A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  The Memphis Division spelled out its indifference toward a formal COINTELPRO program in June 1968, informing headquarters that, when it came to the New Left, “it is felt that this group is vulnerable (already) through the rigid enforcement of local, State and Federal laws” such as “parking, traffic, narcotics, and with increasing frequency the Selective Service laws.” In other words, left-wing activists had to keep on their toes: the authorities in Memphis had them in a virtual trap.27

  And they were working particularly hard laying traps for the city’s leading resident Communist, Kathy Hunninen.

  *1 Available records don’t indicate if the offer was consummated. Former Logos contributor Brian Murphree told the author in 2016 that his memory had faded through the mists of fifty years. Murphree’s memory is unequivocal, however, regarding the hostility he and colleagues faced. On May 2, 1966, a mob surrounded the Logos staff as it handed out literature on Memphis State’s campus. “I thought we were going to be lynched,” he recalled. Several friends were roughed up. He recalls, too, a friend on the police force saying he’d been advised to disassociate from Murphree because he was under investigation for his politics. “It seemed like a monumental waste of police time,” he said.

  *2 Lawrence kept a joint file on Joella Morrison and her husband, Jean. The agent’s attention on the couple ran deep. He wrote in a June 16, 1967, report, for example, that an informant had reported that Joella “surreptitiously” used the mimeograph machine at Memphis State’s Modern Language Department to produce leaflets for a peace rally.

  *3 Jennings told the author in a 2016 interview he’d served five-and-a-half years of a six-year commitment when he realized a “moral imperative” to quit. After his arrest in Memphis he spent several weeks at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, part of that time served in the stockade, before his conscientious objector application was approved and he was discharged.

  *4 Political boss E. H. Crump often planted informants inside rallies held by African American political activist Rev. G. A. Long. A Crump informant reported in 1940 that orations by Long and another black pastor “might cause trouble” as they “preached race equality without any reservations.” District Attorney General Will Gerber, Crump’s hand-picked prosecutor, employed a black woman, who operated under the code name “R,” to infiltrate rallies at Long’s Beale Street Church. By 1963, MPD had an intelligence branch, a forerunner of the Domestic Intelligence Unit, investigating a variety of organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality and the Nation of Islam.

  *5 A May 22, 1968, memo underscores the FBI’s “excellent relationship” with MPD. The memo notes the disruptive financial burden the FBI had placed on black militants by informing MPD about such picayune matters as activists’ failure to keep vehicle inspection stickers current or to properly register cars.

  *6 Townsend served thirty-three years in the MPD, rising to the rank of captain before his retirement and death in 2003.

  *7 Part of the inactivity involves the fact that Memphis was the “office of origin” for just one clear-cut New Left organization, the Southern Student Organizing Committee based in Nashville, within the Memphis Division’s jurisdiction. On March 6, 1969, Memphis proposed that the FBI exploit a developing rift between the SSOC and the Northern-based Students for a Democratic Society by anonymously mailing copies of an article in an SDS publication critical of the SSOC. Although headquarters applauded the effort “to confuse and disrupt” the New Left, it rejected the proposal as unnecessary after members of an SDS convention in Austin, Texas, voted to break ties with the SSOC.

  *8 A January 2, 1969, memo by Lawrence released outside the settlement lists Withers’s informant file number, indicating his involvement. The memo says the unnamed informant offered to speak with Rev. J. C. Atkins, whose church housed the Head Start program. The informant told Lawrence that Lt. Wendell Robinson—Withers’s old friend at the Memphis Police Department—was a member of the church. As for Ingram, she had no memory nearly fifty years later of how her employment ended at Head Start.

  20.

