A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  Withers’s account appears as a single, six-sentence paragraph in the 192-page book. Specifically, it appears in the book’s forty-two-page essay on Withers’s life and civil rights photography written by F. Jack Hurley, former chairman of the history department at the University of Memphis. The context is the volatile 1968 sanitation strike.5

  Hurley quotes Withers as saying:

  I never tried to monitor what they were doing (too closely). I was always interested in their outside work but I tried not to know too much about the inside because I always had FBI agents looking over my shoulder and wanting to question me. I never tried to learn any high powered secrets. It would have just been trouble…I was solicited to assist the FBI by Bill Lawrence who was the FBI agent here. He was a nice guy but what he was doing was pampering me to catch whatever leaks I dropped, so I stayed out of meetings where real decisions were being made.

  That’s it. Nothing more. The reference to “pampering” seems to suggest Withers was paid. But it’s never confirmed here. The essay never explores the many questions raised in the quote: Was Withers saying he was an informant? Just what did he do? How long did he do it?

  Clearly, Withers’s confidential relationship with the FBI had suffered leaks over the years. But the contention it “wasn’t a secret” is simply counterintuitive. Perhaps it wasn’t the best-kept secret. Jim probably told more people than me. Over time, as the events of the ’60s fell into a safe distance, Withers may have talked to others, too. Maybe, he got comfortable. Many a crime, many an extramarital affair, has come to light, not because it wasn’t secret, but because the perpetrator eventually told someone.

  But when a person becomes an informant, the FBI offers a pledge of confidentiality. The purpose is secrecy. Lawrence said as much in his congressional testimony. He talked of protecting Withers, who wasn’t named, saying they took care to meet “under what we hoped were safe conditions.” Simply put, if Withers’s relationship with the FBI had been widely known, he couldn’t have been effective. And as 1967 morphed into 1968, and the volatile sanitation strike broke out, Lawrence needed Withers—he needed confidential informant ME 338-R—to be effective.6

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  PERHAPS WITHERS DID hold back at times—perhaps he avoided some “high-powered secrets,” as he said. Though Lawrence trusted Withers, reports indicate that trust might not have been absolute. In July 1968, for example, the agent fed Withers a red herring. At the request of MPD commanders who hoped to “divert” suspicions from undercover officer Marrell McCollough, Lawrence told Withers someone else had infiltrated the Invaders.

  “It was indicated to ME 338-R that Oree McKenzie was thought to be a PD informant,” Lawrence wrote. His report doesn’t say whether Withers was clued in to the disinformation or not. But clearly, the agent knew the gossipy photographer would broadcast it vigorously.7

  Nearly fifty years later, the scheme to put the snitch jacket on McKenzie, a militant activist who later became a Gospel-preaching pastor, seemed to still be working. “I think he was undercover,” Coby Smith said in 2010 over breakfast.8

  Though it’s unclear what Withers really knew about McKenzie, this much is certain: informing on the Invaders could be especially risky. Police reports tell how Invader “enforcers” stripped and beat a suspected informant in 1969 after he was seen speaking and laughing with three MPD patrolmen who addressed him by name. Operating out of a small office two blocks south of present-day FedExForum, the Invaders “reinstated” the misidentified snitch when an interrogation by the militants failed to produce sufficient evidence.9

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  BY EARLY 1968, Cabbage and Smith had formed the Black Organizing Project, or BOP. Modeled after the Black Panther Party’s “Ten-Point Program” demanding jobs, housing, and exemption from military service, BOP developed a platform seeking a black-run school board, black police to patrol African American neighborhoods, and economic independence. Though the group became popularly known as the Invaders, a name adopted from a popular sci-fi television show about extraterrestrials living here disguised as Earthlings as they prepared to launch an invasion, BOP served as an umbrella group with smaller Black Power–oriented “cells” located at Memphis State, downtown, and in individual neighborhoods and high schools. As Shirletta J. Kinchen notes in her study Black Power in the Bluff City, much of the Invaders phenomenon involved a fad. The city’s youth mimicked the hip style of men like Invaders lieutenant John B. Smith—smoke-black shades, an Afro hairstyle, and a military jacket with the name “Invaders” stitched across the back—while not necessarily committing to the discipline of the cause.10

