Over time, Withers fed the FBI’s fixation on Watson, reporting an incredible range of political and personal developments: Watson was forming a Stokely Carmichael–inspired Black United Front in Memphis; he was attending a Black Power conference in Philadelphia; he was supporting striking workers at St. Joseph’s Hospital; he’d “called for violence” against workers who crossed picket lines; he was having a baby with a girlfriend; he was stabbed by a woman in a brawl; he was seeking a small business loan; he’d met backstage with soul singer James Brown following a concert at the Mid-South Coliseum. Withers gave the FBI political leaflets Watson had authored, one titled “Goddam You White Man, Goddam You,” and another, “Swing Don’t Sing,” a winding, typewritten ten-page treatise that endorses the use of force against oppression and begins with a brief autobiography describing Watson as a former “pimp, theif [sic], gangster and Preacher.”32
According to Lawrence’s reports, Withers knew plenty about his young friend’s criminal life. “Informant stated that ‘Willie Wine’ strictly lives by his wits, has a sharp mind, although he has little formal education,” Lawrence wrote in November 1968 after debriefing Withers. “He stated that he is an excellent pickpocket and is probably the sharpest individual in Memphis with a pen knife and can slit the back pocket of a man’s pants and lift his wallet quicker than anyone he has ever seen.” The photographer reported later that month that Watson had “indicated” he could “get $100 a week in extortion money” from a South Memphis liquor store, though available reports are silent on any detail.
A year later, Lawrence reported this from Withers: Watson was “a con man,” who “is not seriously interested in any particular movements” and who “definitely” won’t “engage in any violence.” The photographer said Watson was running a “racket” called Operation Breakfast, which solicited money to feed needy children, patterned after a program run by the Black Panthers in Oakland. Withers handed over a leaflet promoting the program. He characterized it, Lawrence wrote, as a “publicity stunt” to “help buffer the financial status of Wine.” The program was short-lived, but its demise is generally attributed to a lack of community support, not any graft by Watson.33
Withers chronicled Watson’s slide from a feared radical to irrelevancy. By 1970, the activist had formed “We the People,” a grassroots organization that Withers agreed to join as a board member. The photographer reported only a “handful” of followers—significantly, Withers himself and Don Pigford, an undercover MPD officer who had infiltrated the Black Power movement. The day of the Invaders was fading fast.34
“On 7/15/70 ME 338-R advised that Lance Watson continues to fast and is spending his nights and most of his daylight hours lying in a coffin at the Community Church on Texas Street,” begins a three-page FBI roundup of movement militancy in July 1970. The eccentric militant had turned activism into performance art.35
As the years slipped away, Watson-turned-Yahweh remained loyal to his older friend, living in the seeming bliss of ignorance.
“If he was [an informant] I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “He would call me his son. Right now, I’m still part of the family. I talked to Rome [son Andrew Jerome Withers] just the other day. I talked to [Ernest] on his death bed.”36
23.
“HOW ROTTEN, HOW FILTHY”:
UNDERCUTTING SYMPATHIZERS AND SUPPORTERS
BOBBY DOCTOR UNDERSTOOD THE PRESSURE the FBI could bring. In 1968, he was a twenty-eight-year-old field-worker for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. His sympathies for Black Power landed him squarely in Lawrence’s crosshairs. In those days, before the commission’s south region office moved to Atlanta, it was headquartered in Memphis. And Doctor, who would go on to become the agency’s southeastern regional director, nearly lost his job when Lawrence conducted a loyalty investigation based on intelligence he received from Withers and other informants.
“I’ll admit I was very close to the militant movement in Memphis. But I was also close to the traditional leadership,” Doctor would say years later in retirement. “I tried to bridge the gap.”1
Lawrence opened a file on Doctor in November 1967 after police detectives relayed information from an MPD informant. The snitch said Charles Cabbage had attended “interracial parties” hosted by Doctor at his South Memphis apartment.*1 Days later, an NAACP informer told the special agent that Doctor is “one of the adult advisers” of Cabbage’s “incipient SNCC-oriented black power clique.” Uninvited, the “clique” had attended an NAACP leadership workshop. “Doctor brought the group and left with them,” Lawrence wrote.2
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THE AGENT USED Withers to sharpen his focus on Doctor during the explosive sanitation strike and in the volatile months that followed.
