WITHERS BEGAN TRACKING MEMPHIS’S NASCENT peace movement for the FBI as early as November 1965, nine months after President Lyndon Johnson began bombing North Vietnam. Rev. Jim Lawson stood at the core of that first tip.
That month the photographer told Lawrence of a debate on Vietnam policy held at historically black LeMoyne College. Picking up details through his African American network, Withers learned a tidbit “not generally known”—Lawson had arranged the event. It featured a controversial speaker, William Jeffries, a visiting Quaker peace activist. Essentially giving the FBI a seat inside a meeting that would have been hard for an agent to attend without standing out, Withers said Jeffries received support from two white professors at the school, but a third “took violent exception” to the pacifist’s statements.1
Over the next nine years, Withers passed on dozens of tips on the peace movement. More than two hundred photos he shot relating to the war landed in FBI files, many used to identify protestors and to build personal dossiers chronicling political views, activities, and associations. He reported army deserters, aided efforts to undermine employment or community standing, and relayed details allowing the FBI to conduct warrantless searches of phone records.
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IT’S NOT HARD to grasp Withers’s position. By the mid- to late-1960s, the World War II army veteran was heavily invested in the military. He had three sons in the service—one in the front lines in Vietnam. Specialist Fourth Class Clarence Earl “Billy” Withers, twenty-one, arrived in An Khe in March 1968. One of his first nights there, his camp came under mortar attack. Three men died. That night, Billy decided to “take things as they are and put myself in God’s hands,” he wrote his parents. The family rejoiced when he came home safe a year later.2
But Withers’s motives extended far beyond the military. They ran deep into Memphis politics and his shared interests with the city’s conservative leaders. In 1966, the photographer ran for public office. At first, he considered a bid for county constable. But he ran for a seat on the eleven-member Shelby County Court, the taxing and policy-making board. White support was essential. Blacks comprised only a third of the county’s voters. Running ads that depicted the smiling photographer, an American flag, and a slogan—“A man willing to serve”—Withers received endorsements from the Tri-State Defender and the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the white-controlled afternoon daily paper. He also won endorsements from the conservative Lincoln League and the progressive Unity League, whose leader, O. Z. Evers, was the subject of twenty-two separate tips Withers relayed to the FBI.3
“Ernest Withers is an excellent sample of Memphis’ fine Negro community…good-natured, reasonable, hard-working,” the Press-Scimitar opined days before the election. “It is people like Withers in his race and their counterparts among white people who have provided the base for Memphis’ progress—with good will—in racial matters.”4
Withers came close, but lost in a crowded field. In a demonstration of Memphis’s changing racial climate, another African American won a seat on the County Court’s 2nd District—NAACP leader Jesse Turner.5
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WITHERS’S BID FOR office did, however, elevate his profile, and his value to the FBI along with it. As white war protestors visited his Beale Street studio to purchase pictures he’d taken at marches and rallies, they confided in the trusted news photographer.
