A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  “Ernest always had the pictures,” Cabbage said with a slight scowl as Smith nodded. “Where was he getting the finances to supply himself with so much film?”

  * * *

  —

  THE FBI OPENED its thick file on Coby Vernon Smith on November 29, 1966, as agent Lawrence explored perceived communist influences on local campuses. Smith was twenty then, a student at Southwestern, where he’d penned a “bitter” article in the school newspaper on racial bias. In a memo styled “COMINFIL of Southern Student Organizing Committee,” Lawrence said Smith had “divorced” himself from the moderate NAACP and had become active in the militant SSOC. The agent began seeking regular updates on Smith the following spring as the activist became involved in Memphis’s blossoming peace movement. Again, Withers played a key role. The photographer learned Smith had temporarily dropped out of school and moved to New Orleans—he turned over Smith’s Louisiana contact information, including his address and phone number, details that would allow the FBI to monitor his comings and goings and to conduct warrantless searches of his phone calls if it so desired.*1 When Smith returned, Withers shot a series of identification photos, a close-up of Smith’s smiling face that fills the frame along with wider-angle shots depicting the activist in smoke-black shades at a peace rally—pictures that Lawrence shipped to the FBI’s New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington offices to help monitor his activities.3

  Withers assured the agent he would continue to assist that effort.

  “He stated that he would attempt to run into Smith or find some logical pretext under which to contact him and ascertain if possible his future plans, in view of this Bureau’s investigative interest in Smith,” Lawrence wrote.4

  That investigative interest grew as Smith began making provocative statements about Black Power. As Withers and other informers listened, Smith told an assemblage of peace activists at a downtown Memphis park that April that he’d like to form a Black Power group, perhaps a Memphis chapter of SNCC, that could work “hand in hand” with peace activists in opposing the war. By July, as tensions seethed in riot-torn Detroit and Newark, Smith reportedly announced he’d like “a good race riot” and vowed to “turn Memphis upside down,” Lawrence wrote.5

  Smith’s rhetoric mirrored that of Stokely Carmichael, the newly installed chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who oversaw a metamorphosis at SNCC. He moved to expel whites from the organization, and worked to shift the goals of the freedom struggle from equality and integration to self-sufficiency, pride, and political might—Black Power. His rhetoric inspired countless young African Americans like Smith who had tired of white supremacy and its many afflictions—police brutality, oppression, and poverty.

  Two developments collided in July 1967 that caused the FBI to zero in on the blossoming Black Power movement in Memphis: the destructive race riots that month (now often called the Detroit and Newark rebellions) and the return to Memphis of Charles Cabbage. Graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta, SNCC’s home base, Cabbage had met the group’s leaders there and been baptized in the Black Power calling. When he came back to Memphis, he and Smith became fast friends. As rumors spread that the pair planned to form a SNCC chapter in Memphis, the FBI’s antennas went up. Withers scoped out a two-story brick home in South Memphis where Smith was said to have opened a “Freedom House,” but reported to Lawrence it was vacant. When the FBI discovered it had no identification photos of Cabbage, the photographer searched his files for pictures of the activist from his days playing basketball.6

  Withers provided the FBI with plenty of photos over the next month. That August he handed Lawrence as many as thirty-one new pictures of Cabbage and Smith, several of them posed portraits he shot in his Beale Street studio.

  “When we first walked down Beale Street, Ernest called us over to his studio and took a picture of us then,” said Smith, who’d known Withers all his life as the photographer who’d shot his family portraits and graduation picture—whom he trusted implicitly. Withers evidently misrepresented his purpose. “Withers took these photos,” Lawrence wrote, “under the pretext that he was going to send them to Jet Magazine, a Negro publication, which was potentially interested in the story concerning Smith and Cabbage.”7