  As Withers told the FBI at the height of the sanitation strike, although “many teenagers in Memphis have put the word ‘Invaders’ on backs of their jackets” they are not necessarily members but “do this more or less as a symbol of their self-professed affinity with Black Power.” Lawrence wrote, “On 5/22/68 ME 338-R (Ghetto) advised SA Lawrence that one can no longer distinguish legitimate Black Power advocates, such as the Black Organizing Project group in Memphis, by the dress of the average Negro male or female.”11

  In a similar manner, the photographer helped Lawrence and his cohorts understand that they were wrong about some individuals suspected of radicalism. As the agent would later tell Congress, he wanted “objective” information that could help separate true radicals from “dupes” and those “innocently involved.” Withers reported in March 1970, for example, that a young family man working in education “is not known to be active in any militant activities at the present time” and that one-time Invader Charles Harrington “is also no longer connected with any known militant organizations.” Instead, he drove a food truck.12

  But the thrust of his reports involved intel on the group’s doings and plans. He had the perfect access. Cabbage, Coby Smith, and John B. Smith often hung out on Beale Street, often in the Withers Photo Studio.13

  Withers knew, for instance, if the FBI needed to find LeMoyne student leaders James Elmore Phillips and Clinton Roy Jamerson, both Black Power ideologues, one haunt to check was the Pink Pussy Cat in Hyde Park. And if they needed Cab or John B., try the Log Cabin, a nightclub on South Parkway.14

  Though the men kept abreast of current events, as young adults they concerned themselves, too, with one of youth’s great distractions, partying. They often congregated at “The Crib,” John Smith’s South Memphis apartment. An Air Force veteran with “a John Wayne idea of American patriotism,” Smith’s view morphed, he says, when a white gas station attendant tried to cheat him out of money, and called him a racial slur. Then, the police came. “Nobody wants to listen to me. I’m a black man accusing a white man of taking my gas cap.” Smith was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.15

  His outlook darkened when, like Cabbage and Coby Smith (no relation), he became a target of Kay Black’s poison pen. She wrote in September 1967 that he drew two federal paychecks in apparent conflict with civil service rules, simultaneously working part-time as an anti-poverty worker who canvassed neighborhoods for MAP-South and full-time at the Memphis Defense Depot. Though in reality MAP-South was a private, nonprofit company that merely received federal money, the accusation stung. “It is a complete hatchet job,” Smith said.16

  Hundreds of Memphis youths eventually came to identify as Invaders, yet, as Smith would later recall, the group couldn’t muster more than ten to fifteen members until the 1968 sanitation strike raised their profile. Still, Lawrence kept a laser focus on them.17

  “Cabbage and his associates intimidated white professors and talked of getting guns,” Lawrence wrote that November after debriefing Withers. The subject: a BOP meeting at the LeMoyne campus. Another source told of a meeting at Owen College (LeMoyne and Owen merged the following year), where Cabbage reportedly told a gathering, “The black man must overthrow capitalism by any means necessary”—a quote loosely borrowed from one of his heroes, Malcolm X. Cab bragged of bringing feared radic
al Stokely Carmichael to town, Withers said.18

  As the FBI monitored Cabbage’s travels, Withers reported a trip the militant planned for Little Rock “to make some talks on black power.” In preparation, Lawrence shipped a photo of the activist to the FBI’s Little Rock office, along with a physical description—six-foot-two-and-a-half and one hundred sixty-five pounds—plus a description of his vehicle. Withers shot a flurry of photos, including one depicting the would-be revolutionary’s lighter side, hamming for the camera as he peered comically over the tops of his sunglasses.19

  Over the months, Withers opened a spigot of details—Cabbage distributed leaflets with instructions on making Molotov cocktails, he told Lawrence; he’s “romantically attached” to the secretary of a prominent lawyer; he drives a blue Mustang. Withers gave Lawrence the tag number—details shared with MPD’s Lieutenant Arkin. Cabbage later was pulled over and arrested on a trumped-up charge of suspicion of auto theft and improper registration. The photographer also relayed a series of phone numbers used by Cabbage; Lawrence ran them through his phone company sources.20

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  WITHERS ALSO CONTRIBUTED to Cabbage’s prosecution for draft evasion. Of all the counterintelligence operations aimed at the Black Power movement in Memphis, and there were many, this remains among the most troubling.

