A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  The spiral notebook also listed sympathizers like progressive auto dealer John T. Fisher, who had hired a couple of the Invaders as mechanic’s helpers. Over the course of ten months, Withers relayed a series of tips to the FBI involving Fisher’s links to members of the Invaders. The popular Plymouth-Chrysler dealer had referred one young militant to a professor at Memphis State who might help him arrange night classes, Withers said; the photographer reported efforts by a movement activist to convince Fisher to hire more of the Invaders. Eventually, two agents came to see him. “They asked me some questions about what my motive was,” Fisher recalled years later. The agents were particularly interested in his relationship to another Invaders sympathizer, militant pastor James Lawson. “People were terrified of Jim Lawson,” he said.16

  Withers also helped the FBI monitor relationships between the Invaders and sympathetic Paulist priests at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. The imposing stone cathedral provided office space for the Invaders’ “minister of defense,” Melvin Smith, the photographer told Lawrence. He said Smith was close to the church’s progressive leader, Fr. William Greenspun, reporting that the young activist may be abusing the relationship in a scheme to wring grant money from the church. Withers also handed the agent fourteen pictures of Greenspun’s colleague Fr. Charles Mahoney, described in reports as Smith’s “close friend,” who “allows Melvin” and other militants to use church facilities. Lawrence kept files on Greenspun and Catholic Sister Adrian Marie Hofstetter, both of whom, Withers reported, had become active in a new chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The FBI’s Memphis office also kept a file on Fr. James Lyke, later the Archbishop of Atlanta. Withers told Lawrence in 1969 he’d seen Lyke at a draft resistance rally downtown.17

  “The FBI was really on the wrong track,” one of the Paulist priests, Fr. Charles Martin, recalled years later. “We were all kind of with the civil rights thing. We rubbed shoulders with a lot of different groups.” That included radicals, he said. But, the mission was Christian outreach—tolerance and understanding. “We were for the workers, the sanitation workers. And a lot of people in the town didn’t like us for that.”18

  In fall 1968, a key ally, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, wavered in its support. Fanion announced that H. Ralph Jackson, the AME official who’d approved the $2,600 grant for the Invaders, would no longer allow the militants to keep office space or meet at Clayborn Temple. But Lawrence continued to receive reports of a partnership. He dug in. “All sources have been alerted to attempt to pinpoint any actual proof that employees of the AME Church are giving financial support to the Invaders and if such proof is forthcoming separate communication will be written to the Bureau concerning any possible counterintelligence action which might be instituted with certain AME high church officials in this regard,” he wrote.19

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS IN this tense and tangled environment that Fanion tried to juke the resolute internal security agent. As assistant director of the TCHR, Fanion threw his support behind construction of a new public housing development in Memphis’s Frayser area. The Invaders, too, lobbied for the project, arguing it would reverse substandard housing conditions for poor African American families. But Frayser’s white majority opposed it. Fanion personally called Lawrence and said he planned to support the project at a City Hall hearing but “hoped the Invaders, et al, would not come.” Then Lawrence talked to Withers.20

  “It was apparent that Fanion was being untruthful, for on 8/21/68 ME 338-R (Ghetto) advised the writer that Invader John Henry Ferguson told informant that Fanion solicited Ferguson to get all of the Invaders and BOP to City Hall the afternoon of 8/20/68 to support the Turnkey Housing Project and that Fanion brought the signs for potential pickets and supervised the black protest,” Lawrence wrote. For good measure, Withers gave Lawrence a copy of Fanion’s press release—complete with Invader-like language that referred to the project’s opponents as living in “lily white neighborhoods”—as well as photos of “many of the characters” involved in the protest. The agent cut up the photos and placed them in individual files. “This includes nearly all of the key leaders of the Invaders, the leading Black Power troublesome organization in Memphis,” the agent wrote.21

  Though Fanion reportedly began “drawing away” from BOP that September, Lawrence learned he’d been taking cigarettes to jailed Invaders. And there was this: “Gerald Fanion has purchased a liquor store on South Lauderdale near Parkway,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing Withers.*4 “Fanion is still West Tennessee Director of Tennessee Council on Human Relations. He purchased the liquor store through money provided by a silent partner, Tommy Willis, Comptroller of the Universal Life Insurance Company, and brother of prominent Memphis Negro attorney and state Legislator Archie W. Willis, Jr.”22

  The report seems to imply something improper about Fanion simultaneously running a civil rights organization and owning a liquor store. There is no known record that the FBI took a COINTELPRO action against Fanion. Yet the incident poses troubling questions, considering the federal government later prosecuted Fanion and Tommy Willis for running a check-kiting operation out of the liquor store.