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS SNAPPED SEVERAL of these behind-the-scenes shots as public controversy enveloped Cabbage and Smith for the first time. On August 4, 1967, the Memphis Press-Scimitar’s celebrated investigative journalist Kay Pittman Black reported the two men had been hired by a federally funded War on Poverty program called MAP-South. Cabbage and Smith were believed to be “members or sympathizers” of SNCC, Black wrote. Rumor had it they advocated rioting. It didn’t help that they’d been hired by MAP-South chairman Rev. James Lawson, viewed dimly by the moderate NAACP and by that time under investigation by the FBI for five years. The story intensified as segregationist Sen. James Eastland and Republican congressman Dan Kuykendall pushed for official investigations. Cabbage and Smith were fired but rehired in a hearing weeks later when civil liberties attorney Lucius Burch, who represented the men free of charge, argued that their political affiliations were irrelevant. “If they are members of SNCC or the Ku Klux Klan either, this has nothing to do with their employment,” Burch said.8

  Available records don’t say how Kay Black broke the MAP-South story. But quite possibly the FBI had fed it to her. Black became a critical contact as the Bureau moved to break the Black Power movement in Memphis. As part of a COINTELPRO operation directed at “black nationalist hate groups,” the one-time beauty queen wrote stories at the FBI’s direction aimed at fracturing support for militant activists in the black community. She wrote a watershed piece in February 1969 under the headline, “Invaders vs. the Law—Box Score to Date,” detailing the criminal records of thirty-five members of the Invaders, including its executive secretary, Oree McKenzie, found guilty of assault with the intent to commit murder in the sniper-ambush wounding of MPD patrolman Robert James Waddell. The piece also featured Charles Ballard,*2 charged with murdering another militant, and Invaders “Prime Minister” Lance “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson, who had served three years for burglary in the mid-’60s. The action lacked the treachery of some of COINTELPRO’s dirty tricks—the FBI simply pointed Black to arrest records and public source material she could have found on her own—but it was a classic counterintelligence motif intended to publicly humiliate targets of an investigation. And it was just one of many such actions.9

  Black “advised that she will continue to write articles in an effort to discredit this Invader group at Memphis, Tennessee,” Lawrence’s new partner in internal subversion investigations, Howell S. Lowe, wrote to headquarters.10

  * * *

  —

  BLACK WAS JUST one of several contacts Lawrence maintained among Memphis’s white media. He spoke often with Clark Porteous, the pipe-smoking journalist who wrote for the Memphis Press-Scimitar over parts of five decades, and with Burt Ferguson, the white owner of WDIA, the venerable AM-band radio station that broadcast the blues and news to a massive black audience throughout the South, taking editorial positions occasionally at odds with the movement’s leaders.*3

  My own newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, apparently cooperated, too.11

  Following the March 28, 1968, violence that broke out in the back of a march Dr. King led through downtown Memphis, the Bureau disseminated a blind memo to “cooperative news media.” Intended to paint King as a hypocrite, it likened him to Judas, contending he’d led “lambs to slaughter,” then disappeared “when the violence broke out.” Though it’s never been definitively established, many believe the FBI influenced The Commercial Appeal’s editorial the next day, which condemned King, saying “his pose as a leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered.” A front-page story reported King had met with representatives of the Invaders, noting he stayed in an expensive “$29-a-day room at the Holiday Inn-Rivermont,” then one of the city’s premier hotel
s—a theme trumpeted in the FBI memo. The story failed to mention that police escorted King to the Rivermont because routes to other hotels were blocked by the unfolding melee.12

  The following winter, the FBI’s Memphis office sought headquarters approval to approach a reporter at The Commercial Appeal “who has always been cooperative,” seeking to “leak information of a derogatory nature regarding the Invaders and other black nationalist militants.”13

  These were dubious undertakings. Journalistically, the ethics of becoming a mouthpiece for government propaganda is contorted at best. Still, few journalists are going to turn away an FBI agent offering information. Seth Rosenfeld writes in Subversives, his classic study of FBI surveillance of campus activists at UC-Berkeley, that agents there often received information “from their special contacts in the media,” including an employee at the San Francisco Examiner who delivered unpublished photos from a rally. Reporters need sources to survive. Pleasing a source now can lead to more stories later. It’s doubtful, too, that reporters like Kay Black viewed these stories in the same way the FBI did. Bureau memos state an intent to “discredit” and disrupt. Yet the motives of Black and her cohorts, biased as they often were by a mindset favoring law and order over protest and equal rights, included a sense of fairness. They universally reached out to news subjects, incorporating their comments when available to balance their stories. Yet, in choosing to cooperate, in many ways they were not unlike their counterpart in the black press, Ernest Withers.14