  Nine months before Cabbage was indicted, the then-twenty-three-year-old confided to the older Withers: he feared the draft. Withers, in turn, told Lawrence—Cabbage didn’t plan to return to school, and he faced losing his student deferment. The army wanted him. “He will refuse to go,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing the photographer. The agent jumped on it. He contacted the local Draft Board, sharing concerns with the board’s secretary, Eunice Holloway: Charles Cabbage is preaching Black Power on local college campuses. “This registrant has been under F.B.I. investigation for quite a while,” Holloway wrote in a report placed in Cabbage’s Selective Service file. “His actions are being closely watched by the F.B.I.”21

  Available records are unclear as to whether Lawrence contacted Holloway before an October 17, 1967, hearing when the board first rejected Cabbage’s bid for certification as a conscientious objector, voting instead to reclassify him as 1-A. But the record is crystal clear on this: the FBI’s interference poisoned the board’s final decision, inviting a federal appeals court’s eventual condemnation.

  Cabbage’s fate was sealed at a November 14 appeal hearing when the board again rejected his request for conscientious objector status. Lawrence had this meeting covered. He and two senior MPD intelligence officers staked out the passageways in the federal building that morning. They watched as Cabbage, wearing his trademark dark sunglasses, stepped off the elevator and ambled down the seventh-floor hallway to restate his case to Selective Service Board No. 83. A source described the drama inside the hearing: Cabbage argued most vehemently—the draft was discriminatory. “He said when laws are unjust it is the obligation of the people to oppose them by any necessary means and that the government has systematically opposed his people, the black people,” Lawrence later wrote, emphasizing that Cabbage “used the word ‘black’ ”—the newly adopted term in the freedom struggle—“not Negro.” Cabbage argued he should remain a civilian—an “organizer” for African Americans to reform draft laws.22

  At that moment in 1967 the view of the Vietnam War as unjust—particularly for African-Americans soldiers—was hardly a fringe opinion. King had fully come out against the war seven months earlier. Even before that, leaders like Stokely Carmichael railed against “American imperialism,” asking a troubling question: Why should blacks fight and die in a “white man’s war” when they were denied basic rights at home? The draft itself seemed patently unfair: an estimated two-thirds of eligible blacks were drafted, yet just a third of whites. In Memphis, Lawrence had observed the militant movement’s strenuous opposition to the war up close for more than seven months now. Withers had first told him about Coby Smith’s involvement in the peace vigils the previous spring. Just weeks before the appeal hearing, the photographer reported that Cabbage and two colleagues planned to drive 875 miles in a cramped Volkswagen to participate in the massive “Confront the Warmakers” march on the Pentagon.23

  Even absent Lawrence’s interference, Cabbage’s appeal may have failed. He’d refused for months to fill out the conscientious objector forms the board supplied, contending they were unconstitutional—they required affirmation of religious beliefs. But he was unpersuasive. Lacking legal representation and with just one witness—a fellow activist from his neighborhood—his presentation appeared loud and disorganized and, at least to the board of three whites and one black man, who worked as the head waiter at the elite Memphis Country Club, insubstantial. They again denied his request for C.O. status.24

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  CABBAGE FAILED TO report for military induction the following May. He was indicted in July, then convicted in April 1969 following a three-day federal trial. Judge Bailey Brown sentenced him to four and a half years. But the case was later overturned. Citing Lawrence’s “clearly prejudicial” report—which Cabbage never knew about and had no opportunity to rebut—the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati ruled in 1970 that the militant had been denied a fair hearing. In the meantime, the FBI kept up the pressure. It shadowed Cabbage, by then struggling with anxiety and depression, chronicling his slide into crime.25