The photographer reported Doctor’s attendance at a series of Black Power–oriented meetings, including a September 1968 rally at cavernous Clayborn Temple where soul singer Isaac Hayes addressed the all-black crowd. Eleven months before he released his classic Hot Buttered Soul to diverse acclaim, Hayes—in his role within the Black Knights, a radical North Memphis cell of the Black Organizing Project—preached Black Power and spite for “Whitey.” Hayes “was extremely militant, warned all present not to take notes, and allowed no pictures taken,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing Withers. “[Hayes] said the whites did nothing for blacks until a few brave blacks used Molotov cocktails and broke a few windows. He said this is the only way to fight ‘Whitey.’ He said, ‘We have to hurt Whitey where it hurts, in his pocketbook—have to get control of the dollar.’ ”3
Withers reported Doctor’s presence at the Invaders’ headquarters in March 1969 and saw him there a second time that month as about forty militants, including members of the East St. Louis–based Black Egyptians street gang, listened to tapes of Malcolm X and discussed issues ranging from fund-raising to mistreatment by police.4
“I taught classes on black awareness at the Invaders headquarters,” Doctor later said. He didn’t see his involvement in opposition to his job. As a field-worker for the Civil Rights Commission, established in 1957 to investigate discrimination and voting rights violations, Doctor maintained relations in all corners of the black community. A former activist who participated in the 1960 sit-ins in Orangeburg, South Carolina, he spent a good deal of his time in 1968 and 1969 smoothing over tensions between the Invaders and members of King’s staff as they pursued an uneasy, months-long collaboration to advance civil rights. “The line between my official and private life was always blurred,” he said.
But where Doctor saw gray, Lawrence saw black and white. And in the agent’s view, Doctor had stepped over the line. Lawrence’s antipathy is best seen in two inflammatory reports he wrote after debriefing Withers.
“ME 338 added that during the 10/5/68 sympathy march for striking city hospital employees that Robert C. Doctor, aka Bobby Doctor, male Negro employee of U.S. Civil Rights Commission, was with Audrey Dandridge, female Negro who used to do volunteer office work for SCLC. Dandridge is married as is Doctor, yet they were holding hands,” Lawrence wrote in November 1968. “Photos of Doctor holding hands with Dandridge were furnished by ME 338.”5
Then this seven months later:
“Informant added that one thing that concerns him is that Bobby Doctor, employee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Third Floor, FOB (Federal Office Building), Memphis, an admitted agnostic non-believer in Christ, as recently as 5/2/69 was telling many BSA (Black Student Association) students along with some Invaders that the theory of SCLC of non-violence and Christian ethics is baloney and that the only way young blacks could get their way was through militancy, even of a violent nature if necessary.”6
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NEARLY FIFTY YEARS later the accusations emblazoned on official FBI stationery still sting.
“I didn’t want to tear the country apart. I wanted the country to do right by all of its citizens,” Doctor said on a lazy autumn day from an easy chair in his
home in Fayetteville, Georgia.
He said he never knew Withers was an informant. But now it made sense. “Ernie made an effort to befriend the militants in Memphis, Tennessee,” he said. He recalls the photographer’s common interest in topics like police brutality. Often, he shared photos he’d shot of victims cruelly beaten by officers.7
“I’m not mad at Ernie,” Doctor said, focusing his anger at the FBI.
“Now, don’t misunderstand me. I was doing a lot of things in Memphis. But none of what I was doing was illegal. And I’ll go to my grave saying that. Now, a lot of what the FBI did was illegal.”