  THE COMMUNIST RESURGENCE:

  DIRTY TRICKS, FEAR, AND HARASSMENT

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A PERFECT DAY for a wedding. Sunlight danced in dappled dashes along the oaks and poplars hugging the Mississippi’s east bank, a great green bluff of groomed lawn and virgin forest that sloped gently downward before falling hard into the coffee-brown water below. Kathy Roop Hunninen recalls it well: May 21, 1971. The young bride, in a blue and gold sari, and carrying a simple bouquet of daisies, beamed. Her groom, goateed guitar picker John Hunninen, smiled widely. Together, they stood near the bluff’s crest, waiting for their friend Ernest Withers to snap their picture.

  Kathy first met the photographer in 1968. An outspoken college student, she got to know him as she marched for a myriad of causes: in support of the sanitation workers, against school segregation, and, increasingly, in the effort to end the war in Vietnam. It was strictly professional at first. But over time, despite divisions of race and class, they got to know and like each other. The older Withers socialized with Kathy and her friends, an array of peace activists and students affiliated with Memphis’s emerging New Left. He shot pictures to accompany articles they arranged in left-wing publications, went to get-togethers in their homes, and even attended the wedding here at the First Unitarian Church along the Mississippi River south of downtown, where Kathy Roop became Kathy Hunninen, proudly hiring the gregarious newsman to shoot her wedding album.

  Unbeknownst to her, Withers also shot as many as fifty-two photos of her at rallies and meetings, covertly passing them to the FBI between 1968 and 1973 along with a variety of reports on her political activities as agents investigated her as a suspected Communist and a security threat.1

  The investigation would come back to haunt her years later—and cost her a career.

  Hunninen never suspected Withers, certainly not on that sunny afternoon when he aimed his camera at her wedding party. In his viewfinder, the photographer eyed Kathy and her friends—conscientious objector Allan Fuson, squinting behind dark sunglasses; Michael Welch, a Southern Student Organizing Committee leader, looking glum and out of place in a red tie; Michael Honey, now a professor at the University of Washington Tacoma who has authored some of Memphis’s quintessential histories, including Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign. Back in 1971, Honey worked as the regional director of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, a civil liberties advocacy group formed in 1960 to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Withers stamped each picture, shot in color, with his famous Beale Street imprint, “Ernest C. Withers Photographer.”

  These accomplished activists and circle of friends had a hand in raising some of Memphis’s venerable institutions, organizing an early predecessor of the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center and providing early support to WEVL, the city’s long-running nonprofit community radio station. The story of the FBI’s interest in them is the story of overreach that colored so many of the agency’s investigations into the peace and civil rights movements.

  That interest peaked as members of the group spoke out against the war and, more critically, as they developed ties to the Communist Party. In 1970, they formed a chapter of the Communist Party’s youth organization, the Young Workers Liberation League. The squeaky-clean group focused on human rights, poverty, and labor issues. But the return to Memphis of the Communist Party, which Bill Lawrence had worked so hard to eviscerate in the 1950s, drew special attention from the FBI—and from Withers. As they organized, Withers tossed the FBI nuggets of intelligence:

  The group was bringing an out-of-town activist to Memphis to drum up support for the jailed radical Angela Davis, he said; they were meeting with suspected communist sympathizer Anne Braden. The photographer said Hunninen had secured financial donations for her leftist causes from an executive at Stax Records; that she was trying to orga
nize workers at a local factory; that she and Fuson were attending a memorial for King; that Fuson was hosting activists who’d traveled to communist East Germany.2

  Among his more invasive tips, Withers passed on a phone number that allowed the FBI to conduct what appears to be a warrantless search of Fuson’s and Welch’s long-distance phone charges. It happened on December 4, 1969: Withers gave Lawrence an unlisted telephone number used by roommates Welch and Fuson.*1 Lawrence then reached his contact at Southern Bell Telephone Company. She advised that Welch had opened the account the previous July. She also provided details on Welch’s employment. The phone company source “was requested to search any long-distance toll charges made from or to # 278-2356, and she advised she would do so and contact this office as soon as this information is available,” Lawrence wrote. His report made no reference to any warrants or court orders allowing legal collection of personal information.3

