to King, aired so publicly during the march, followed another collaboration the year before that went under the radar. Lawson had traveled to Vietnam in the summer of 1965 at King’s request. Though the trip was widely reported in the media—Lawson was part of a fifteen-member interfaith delegation from the United States and Europe that spent two weeks in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand—what wasn’t known is that King had asked the Methodist minister to go as his proxy.32

  King would come out against the war two years later, but in 1965 he felt such an act was politically undoable.

  “That’s not a known story,” Lawson told me in 2015. “King felt that he could not so identify himself with this public group of clergy from Europe and North America. So I agreed to do it.”

  What Lawson didn’t know was that Withers offered to give the FBI a copy of the minister’s written report of the trip. Though Lawson wrote the report for King, he offered in October 1965 to mail a copy to Withers after the photographer contacted him asking about possible war demonstrations in Memphis. “He said he had written a report regarding his June, 1965, trip to Vietnam and would mail a copy to Withers (who in turn will make it available to this office),” Lawrence wrote in the October 22, 1965, memo.33

  Fifty years later, Lawson said he had no memory of Withers asking about the report; he believes the only copy went to King.

  Increasingly, Lawson’s opposition to the war became a focal point for the FBI in Memphis. And as black leaders in Memphis pushed Lawson away, he found camaraderie among white activists who shared his views on Vietnam.

  “If any Negroes play a leading part,” Lawrence paraphrased Withers in a 1966 report on Memphis’s emerging peace movement, “Rev. James Morris Lawson, Jr., Pastor, Centenary Methodist Church, will probably be among them.”34

  *1 Lawrence’s characterization that Withers “posed” as a newsman is illuminating. Covering the march may have been the agent’s idea, yet Withers often pulled double duty, shooting for the FBI and a news organization to maximize sales. This event appears no different. A photo of a marching James Lawson getting heckled appeared on the April 30, 1966, front page of the Tri-State Defender. Uncredited, the photo almost certainly is Withers’s.

  *2 The author counted forty-seven separate reports containing information Withers passed to the FBI involving Lawson’s personal and public life. The actual number may be higher. Though Lawson signed a privacy waiver authorizing the FBI to release his file to the author as part of the Withers settlement
, the clergyman’s file is one of several the government failed to produce. The author is working to reconcile the matter.

  *3 Jim also characterized the Smiths as unpaid sources rather than high-level informants.

  *4 The World, the black weekly newspaper in Birmingham, opined at the height of the movement there that direct action was “both wasteful and worthless.” Conversely, King argued the greatest obstacle to civil rights wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council but “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

  *5 The report is one of several documents released in the settlement that provide a direct peek inside Withers’s informant file, detailing his role as an FBI “listening post” in the black community. Though records in Withers’s informant file weren’t subject to the settlement, this one was released because Lawrence copied it to a case file titled “Racial Situation in Tennessee.” Similar reports, including a form FD-209 discussed in chapter 15, are critical in understanding Withers’s value to the FBI, not just as a photographer but as a prolific intelligence gatherer.

  *6 Lawson said he doubted the FBI would have gotten far had it tried to undermine his ministry. “The congregation received me with unanimity of spirit and compassion and love, and adopted my family as such,” he said. “So there would not have been much chance to divide the congregation from me.”

  19.

  THE WAR IN MEMPHIS:

  DISRUPTING THE PEACE MOVEMENT