A group of pacifist students turned to Withers for help in May 1966 when conservatives pushed to purge a controversial antiwar newsletter from the Memphis State campus. The students, writers for a mimeographed newssheet named Logos—Greek for logic—faced vitriolic opposition and physical confrontations. When they explained their troubles—they’d lost their mailing address, for one—Withers offered to let the news organ receive its mail at his Beale Street studio.*1 In turn, he told Lawrence that two Logos writers had ties to the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a suspected communist front.6
Hanging around at downtown peace vigils in 1967, Withers grew friendly with two outspoken Memphis State professors who were pressured to leave the school that spring. One, Jean Antoine Morrison, had been a focal point of a series of updates Withers passed to Lawrence. The silent vigils produced the perfect cover for the affable newsman. Holding placards, protestors stood for hours in front of popular businesses like Goldsmith’s Department Store, giving the chatty Withers ample opportunity to pick up bits of intelligence. He told Lawrence he was building “good rapport” with the left-leaning Morrison, reporting that the professor of philosophy and German language had taken a camera to one rally in hopes of producing “propaganda” photographs of hecklers and aggressive policemen. Morrison planned more vigils that summer, Withers said.7
How much of Withers’s intel made it to Morrison’s bosses at Memphis State is hard to say. But Lawrence routinely shared such information with the school. When professor John Dolphin Bass called MPD in 1966 for a parade permit to hold the city’s first big demonstration against the war, for example, an officer called Lawrence, who, in turn, alerted military intelligence and Edward Donald McDaniel, Dean of Men at Memphis State. By the end of the spring 1967 term, Bass and Morrison were gone.8
“Just suddenly—boom!—he was fired,” recalled Morrison’s widow, Joella. The official letter of dismissal cited smoking in class, failure to attend commencement, tardiness, and other petty offenses. But “it was just an excuse,” she said. “A lot of it had to deal with Vietnam. I’m sure it was an embarrassment to them.” It happened so quickly, she said, graduate students working with Morrison saw thesis projects halted—they had to start over. “That was the most scurrilous thing they did,” she said.9
Withers relayed reports on another, older war protestor, Thomas Van Dyke Potts, forty-nine. A decorated World War II bomber pilot and son of an affluent Memphis cotton linter, Potts had briefly joined the Communist Party in California, where he was a labor organizer, before returning to Memphis and teaming with Reverend Lawson in 1967 in a much-publicized “fast for peace.” He came under intense scrutiny as he helped lead the vigils downtown. Tapping his stable of sources, Lawrence maintained files on Potts; his wife, Haleen; his church, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Memphis; and his causes, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam and the National Students Strike for Peace—classifying all as potential security threats.10
Withers made significant contributions. The news photographer told Lawrence that Potts had “argued vehemently” with a group of Marines at one vigil; that he’d complained bitterly of a pro-war editorial run on WDIA, the popular African American radio station. Potts expressed anger that Bert Ferguson, the station’s white owner—and one of Lawrence’s many media contacts—had “bitterly denounced” Dr. King’s stance against the war.11
Inviting Withers to a coffee discussion, Potts told him he would take his antiwar message directly to the black community: the next peace vigil would be held in Handy Park on Beale Street, in the heart of the black business district—details the photographer passed to Lawrence. On another occasion, Withers called the agent at home after learning Potts was to appear in a WDIA debate on the war. The agent’s reports typically were sterile, yet this one conveyed a controlled sense of outrage: How could popular radio personality Nat D. Williams put ex-Communist Potts on the air? In response, Withers vowed to find out. By the summer, Potts, too, had left town.12
“Memphis was a very scary place. To me, you could feel violence in the air,” said Joella Morrison, also a target of FBI inquiry along with her professor husband.*2 The Morrisons and their five children moved so quickly they left their dog with another famous Memphis photographer, William Eggleston, a family friend. “It was so superficially clean. The garbage strike was to me like a metaphor for all of that. You weren’t allowed to put your garbage out in front of your house in Memphis. The poor garbage guys had to go get tubs in your backyard, sometimes 200 feet, put the garbage in the tubs and carry it back out to the truck to make it look like Memphis w
as so clean and perfect. And underneath all of that it was seething.”13
Withers had a clear role in expelling another activist from Memphis, William Jennings, a Kentucky native with flowing red hair and a fuzzy beard who deserted his Indiana-based Army Reserve unit in early 1969 as his opinion of the war soured.*3 Then twenty-six, he moved to the Bluff City with his parents and became active in the Draft Resistance Union of Memphis, which schooled young men on ways to avoid military conscription. Jennings was arrested on a sticky August day after attending a DRUM rally at the First National Bank plaza at Madison and Third. He unwittingly walked into a police gauntlet. That was his first mistake. Surrounding the thirty-five or so protestors were an array of plainclothes agents of the FBI and MPD, as well as several informers, including Withers. Jennings’s second mistake involved chatting with the personable photographer. According to Lawrence’s report, he fingered Jennings as a deserter “based on a composite information furnished by” Withers and two others.14
