A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

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  SIX SHORT WEEKS after the first shanties went up, Resurrection City came crashing down on June 24. A thousand or more police officers armed with clubs and gas masks cleared the camp with little resistance. Ralph Abernathy led a long column of marchers to safety before the police arrived. Routed, the Poor People’s Campaign ended with a few defiant shouts of “Black Power!” blocks away, outside SCLC’s Washington office. The organization King had founded eleven years earlier in the afterglow of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had hit bottom. Historian Gerald McKnight writes in his book, The Last Crusade, that the campaign likely would have failed on its own—largely because of the leadership vacuum caused by the assassination—but argues the FBI played a role, too, through its intense surveillance and smear campaign that had diminished King’s image among many Americans.14

  The SCLC would regroup seven weeks later in Memphis for its annual convention, facing more animosity—and another confrontation.

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  ABOUT FIFTY INVADERS stormed Mason Temple waving a “Liberation” flag featuring a dagger encircled by a wreath—the young militants were back. With a shout, they shattered the decorum of SCLC’s 12th annual convention. As Withers later informed Lawrence, the mayor of Gary, Indiana, Richard Hatcher, was speaking when the Invaders stormed in, led by Lance Watson and John B. Smith. “The Invaders were claiming the SCLC through its deceased former President, Martin Luther King, Jr., had promised The Invaders a considerable amount of financial support when he was in Memphis in early April, 1968, just prior to his murder,” the agent wrote after debriefing his photographer-informant. The militants contended King promised them $300,000 and four automobiles. Withers felt certain King had offered something as he tried to placate the young men. But he called their representation a “gross exaggeration,” Lawrence wrote.15

  The showdown started earlier that night. As an MPD informant watched, a few of the militants confronted Andrew Young. It got tense. “I carried a pistol. Threatened to shoot him,” one of the militants involved, John Smith, recalled years later. It was just a bluff. But Smith was angry. “They were still saying we were responsible for the riot, and maybe even the assassination,” he said. The confrontation ended when Invader Lance Watson stepped between them. “Andrew Young of S.C.L.C. didn’t feel that S.C.L.C. owed them anything,” MPD’s Lieutenant Arkin wrote of the incident. His informant watched as the young men later composed a two-page handwritten statement, rifled off numbers of copies on a mimeograph machine, and then raced down to Mason Temple.16

  Withers described the melee to Lawrence like this: The Invaders storm in. Rev. James Lawson tries to quiet them. No luck. The militants pass out copies of their leaflet. It is full of stinging allegations. “While poor Black Brothers and Sisters were sleeping in the rain and mud” eating cheese and bologna sandwiches at Resurrection City, it reads, “S.C.L.C. staff was sleeping in the Pitts Motel with white girls” and “eating steak.” Young talks. He calls the Invaders “children.” It looks like it might get physical. The Black Knights are there. The North Memphis militant group is providing security for the convention. Abernathy gets up. He talks. Finally, a man called “Barracuda”—described as six-foot-two and 270 pounds with connections to Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers gang—subdues the Invaders and restores order.17

  For all the trouble, the Invaders received a $500 check, signed by SCLC treasurer Cirilo A. McSween and drawn on Citizens Trust Bank in Atlanta. Withers took a picture of it and gave it to the FBI. The Bureau’s Atlanta office agreed to trace the payment and “be alert” for any future SCLC payments to any Memphis groups or individuals. A week later, headquarters directed Memphis to consider counterintelligence actions “to neutralize” the Invaders.18

  At that point, August of 1968, the SCLC remained in a tailspin. In Memphis, a power struggle brewed. The movement there had long been directed by the NAACP. Though prominent Memphis pastors Samuel Billy Kyles and Ben Hooks had both sat on King’s national board of directors, the SCLC didn’t have a chapter in the city. But now a group of upstarts wanted to form one. Young Turks, Lawrence called them. And from what Withers was telling him, it was causing considerable friction with “old line” leaders Kyles and Hooks. “Source has learned that there is a lot of dissension within SCLC ranks,” Lawrence wrote.19