Doctor denied Lawrence’s insinuation in the November 1968 report that he was involved in improper extramarital conduct.*2 He questioned the purpose of such an assertion—a “dirty, rotten” smear, he called it—in a government report. If the FBI ever used the information in an official COINTELPRO action there is no known record of it. But the agency did make an unofficial effort to neutralize the activist-turned-field-worker. As Doctor tells it, two FBI agents delivered a “thick report” on his activities to his boss, Bill Taylor. “They clearly were trying to get Bill to fire me. That didn’t work,” he said.
All over the country, the FBI took similar measures. According to the Church Committee, the FBI directed numbers of disruption actions against “black nationalist hate groups” and their supporters as part of COINTELPRO. Many targets were hardly extremists—King’s SCLC, for one. Benign campus student associations fell victim, too.
Here, the perniciousness of the 1960s surveillance state comes into focus. When the news of Withers’s secret FBI relationship first broke, some people didn’t understand: What harm could an informant do in an open, transparent movement? “I don’t think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side,” Andrew Young said.
But the Church Committee identified several concerns. For one, the FBI’s intelligence informants had few restrictions. The broad, vacuum-cleaner approach they employed, collecting “any and everything,” was excessively intrusive, the committee found. Then there was the attendant fear. Many groups knew they were being watched. But by whom? The fear of unknown informants chilled the exercise of constitutional guarantees to free speech and political association. Some citizens simply avoided political participation for fear of being associated with an unfavorable group. Others had specific worries, like being dropped from consideration for a government job requiring a security clearance.8 Then, there were the direct, disruptive actions, like those waged against Doctor, which weren’t even formally part of COINTELPRO.
Doctor’s coworker, Rosetta Miller, fell in jeopardy, too. Withers gave Lawrence identification photos of her—one depicting the petite field-worker as she smiled sweetly at an unknown social gathering, her hair permed and a corsage pinned to her lapel—along with some intel. “He said she is the type who is a rumormonger and one who will give aid and comfort to the black power groups,” Lawrence reported Withers as saying. A few months later, the photographer reported that Miller—described by Lawrence as “the controversial Negro”—was involved in a marriage that “lasted only one week,” and that she’d “since left town.”9
Decades later, she harbored a bit more bitterness toward Withers than Doctor did.
“My friend Ernest Withers,” she said sarcastically as the news of Withers’s informing sunk in. “Mr. Withers was at everything. He’d be there taking pictures. You just wouldn’t think of it.”
In the intervening years, Miller achieved great success. She became Nashville area director of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and later opened the Tennessee Tribune, a Nashville-based newspaper serving a largely African American readership. Going now by Miller-Perry (after her husband of twenty-five years, the late Dr. Ludwald Orren Pettipher Perry, believed to be Tennessee’s first black gastroenterologist), she said the Civil Rights Commission headquarters was alerted after the FBI contacted her Memphis bosses. She and Doctor were called in for hearings.
“It’s scary even when I think about it now. They could have really destroyed me. I would not be where I am today if I had lost my government job.”10
Though it’s common today for some older civil rights veterans to speak critically or even derisively of the Invaders and similar radical groups, in truth sentiment about the militant Black Power movement is much more complex. In Memphis in 1968, the city’s black elite openly condemned the Invaders, yet many in the larger African American community embraced them.
“Too many Memphians, black and white, are too quick to dismiss these youths as thugs, criminals, drop-outs, and lunatic fringe fools,” legendary Memphis disc jockey Nat D. Williams wrote in the Tri-State Defender. “But let’s face it. They do have some very legitimate gripes…They are black youths who have felt the sting of white racism, the frustration of inadequate employment, the injury of social rejection, the despair of hopelessness, the desperation of a loss of faith in anything except their own strength.” The newspaper embraced the militants in its treatment of the March 28, 1968, melee that broke out during King’s march through downtown Memphis. The front-page coverage included an editorial denouncing police assaults on innocent bystanders alongside a political cartoon titled “Black United Front”—the name of a collaborative organization lead by militant activist Stokely Carmichael. The cartoon depicted a circle of African Americans holding hands, including militants, radicals, Muslims, “non-violents,” conservatives, and “Uncle Toms.”11
Lawrence understood the sentiment well. He wrote that Withers told him “as much as he hated to admit it, the majority of the black community in Memphis basically supports the Invaders,” saying that they got “a vicarious thrill as they hold the impression that the Invaders are causing the white power structure to squirm.”12
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AS THE INVADERS gained traction, Jerry Fanion’s sympathies for them put him under intense scrutiny. They may have even contributed to the one-year prison sentence he ultimately served for misapplying bank funds.