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PEACE ACTIVISTS AND civil rights workers had more reason to be paranoid. Memphis was wired for dissenters in the late 1960s. The city had a long history of spying on political dissidents, particularly African Americans, but a series of factors converged in 1967 to make Memphis especially inhospitable.*4 Following massive urban rioting in Los Angeles, Newark, and Detroit, President Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, recommended that police departments develop intelligence units “to gather, evaluate, analyze, and disseminate information on potential as well as actual civil disorders.” When the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration extended funding, a nationwide conglomerate of local “red squads,” including MPD’s newly founded Domestic Intelligence Unit, blossomed. Abuse soon followed.15
In Memphis, the effort involved as many as fifteen officers and undercover agents. Benefiting from technical assistance from the FBI’s Lawrence, MPD’s Domestic Intelligence Unit assembled dossiers on hundreds of individuals and groups ranging from black nationalists like the Black Panthers and the homegrown Invaders to mainstream organizations including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Memphis Labor Council, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Memphis and Shelby County Human Relations Commission, the National Council of Churches, the Mayor’s Council on Youth Opportunity, and the Memphis Ecumenical Children’s Association. Before the unit finally disbanded in the mid-1970s, it operated on a near-million-dollar annual budget (equivalent to roughly $4.2 million in 2018) and shelled out $10,000 a year to informers.16
Top brass denied it, yet evidence indicated MPD made warrantless searches of U.S. mail, gathered personal details such as political affiliations and even sexual preferences, and routinely accessed bank, telephone, student, and credit agency records.17
The full story would never be known. As lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union rushed to federal court in 1976 to obtain subpoenas after learning of the operation, Mayor Wyeth Chandler ordered all files burned. Nonetheless, U.S. District Court judge Robert McRae signed a landmark consent decree two years later ordering MPD to no longer “engage in political intelligence.” The decree forbade any electronic or covert surveillance, the keeping of files, or “any law enforcement activities which interfere with any person’s rights protected by the First Amendment.”18
It was tough and it was stinging, but the order completely overlooked MPD’s silent partner in this great, clandestine undertaking—the FBI.
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THE MEMPHIS PUBLIC first learned of MPD’s political spying with news of that great file burning, but details of Withers’s role have remained hidden—until now. Those details emerge when examining the operation’s inner workings: MPD and the FBI worked in close collaboration, routinely sharing information each picked up from their intelligence networks.
“We were swapping information,” said Lt. Eli Arkin, the dashing commanding officer of MPD’s intelligence unit, who often socialized with the Bureau agents.*5 For years after Lawrence retired in 1970, Arkin maintained close ties to the federal agency, lunching with the agent’s successors and becoming a Saturday-night regular on the FBI’s recreational bowling squad, “The Alley Cats.”19
Those relationships buttressed the FBI-MPD information exchange, a large share of which focused on groups protesting the Vietnam War.
On its end, MPD deployed a young police recruit named Byron “Gene” Townsend, an army veteran who served in Vietnam before joining the force in 1969. He spent the next five years undercover, working from the inside of the peace movement, posing as a campus radical. With flowing, light-brown hair and a thick “hippie” mustache, Townsend—secretly coded in MPD files as “Agent 503”—infiltrated the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the Young Workers Liberation League, and other groups at Memphis State. Meeting in deserted parking lots under cover of night with MPD supervisors who paid him in cash, Townsend passed a steady flow of details to the police and, consequently, to the FBI.20
“It broke my heart that he lied to me all that time,” Vietnam Vets leader Eric “Rick” Carter told a reporter in 1976 when Townsend*6—his ex-roommate and best friend—finally blew his cover.21
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LAWRENCE KEPT VIGILANT watch on the New Left, but he wasn’t big on COINTELPRO dirty tricks or disruption—not officially, anyway. The files of the Memphis Division’s New Left counterintelligence program reveal just thirteen serials. Most constituted quarterly reports listing no activity. In fact, Memphis sought headquarters approval of just one serious disruption proposal.*7 Compare this to the overall output—nationwide, FBI field offices submitted 381 separate proposals to disrupt the New Left between October 28, 1968, and April 27, 1971—and COINTELPRO seemed all but nonexistent in Memphis.22
In reality, however, disruption tactics were much more common in Memphis.