  Still, there are critical differences. First and foremost, Withers was paid. There is no record to date that shows any other Memphis journalist received money from the FBI. In fact, among scores of confidential sources the FBI maintained in the media, in academia, among student activist groups, civil rights organizations, political parties, private business, local government, and labor organizations, only five informants in this period were paid to report on the city’s racial turmoil. And one was Withers.15

  The tensions of 1967 brought Withers deeper into the FBI fold. Following the photographer’s 1961–1963 trial as a Potential Confidential Informant, Lawrence had kept Withers parked in the status of a Confidential Source. But the riots in Newark and Detroit the summer of 1967 changed that. Under pressure from Lyndon Johnson’s White House to ramp up intelligence in urban areas, the Bureau created the Ghetto Informant Program. It comprised as many as 7,400 informers, including so-called listening posts—many of them white shopkeepers doing business in black communities—who kept alert for unrest and possible rioting. The program offered Withers more assignments, more opportunity for pay, and a moniker, ME 338-R.*4 He remained in this status as a racial informant until 1971. By then, the photographer’s assignments had shifted to reporting nearly exclusively on fringe groups, including a small chapter of the Black Panthers, and a resurgent Communist Party whose youth organization, the Young Workers Liberation League, became active in Memphis. Accommodating his redesignation as an extremist informant, the FBI revised the suffix of his code number, repackaging him as ME 338-E—“E” for extremist.16

  * * *

  —

  THERE’S NO EVIDENCE, either, that any other Memphis newsperson shared such a volume of information with the FBI or acted as a directed informant as did Withers, whose work veered far outside mere journalism. To the contrary, there is evidence other black journalists were courted as potential informants by the FBI—and they resisted.

  Earl Caldwell, the pioneering black New York Times reporter, is one writer who refused to bend. Caldwell was at the Lorraine when King was shot there in 1968. He was assigned the following year to cover the Black Panthers in Oakland. Being black opened special access that enabled him to write critical articles about the Panthers’ tactics and plans—plans that intrigued not only the public but the FBI, which unsuccessfully pressured him to become an informant. When Caldwell resisted a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury, a group of seventy black journalists took out a full-page ad in the New York Amsterdam News titled “Message to the Black Community.”

  “We will not be used as spies, informants or undercover agents by anybody. We will protect our confidential sources, using every means at our disposal. We strongly object to attempts by law enforcement agencies to exploit our blackness,” read the ad signed by some of the big names in the business, including broadcasters Ed Bradley and St. Clair Bourne, Ebony’s Phyllis Gardner, and novelist Louise Meriwether.17

  “There was tremendous pressure on all kinds of people to be a participant in that,” Caldwell said years later. “How is it that Ernest got trapped up in something that we all said we will not do this? This is a line we will not cross. How did Ernest get on the other side of that?”18

  *1 As early as November 20, 1967, records show, Lawrence began tapping his sources at Southern Bell to check phone records connected to members of the Invaders.

  *2 The charge against Ballard was later dismissed.

  *3 Porteous had a long relationship with Lawrence possibly stretching to 1951, when the reporter appeared before Sen. James Eastland’s communism hearings in Memphis. Porteous testified that he was told that as many as seven hundred copies of the Daily Worker were coming into Memphis a day. In 1967, Porteous arranged for Lawrence to receive Press-Scimitar photos of war protestor Thomas Van Dyke Potts, and told the agent of a televised debate in which James Lawson expressed sympathies for communism. The reporter also passed on leads during the 1968 sanitation strike.

  *4 Withers first appears as ME 338-R in a report dated December 16, 1967.

  22.