  The Turks were younger men and women—several of them professionals, others a “grass roots” variety who sported denim. Some had been active in Resurrection City. They moved at a frenetic pace, raising funds and organizing. According to what Withers was telling Lawrence, some of their aggressive tactics amounted to “semi-extortion.” Some Turks “were putting the heat on white businessmen for donations for SCLC,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing Withers. One businessman hit hard by the solicitors was William Loeb, Mayor Henry Loeb’s brother. “Informant has reliably learned that William Loeb…has contributed large amounts of money to SCLC and other black pressure groups” including the Invaders, Lawrence wrote.20

  Withers connected the dots for Lawrence: The SCLC is opening operations at the office of real estate agent O. W. Pickett; Pickett is a political crony of activist Cornelia Crenshaw; Crenshaw is close to O. Z. Evers; Evers, the man who integrated the Memphis bus system and who’d been a focus of tips Withers passed to the FBI for five years, was close to Tarlease Mathews. Mathews had first gained attention in Memphis in 1958 for a lawsuit that hastened the end of segregated attendance at the Memphis Zoo. She and her colleagues weren’t elites. They were everyday people—Evers a pest control man; Mathews a hairdresser; Crenshaw, a housing manager—whose activism had effected true change. They made the status quo nervous. Their militancy had a direct link to King. The last time King had come to Memphis, it wasn’t Kyles or Hooks who picked him up at the airport. It was Tarlease Mathews.21

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  THE SCLC FINALLY formed an affiliate in Memphis in late 1969—with Ernest C. Withers on its founding board of directors. Lawrence immediately had an insider’s view. The board has thirty-two members, Withers told him; Invaders leader Lance Watson has an invitation to join. The board included several whites, he said. One, an agitating schoolteacher, “bears watching,” Lawrence wrote; the first meetings are being held at Jim Lawson’s church.

  Seven years after he first began reporting on Lawson, describing him in those early days as a “thorn in the side” of Memphis’s conservative NAACP-led movement, Withers listened as the militant pastor directed the upstart SCLC group, telling them in his clipped, Yankee accent that the NAACP had “lost its influence.” That meant Lawrence lost, too. He had worked hard to sway and receive cooperation from the NAACP in Memphis. And now this. Many of the details his informant was relaying struck the agent as risible, his reports indicate. The SCLC affiliate aspires to be a militant group, to “make an issue of so-called police brutality in Memphis,” the agent wrote.22

  The new movement captured the imagination of Jet magazine, which sent writer Valerie Jo Bradley to town, Withers told Lawrence. “He said the feeling is that there is too much conservatism in the black leadership in Memphis, and she wants to emphasize the point,” the agent wrote.23

  A major rift in the city’s black leadership had sparked the rise of the SCLC’s Memphis affiliate. In the autumn of 1969, as part of the United Black Coalition, a loose association of twenty-five community organizations, the NAACP led a series of marches and boycotts—a rare campaign of direct action for the more conservative organization. The ambitious undertaking was fought on two fronts: improving educational opportunities for black youth and supporting the striking workers at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The school battle was pivotal. Pushing to desegregate the city’s schools and install blacks on the city’s all-white school board, leaders orchestrated a series of “Black Monday” boycotts—as many as 67,000 black children skipped school on the first day of the school week in protest. Many teachers stayed out, too. But as the venture veered toward crisis, the
NAACP wanted out.

  Lawrence used Withers and his stable of sources to monitor the “Black Monday” movement, watching as it grew, flourished, then collapsed. He kept a particularly close eye on the developing rift between the NAACP and the rest of the coalition. Police sources told Lawrence that Vasco and Maxine Smith, his longtime NAACP informers, may have been “bought off” by the city’s white elite who wanted to end the boycott. “Inspector (Don) Smith pointed out that it is significant that in the past week neither of the Smiths has made any flamboyant or highly emotional remarks,” Lawrence wrote on November 7 as the rift deepened. Available records don’t clarify what Lawrence might have told the NAACP power couple. But the agent seemed to cover his bases. Pressed by news reporters, Maxine had publicly denied that the NAACP had initiated the Black Monday boycotts. But the agent knew otherwise. Withers handed him a nine-page packet of NAACP papers written “in connection with its call for boycott of Memphis public school system.”24