Although COINTELPRO was a clearly defined program requiring headquarters’ approval before field agents could take action, Memphis operated an alternative program that, with little oversight, likely produced many of the same effects. Under the so-called “interview program,” Lawrence and a second agent—typically, his longtime partner, Hugh Kearney—pounded the pavement, knocking on doors and cornering targets. The dragnet was aimed squarely at Memphis’s growing Black Power movement. But it took aim, too, at members of the New Left and its associates—anyone with the potential of giving “aid and comfort” to America’s internal enemies.
White businessman John T. Fisher received such a visit at his car dealership on Union Avenue. His wife, Jean, had marched in support of the sanitation workers. Fisher became close to Jim Lawson, and he was befriending some of the younger activists in the movement’s militant wings.
“The FBI, in my opinion, was being paranoid,” he said years later, describing how two agents in dark suits showed up to warn him off his militant associations. “Somehow my name came up in that process and they came to see me, which I thought was ridiculous.”23
Intimidation was a key component of the program. Lawrence learned this in the ’50s when busting up Memphis’s Communist Party and running William “Red” Davis and others out of town: there was power in face-to-face contact with a target and his associates. Few things irked an employer, a friend, or a colleague in conservative, Cold War–era Memphis like two dour agents in dark suits at the door asking questions about loyalty and un-Americanism. A stated purpose of the program was to “cast suspicion,” mirroring the advice of James O’Connor, the FBI’s New Left specialist in Philadelphia who urged agents to increase contacts with activists to raise “the paranoia endemic in these circles and to further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” It also served to discourage potential recruits from joining Memphis’s radical Left and, in turn, aided the FBI in its own recruitment of informants. The Memphis field office reported in May 1968 tha
t it had developed three informants in less than a year through the approach.24
One such would-be informant was Laura Ingram, a nineteen-year-old sophomore active in the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at Memphis State in 1968 when two agents paid her a visit at the communal “hippie house” where she lived near the medical district. She’d been on their radar for some time. Withers had shot identification photos of the blond activist in March 1968 as she protested in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers and again that August as she attended a rally at City Hall. Her interest in civil rights raised more suspicion. Ingram had been identified as part of a white-black student alliance working increasingly with the Invaders in social protest. Leading the two agents through Ingram’s door was Marrell McCollough, the undercover cop who had infiltrated the Invaders and would appear in a picture in Life magazine on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with Dr. King’s body after he was shot.25
“They wanted to talk to me because they felt like I wasn’t, you know, a serious, dangerous radical, that I was being misled,” Ingram recalled years later. The entourage seemed intent to make her an informer or “at the very least get me to stop” participating politically.26
Ingram’s case provides evidence, too, that Lawrence didn’t need a formal COINTELPRO program to disrupt Memphis’s left-wing activists. After efforts failed to win Ingram’s confidence, Lawrence evidently moved to disrupt her employment. Without ever submitting a formal COINTELPRO proposal, the agent seems to have hatched a plan to get Ingram fired in November 1968 from a part-time education job she held through a federal War on Poverty program, Operation Head Start. Lawrence spoke that month with an informant who said “he would not have any hesitation” talking about Ingram with a conservative South Memphis pastor whose church housed the Head Start program. It’s unclear if Lawrence went through with the plan, though records indicate the informant he spoke with almost certainly was Withers.*8
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