  “What concern was it to Bill Lawrence or anybody else that Jerry owned a liquor store?” asked Bruce Kramer, the Memphis attorney who represented Fanion in the criminal case alleging misapplication of $380,000 in bank funds. Fanion pled nolo contendere—no contest—to the charges and was sentenced to a year in 1977. It’s difficult to draw a direct link to Fanion’s prosecution and his earlier activism. As many as six years separated the intelligence operation and the start of the investigation of the bank scheme—charges Fanion didn’t deny.*5 Yet Lawrence’s report put Fanion’s liquor store on law enforcement’s radar. As early as 1969, the activist-turned-businessman filed a complaint alleging MPD officers were harassing him and his customers. Kramer, an ACLU attorney who sued MPD over its Red Squad abuses, said the intrusion of the 1968 report into Fanion’s personal affairs remains disturbing.23

  “You could ask that same question for almost all of the activities that Bill Lawrence and MPD’s Domestic Intelligence Unit did,” he said. “It was Keystone Cops.”

  *1 Lawrence originally recommended opening a “140” file, the FBI’s classification for federal employees suspected of posing risks to national security. Doctor’s file was altered to 157, a classification designating investigations related to civil disorder.

  *2 In separate interviews, both Doctor and Dandridge denied Lawrence’s insinuations. Dandridge, too, didn’t blame Withers. “He just did what he had to do,” she said. Both signed privacy waivers allowing release of their FBI files to the author. To date neither has been received, nor has the “holding hands” photo been released.

  *3 Special agent Burl F. Johnson of the Memphis office sought an opinion from Washington on December 30, 1969, for bringing sedition charges. Assistant Atty. Gen. J. Walter Yeagley later cited insufficient evidence for such a case, noting that the depleted Invaders by then had only seven active members.

  *4 Though Withers is indicated as the likely source, this is one of those reports written imprecisely enough that it’s possible Lawrence could have learned about the liquor store through other sources.

  *5 Fanion died in 2010. His son, Gerald Fanion, Jr., said he had no details on the case. Efforts by the author to obtain the FBI’s files on the liquor store investigation through FOIA have been unsuccessful.

  24.

  DEATH OF A MOVEMENT:

  THE FBI AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SCLC

  ONE OF THE GREAT OVERLOOKED stories of the movement involves the collapse of the SCLC in Memphis, and how Ernest Withers gave the FBI a front-row seat to the wrath and passion of that tumultuous crash. To understand it, one needs to return briefly to April 4, 1968—the assassination.

  Withers holds legitimate claim to the unofficial title, “The Movement’s Greatest Photographer.” But he missed the big one. The most iconic image. He was bl
ocks away, sitting in his Beale Street studio, his feet on the desk, when King fell—when the movement died. Someone else got it. Nearly everyone above a certain age knows the image: King lying on his back on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel as Andrew Young and others point desperately toward a forsaken rooming house where the shot erupted.

  The photographer who took it, a young South African named Joseph Louw, was staying at the Lorraine, a couple doors down from King. Seconds after the shot rang out, Louw, then a skinny twenty-eight-year-old, stepped onto the balcony with a 35mm camera. He shot some of the biggest news photos of the twentieth century: King lying in a pool of blood. The police hustling into the motel courtyard, reaching for their guns. King’s friends straining with paramedics as they carry the fallen leader down the narrow steps and into an ambulance.1

  Withers missed the shot, but he recovered admirably. As with so many other pivotal moments he’d witnessed, Withers played an all-but-invisible though critical role that night. Louw was visiting Memphis to assist in the making of a documentary film. But, as Withers later recalled, the South African was less than proficient when developing film. So Withers did it for him. He took Louw to his studio where the young man jammed the film in his camera. He couldn’t rewind it. Withers took over.