  The action described in Lawrence’s report was a common Cold War investigative technique. Though wiretapping had been illegal since 1934, Hoover’s FBI tapped phones of suspected foreign spies during World War II and later expanded the practice to an ever-growing range of “subversives,” mainly American citizens. Collection of phone records was used to identify a target’s associates and strategies. “That was their concern: What were their plans?” said political surveillance historian Athan Theoharis. The data wasn’t used directly in criminal prosecution, but could always be “laundered,” Theoharis said—used as a lead to obtain incriminating information through other, legal means.4

  “Ernest Withers was my friend,” Fuson said years later when confronted with the long-concealed FBI records. “He came over sometimes. We thought he was part of the movement. And I had no idea he wasn’t.”5

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS ALSO PLAYED a shadowy role in an evident FBI bid to get one of the young activists, Mark Allen, fired from his job as a truck driver. It happened in 1972, months after Allen moved to Memphis from Michigan. Many people around Memphis’s Cooper-Young neighborhood know Allen today as a gifted guitarist whose mesmerizing performances feature flamenco and Latin music. Back in the early ’70s, he helped run a nonprofit bookstore in Midtown and served as president of the fledgling WEVL, the commercial-free radio station that still operates in Memphis. But it was his affiliation with another organization, the Young Workers Liberation League, that attracted the attention of the FBI—and Withers.

  Withers “advised that as instructed he contacted the Chandler Wrecking Company, 1223 North Watkins, and obtained the information that Mark Allen is employed by the Chandler Wrecking Company as a driver of a truck,” an agent wrote in a July 3, 1972, report. The item, part of a larger roundup on subversive activity reported by Withers, concluded that “the only information contained” in the employer’s file on Allen was his address—a Midtown duplex—and his Social Security number, which the photographer copied and relayed to the FBI.6

  Later, two FBI agents showed up—Allen heard about it from a crane operator who was taking a break in Chandler’s offices at the time.

  “He said the FBI had come there to the office to tell them about me,” Allen said years later. But company co-owner Jimmy Chandler shrugged them off. “They came and told us you were a Communist,” Allen recalls his boss telling him with a laugh. “He said, ‘I knew you were a Yankee. Yankee, Communist. What’s the difference?’ So that trick didn’t work.” But “one trick did work,” Allen said. The FBI often paid home visits to young men and women who expressed interest in the Young Workers Liberation League: “They would stop coming. The FBI would tell them, ‘We’ve got enough to arrest. But we’re watching them to see who they get together with.’ They made it seem an arrest was imminent because we’re doing illegal things.”7

  The group knew they were being harassed by police and the FBI. But none of them knew Withers had a hand in it.

  “He was a jolly old guy,” said Hunninen, who often called the photographer when big stuff happened: the night her car was bombed by a suspected right-wing extremist; when she first tried her hand at labor organizing; when she heard the joyous news she’d been offered a scholarship to enter the University of Cincinnati’s doctoral program in environmental health.

  “I mean, he was friendly with everybody.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FBI’S ATTENTION on the group started well before the formation of the YWLL in 1970. It started with the war. As early as 1967, Withers informed Lawrence that YWLL organizer Michael Lane Welch, then under suspicion for his involvement in the radical Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), had helped organize a series of peace vigils in downtown Memphis.8

  It was through SSOC that Welch and Fuson met in Nashville.

  Raised a Quaker, Fuson grew up in the shadow of Nashville’s Fisk University, where his father, Nelson Fuson, a pacifist, chaired the Physics Department. The Nashville movement’s heroes often visited their home—future congressman John Lewis, James Bevel, and Bernard LaFayette. Diane Nash, who famously confronted Mayor Ben West on the courthouse steps making an impassioned plea to end segregation and who later coordinated the Freedom Rides, babysat Allan and his younger brother, Dan.9

  Drawn to the ideal of a classless society, young Allan immersed himself in the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. “I buzzed through these books, and a lot of what they were saying made sense. And it was like, ‘Jeez, why is that so bad?’ ” he later recalled.10

  When he moved to Memphis in 1969 to begin his alternative service as a conscientious objector, Fuson landed in the FBI-MPD gauntlet.