  “IS ANYONE LOOKING FOR US?”:

  THE RISKS OF WORKING UNDERCOVER

  CHARLES CABBAGE SEETHED WITH URGENCY.

  The young militant appeared unusually hostile as he approached Withers on this frosty winter day in 1968. At Cab’s side was Clifford Louis Taylor, twenty-one, his “lieutenant,” a rough, street-savvy associate from Memphis’s Riverside neighborhood. Both had been subjects in a series of confidential reports the photographer funneled to Lawrence as the special agent investigated the fledgling Invaders.

  “Has anyone been here looking for us?” Cabbage demanded.

  “I mean,” he prompted, “someone such as the FBI?”

  Withers was shaken. But he kept his composure. No, he lied. No special agents had been to see him. No one was asking him questions.

  As he ad-libbed, Withers, dubbed ME 338-R just weeks earlier, sensed the depth of his predicament. His secret was about to unravel. He quickly contacted Lawrence, who recorded the incident in a January 5, 1968, report.

  “Informant was warned that they may be on to him,” the agent wrote. To counteract their suspicions, he devised a plan: he would arrange a “fake” FBI interview with Withers. Lawrence believed Cabbage and Taylor were agitated by a recent round of interviews he and agent O. V. Johnson had conducted in a campaign to intimidate the militants, possibly even recruit some as informants. To get the heat off Withers, Lawrence determined the photographer must appear as just another target. At the agent’s instruction, Withers told Cabbage and Taylor the FBI learned he’d taken recent photos of Black Power advocates and wanted copies, but he’d told the agents he had none—he’d sent the negatives to Jet and similar publications and hadn’t kept any.

  “Cabbage and Taylor seemed to ‘fall’ for this story,” Lawrence wrote. “In other words, he [Withers] became one of the ‘fraternity’ of FBI interviewees, and it is felt as a result a closer fraternal relationship will develop.” It did. Cabbage opened up. He talked manically of the tall “cracker”—Lawrence—who’d been asking about him. “Cabbage was particularly worried,” the agent wrote after debriefing Withers, “feeling that the FBI is about to take some legal action against him and his followers, and apparently fears that he may be arrested on some unknown charge in the near future.”1

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS WAS SHAKEN. But it wouldn’t be the only time. Repeatedly, his secret came perilously close to dis
closure. In time, he would be called to testify behind closed doors to a congressional committee, narrowly escaping detection. But danger came much earlier. Withers narrowly avoided detection on the night of King’s April 4, 1968, assassination. A visitor overheard him talking on the phone at his Beale Street studio. Was it the FBI? Or the police? He couldn’t tell. Fifteen months later—another close call. A militant accused him of leaking a photo to the FBI. The picture identified a fugitive Invader wanted for a double shooting. Withers stood his ground. He dismissed the accusation as a “fishing” expedition.2

  Withers was nearly found out again in 1970 when two news photographers confronted him. They “accused the informant of furnishing photographs of black leaders, organizations, demonstrations, and meetings of Negro citizens to the FBI,” agent Howell S. Lowe wrote that April. The photographers, Sam Melhorn of The Commercial Appeal and Jack Cantrell of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, confronted Withers following a hearing on police brutality at the Shelby County Courthouse. In a move evidently motivated by professional jealousy, Melhorn told Withers that he and other photographers at the two daily newspapers “had been ordered not to give out any photographs to any [police] agency.”3

  Asked about the incident forty-six years later, Cantrell said he didn’t recall it but remembers unspecific rumors among press photographers that Withers “was working for the FBI on the side.” Though Lowe’s memo suggests that other news photographers might have been doing the same, Cantrell said, “I didn’t do it and I don’t know anyone else who did.”4

  * * *

  —

  THE REVELATION THAT some suspected Withers is intriguing. Following publication of my initial stories in 2010, a Withers associate argued his relationship with the FBI “was not a secret,” citing a passage in the photographer’s 2000 book of civil rights–era photos, Pictures Tell The Story, that mentions agent Lawrence. I’d done an immense amount of research prior to publication, but I flat missed this. The development stung. It grieved me—until I checked deeper.