  “I knew exactly what to do. But Joe Louw wouldn’t have known,” Withers said. “He was just wanting to develop it…but the noise that he was making in the darkroom, I just told him to put film in a, in the paper box, and went in and then loaded the two rolls, developed…the two rolls of film. Perfect development.”2

  * * *

  —

  NOT ONLY DID Withers save Louw’s photos for history that night, he reported one of the first tips linking King’s murder to a possible plot by elements of the Ku Klux Klan. It happened like this:

  Louw lived in New York. FBI agents visited him there after a dozen or so of his assassination photos ran in Life magazine later that month. He told the agents that when he was in Withers’s studio he overheard the photographer talking on the “telephone to either police or FBI.” It had been an intoxicating moment.

  Louw didn’t know it, but Withers was on the phone with Lawrence. Roughly four hours after King was shot, the photographer called the agent to report his suspicion of a man with ties to a West Tennessee Klan group. The suspect was Withers’s old friend Renfro Hays, a private detective well known in Memphis, who would later work for James Earl Ray’s defense. Withers had first told Lawrence about Hays in 1966 after the private eye said he had joined a klavern of the United Klans of America in Brownsville, Tennessee, supposedly at the behest of a client seeking intel on the group. Lawrence, in turn, interviewed Hays. He found him cooperative, but too unstable “to develop him as an informant.”3

  But Withers’s suspicions of Hays piqued the day before King’s murder. A bearish man with a nervous tic that pulsed through his right cheek, the private eye had come by, insisting “on being informed” about where King was staying in Memphis. Though accounts linger to this day about possible Klan involvement in King’s murder, the tip didn’t yield any direct connections. Presumably, Lawrence did a thorough check. He and domestic intelligence partner Hugh Kearney had battled the Klan in Mississippi and West Tennessee for years, and the pair had a reputation as a formidable duo. “J. H. Kearney and Wm H. Lawrence are the two agents who are, as it seems, determined that no klan will again ride in West Tennessee,” a Klansman complained in 1960 in a letter intercepted by an informant. “I will be forced to hold up my work here until Kearney who is a Roman Catholic, and the rest of Hoovers [sic] stooges are put back in their place.”4

  No matter who killed him, King wasn’t coming back. The SCLC—the movement—would have to go on without him.

  * * *

  —

  IN HIS VIEWFINDER, Withers saw Coretta Scott King. She wore a long, dark veil. Leading a mass march through downtown Memphis, the march her now-dead husband was to lead, she stared solemnly ahead, friends and family beside her. James Bevel and Harry Belafonte paced in the flank to her right alongside three of her small children, Martin, Dexter, and Yolanda; to her left were Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young. They stepped past the State Theatre, where Elvis Presley’s latest movie, Stay Away Joe, was playing, a sea of mourners lurching behind. It was the first of many return visits the SCLC team would make to Memphis over the next eighteen months. Withers helped the FBI monitor each of them.

  Already, he’d been pitching in for three weeks, since before King was shot. He was among the sources who helped corroborate the meeting between King and the militant Charles Cabbage on March 29, 1968, the morning after the infamous “riot” that crippled King’s march through downtown Memphis. From the start, it was hardly a secret. A news reporter paced the hall outside King’s room at the towering Rivermont Hotel overlooking the Mississippi River when Cabbage and two Black Power colleagues arrived. So, when Withers told Lawrence what little he knew about what had transpired inside the blue-carpeted room, it was no coup, but it added detail. As King continued to reach out to the young militants, hoping to build an alliance that would enable him to return to Memphis and lead a peaceful march, Withers proved a valuable resource.5