Again, Withers played a critical role.
Back in 1968, Gerald A. “Jerry” Fanion was a leader in the black community. The personable ex–postal worker, then thirty-seven, served as Shelby County’s director of community relations until he won appointment that year as the deputy director of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, or TCHR, a nonprofit group that investigated discrimination, police brutality, and issues affecting minority communities. When the sanitation strike broke out, he was a familiar figure at the many rallies and marches.
And as Lawrence and his colleagues at MPD clandestinely learned, Fanion, like many in the black community, secretly cheered on the young militants on the movement’s fringe, the Invaders.
Withers first mentioned Fanion that February. The sanitation strike had just gotten under way. The photographer reported a keen observation to Lawrence: the labor struggle that was tearing Memphis apart had its own, internal, struggle, a “power fight” to direct the strike. On one side was the old guard, conservative NAACP leaders like Jesse Turner. And on the other, mavericks like Rev. James Lawson, fiery Presbyterian pastor Ezekiel Bell, and Fanion’s boss, Baxton Bryant, a white liberal who headed the TCHR. Where Fanion fell in the schism wasn’t clear. But Withers relayed an intriguing tidbit that provided an early indication of where he stood: Fanion told him that Invaders Charles Cabbage and John B. Smith wanted to insert fire-breathing Stokely Carmichael into the fray, though they lacked the resources to arrange his participation.13
Withers mentioned Fanion again that summer. In one of those sweeping intelligence reports that helped the FBI keep its suspicious eye on Memphis’s black community, the photographer provided updates on as many as twenty-five people over the course of five pages, many of them Black Power militants, but also mainstream community fixtures like Alma Morris, longtime president of the Kennedy Democratic Club (she was close friends with the mother of one of the Invaders, Withers said); North Memphis barber and c
ivic leader Warren Lewis (he was active in the Black Organizing Project’s North Memphis cell, the Black Knights); and the SCLC’s Rev. R. B. Cottonreader (in town recruiting young men as marshals for the Poor People’s March on Washington and running out of money). The shutterbug had this to say of Fanion: he “got a job” for Invader “troublemaker” John Henry Ferguson, arranging for him to work in public relations for insurance executive Harold Whalum. “Fanion wants Ferguson to get experience, and then Fanion promised to put Ferguson to work for the West Tennessee chapter of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations,” Lawrence summarized from Withers’s tips.14
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FANION’S OUTREACH TO the young militants couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time. In its quest to eviscerate the Invaders, the FBI weighed sedition charges*3 and also contemplated an ambitious COINTELPRO campaign against the organization’s supporters. Lawrence wanted not just oral intelligence but written confirmation of the collaboration—financial documents, telephone records, leaflets the group handed out. Repeatedly, Withers came through. He produced a financial report that showed Community on the Move for Equality, the minister-led organization that oversaw the sanitation strike, had given $2,600 to the Invaders’ umbrella group, the Black Organizing Project, as a donation and for attorney fees. He handed over a leaflet Cabbage had passed out at a strike rally that quoted militant H. Rap Brown—“For every Max Stanford and Huey Newton (both incarcerated revolutionaries) there must be 10 dead racist cops”—and contained a crude drawing and instructions for making a Molotov cocktail. (Withers told Lawrence none of the pastors “made any effort whatsoever” to restrain Cabbage from handing it out.) The photographer got his hands on the Invaders’ official notebook containing pages of telephone numbers of its members, relatives, and associates. The FBI made two photocopies—one for its files and the other for MPD.15
A Spy in Canaan Page 30