  Cabbage is hiding, Withers said in July 1968 after the activist failed to report for military service. Over time, the photographer learned more: Cabbage is staying in a motel; now he might be in Atlanta; he’s getting advice from pacifist pastor James Lawson; he’s broke; he’s desperately raising money for his legal defense; he bums money; he’s become a “con artist”; a “gigolo”; a “pimp and a hustler.” His friends are army deserters. That fall, Withers said that Cabbage might have been involved in the burglary of Christian Methodist Episcopal Church headquarters.26

  Withers’s informing also had a direct impact on Cabbage’s placement on the Security Index. Under a heading labeled “Basis for recommendation on Security Index,” Lawrence’s first sentence in a March 1968 report reads, “Continuously from 7/5/67 to 3/15/68, ME 338-R (Ghetto) has advised that Cabbage has been the leader of a SNCC-oriented group in Memphis, Tennessee, and has by his admission made trips to consult with SNCC and black power leaders in Atlanta.”27

  For all his double dealing, Withers loaned Cabbage, his “dear friend,” ten dollars—the cash-strapped activist was headed to Washington to participate in the “Resurrection City” demonstrations there that summer. Withers went, too. He caught up with the young militant there, snapping a picture on the street showing Cabbage dressed in a stylish Nehru jacket, glancing downward, toward the sidewalk. He gave a copy to the FBI.28

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  AS CABBAGE FADED from the Invaders, another Black Power figurehead appeared. The rise of Lance “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson came in near-mystical fashion. An ex-convict and a street hustler, the gaunt, goateed Watson became the public face of the Invaders. Folk hero to some, villain to others, he stirred fear and awe in his Black Panther–inspired beret, dark turtleneck, and military jacket and his self-anointed title as prime minister of a group that, rhetorically at least, looked favorably toward the overthrow of the U.S. government. What he really believed is hard to say. By the mid-1970s, he’d changed his name to Suhkara Yahweh. He could be seen across the years dressed in flowing robes and open-toed sandals, and other outfits, making epic public statements, like the time he marched for two and a half hours across Memphis with a large cross strapped to his back or the time he ran for governor of Arkansas or when he sued Richard Nixon for “crimes against humanity,” or chained himself to railroad tracks or tossed his blood on the door of a Memphis abortion clinic.29

  Watson was an enigma. When he emerged from obscurity in the summer of 1968 as the leader of the Invaders, Withers tried to make se
nse of him. The two grew close. Over the next six years, Withers relayed dozens of tips about “Sweet Willie,” never stirring a hint of suspicion, it seemed.

  “That’s my daddy,” Yahweh would say decades later as he nodded toward a portrait of Withers hanging on his living room wall alongside other mementos. One, a glass case, contained a military-styled jacket with “Invaders” emblazoned on the back. Nearby, a bumper sticker hung. Designed by Yahweh in 1968, it read “Damn the Army, Join the Invaders.”30

  Withers first told Lawrence about the bumper sticker on November 12, 1968. At the time, the agent was investigating the placement of one of the stickers on a door at the federal building. Authorities noticed it following a visit by Yahweh. Then very much in his “Sweet Willie Wine” persona, Watson/Yahweh had showed up with three or four Black Power colleagues at the army recruiting station on the first floor. According to a sergeant there, the men harassed a young recruit as he was filling out army paperwork. They demanded an office of their own to recruit “their army.” Shown a lineup of photos, the sergeant could identify only Lance Watson. Then Lawrence consulted Withers. Listed in the report as ME 338-R, an informant providing “coverage with regard to Invaders and BOP,” Withers said “Wine” and his men had printed a series of “Damn the Army” stickers and were selling them for fifty cents each. He gave the names of two printers who might be producing them. But Lawrence subsequently dropped the investigation when he found no federal laws had been broken.31