  On one end, there was Gene Townsend, the undercover MPD officer posing as a radical activist, who often attended YWLL meetings. Police learned Fuson roomed for a time with a young African American active in radical politics; that he solicited donations for his causes from Stax Records; that he read the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker and owned books by Party officials Gus Hall and Claude Lightfoot; that he supported the unsuccessful bid for a fourth term by liberal Tennessee senator Albert Gore, Sr., in 1970; that he and his white colleagues often worked on anti-poverty and civil rights concerns with a range of black activists, including the ultra-militant Black Panthers.11

  On the other end was Withers. The photographer helped keep the FBI abreast of Fuson’s political doings—he spotted the activist with Kathy Hunninen in 1970 at an MLK memorial rally heavily attended by black radicals; he reported in 1972 that the pair planned to attend the Democratic National Convention in Miami. He reported on his personal life as well.12

  Withers told the FBI in 1973 that Mike Honey had invited him over to Fuson’s Midtown apartment “to attend an international night party sponsored by the Memphis Chapter of the Communist Party,” according to a report by agent Howell S. Lowe, who’d assumed the shared duty of running the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations in Memphis following Lawrence’s 1970 retirement. Withers reported that an interracial group of twenty-one people attended the event to hear two Memphis women discuss their recent trip to East Germany for the World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin. They reportedly delivered a propaganda-laced lecture: crime is low in East Germany, food and housing are good, and trains run on time, they said. Withers said the meeting wrapped up near midnight, when Honey announced a meeting the following week “to study police brutality and political prisoners.”13

  Despite constant pressure, Fuson and his friends inside the small YWLL chapter gave the FBI-MPD alliance little to work with—they were simply a bunch of wonks and idealists. Lieutenant Arkin and his counterparts at the FBI failed to pick up any incriminating information—no drug use, no acts of subversion, no evidence of sabotage, no contacts with foreign powers or any plot to overthrow of the government. Nonetheless, they kept the pressure up—most of it focused on Kathy Roop Hunninen and her sharp critique of American imperialism and economic policy.

  * * *

  —

 
; WITHERS FIRST INFORMED on her in late November 1968 during her junior year at Southwestern, the elite Memphis liberal arts school now called Rhodes College. The photographer shot twenty pictures of the pigtailed activist at a welfare-rights rally and turned them over to Lawrence along with Hunninen’s license plate number.*2 The agent’s interest was high. Tapping informants, he had logged Hunninen’s attendance over the previous month at as many as four meetings of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical Northern-based group whose local chapter increasingly was teaming with black militants in anti-poverty and civil rights efforts.14

  The FBI’s interest in SDS in Memphis had peaked four days earlier.

  On November 25, 1968, a group of white SDS members teamed with leaders of the Black Power group, the Invaders, in a takeover of the administration building at LeMoyne-Owen College, the private, historically African American school where students were seeking lower tuition and cafeteria prices, better books, and black history courses. The activists allowed Withers into the building during the occupation, and he later told Lawrence that some of the Invaders were armed. He reported seeing a shotgun, a rifle with telescopic sights, a bayonet, a Derringer, and a second pistol inside the building. The agent recorded that Withers told him the Invaders “had hoped to have a confrontation with the police,” yet the occupation ended peaceably. No charges were filed.15

  FBI reports on the incident make no mention of involvement by Hunninen either in the planning or actual occupation of the building.

  “I never was in SDS,” Hunninen said nearly fifty years later, characterizing her association with the group as a shared interest in ending the war. “The war was awful. All my friends were being drafted.”