  When King returned on April 3, the day before he was shot, the photographer was all over it. He told Lawrence that day of the strategy meeting that wound deep into the night; how union leaders planned to bring in out-of-towners for the march; how King’s staff had agreed with Memphis community leaders to give the young militants a role in it; how Jesse Jackson was appointed as a liaison to the Invaders; how Hosea Williams urged a “united front” with the militants. Withers reported details of King’s arrival at the Lorraine and his later attendance at a strategy meeting; how he and top aides Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton finally sat down at the motel’s diner for a dinner with Charles Cabbage and other militants—firsthand, real-time details that helped the FBI assess the direction the volatile sanitation strike was heading.6

  Withers was clear: he believed the Invaders were trying to blackmail King, trying to obtain money “by giving the impression that they could control potential violence,” Lawrence wrote. King wanted to pacify them. But across the racial divide, the city’s white leadership saw only trouble in the alliance. Testifying that morning in federal court, Memphis Police and Fire director Frank Holloman cited King’s meeting with the Invaders as a reason he believed another march would stir chaos. “There is great likelihood that there will be rioting and looting and lawless acts,” he said. Lawrence, too, saw no good in it. “King chose to team up with SNCC and Stokely Carmichael on civil disobedience & irresponsibility in its attack on our govt.,” he wrote in retirement, contending King maintained “relationships with violent groups” like the Invaders as a strategy to push his agenda.7

  After King was shot, Withers covered his funeral in Atlanta. As advisers grieved, bracing for an expected collapse of financial contributions to the SCLC with the loss of the charismatic King, an informer picked up this tidbit: aides Bernard Lee and James Orange planned to return to Memphis “to resume SCLC support of the Sanitation Strike.” To the FBI, the message was clear: Memphis, quiet now after another round of rioting, should brace for trouble. The Memphis office sent an “urgent” Teletype to headquarters.8

  * * *

  —

  A WEEK LATER, on April 15, Abernathy led a raucous rally in South Memphis as the sanitation strike lingered. The following morning, Withers gave Lawrence a report: Bevel delivered another frenetic Black Power speech. But Abernathy stole the show. He talked of blocking garbage trucks—“putting our bodies in front of them.” He called for night marches; marches through white neighborhoods; marches through Chickasaw Gardens, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in all of Tennessee. He talked of “massive work stoppages” to “completely disrupt Memphis.”9

  “Now that King is dead,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing Withers, “Abernathy is more militant in his remarks.”10

  Abernathy would never launch thi
s campaign. The next day, the city signed a memorandum of understanding with the newly recognized union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, ending the sixty-five-day sanitation strike.

  Eight days later, SCLC was back. Bevel and other staff members held a strategy meeting with Memphis community leaders at the Lorraine, Withers reported. Preparing to launch King’s long-awaited Poor People’s March on Washington, the group set a goal: they hoped to send a thousand Memphians to the nation’s capital on fifty buses. Withers handed over a recruitment leaflet—“Youths & Adults Wanted!”—and reported from a rally the next day that Bevel had urged children to skip school to travel to Washington. Five days later, he planted himself inside the mass rally at Mason Temple, where King had delivered his last speech. Coretta sang a solo as eight thousand people listened.11

  As if running its own internal news agency, the FBI chronicled the events in its files with Withers’s photos: Coretta King speaking to reporters. Andrew Young in a denim jacket as he rallied the campaign’s pilgrims in nearby Marks, Mississippi. The scoop: the Poor People’s Campaign was shaping into a colossal failure. Organizers expected 1,000 people, but only 369 boarded the ten Greyhound buses that departed for Washington, Withers said. Deep into May and then June, SCLC insiders “admitted” to the informant that the ambitious venture wasn’t gaining traction.12

  Among other troubles, Withers reported that organizers had to remove an Invader and two of his young friends from a bus for making “radical and violent statements.” In addition to the rains and the thickening mud that dampened “Resurrection City,” the interracial, plywood-and-canvas shantytown built on the National Mall with help from the Invaders, a major story that spring in D.C. involved youths from Memphis and other cities who were becoming violent. “They went around and beat up on our white people,” Andrew Young complained after expelling about two hundred residents. “We had to get them out.” Invaders leader Lance Watson, put on the camp’s security detail, was gaining press attention. Withers arrived at the camp in mid-June and spotted the young militant there. He shot a group picture of several Invaders before the Lincoln Memorial. He gave a copy to the FBI.13