  Withers reported that some in the fraying United Black Coalition were taking desperate measures to keep it going—using the Invaders “as a sort of ‘Black Mafia’ to round up young thugs to participate in marches and to attempt to mentally and possibly physically intimidate students from going to school in an effort to build up the pressure of the black movement,” Lawrence wrote. It wasn’t working. “The coalition is rapidly losing strength,” the agent wrote after consulting Withers.25

  The coalition finally spun apart when the NAACP’s divided leadership voted to temporarily halt the Black Monday boycotts. Disheartened, the organization’s president—militant pastor Ezekiel Bell—quit in protest. Cornelia Crenshaw was so dismayed she “nearly got into a physical fight” with Maxine Smith, a source told the FBI.26

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  EVEN RALPH ABERNATHY couldn’t reunite the coalition. Flying in from Atlanta, Abernathy participated in at least three large demonstrations that fall. Each time, Withers reported his actions. The photographer was part of an FBI-MPD gauntlet that closely observed a November 10 mass march. The city had informed movement leaders a day earlier that it would forbid late-afternoon or night marches, citing traffic snarls and safety concerns. Organizers ignored the dictum. Withers reported to Lawrence at 5:05 p.m. from Clayborn Temple that some two thousand activists were preparing to defy the city and begin marching. As news reporters, FBI agents, and police watched, the crowd lurched forward. Onlookers threw bottles from rooftops as more than sixty marchers were arrested, including Abernathy and Memphis movement leader H. Ralph Jackson. Later that night, Withers reported that organizers were planning another march in the morning.27

  Withers reported the next day that Abernathy, fresh out of jail, told the Clayborn gathering that pressure would intensify until demands were met; he urged students to stay out of school. When Abernathy prepared a return trip in December, Withers gave Lawrence a two-day advance warning, providing the civil rights leader’s travel information—Eastern Airlines Flight 395 from Atlanta.28

  By late December, leaders of the month-old Memphis SCLC affiliate were complaining about Abernathy—and a spiraling debt. The upstart organization launched that November “already is $5,000 or more” in the red, Lawrence wrote after speaking with Withers. H. Ralph Jackson blamed phone, mail, and travel expenses. But mostly he blamed Abernathy, Withers said. “Another expense were hotel rooms and food bills run up for Ralph David Abernathy and his staff,” Lawrence wrote. The informant said Jackson had called them “freeloaders” who “didn’t work and merely ate a lot of food and run up big bills.” Lawrence wrote that Withers confirmed another story supplied by a police informant: when Abernathy was caught in a rainstorm at the end of the November 11 march, he went to Julius Lewis department store and bought a $200 suit (roughly equivalent to $1,300 in 2018) and a $100 pair of alligator shoes—items evidently paid for by others. Withers said members of a local church later gave Abernathy a $2,300 “love offering” before he flew back to Atlanta.29

  The Memphis authorities finally found a creative way to stop the Black Monday movement. On December 9, a state grand jury indicted Abernathy, Vasco and Maxine Smith, James Lawson, Ezekiel Bell, and fourteen others on charges of interfering with the operations of public schools and contributing to the delinquency of minors. It took the steam right out of the operation. As 1969 faded into 1970, the civil rights direct action movement in Memphis effectively was over.30

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  THE BLACK PANTHERS, HOOVER, AND THE END OF AN ERA

  FIVE WEEKS AFTER THE BLACK Monday protests were finally crushed, Bill Lawrence retired. He turned in his FBI handbook, his badge—No. 276—his agent’s briefcase, and a Colt revolver (though, with permission, he’d carried his own .38-caliber Smith and Wesson on duty). “Dear Mr. Hoover,” the agent wrote, “This is to advise you of my request to retire at the close of business, Jan. 23, 1970…I shall always cherish my long and satisfying association with the FBI. I shall do everything possible to assist the Bureau and to uphold its wonderful heritage. I have never had an autographed photograph of you, and would greatly appreciate your autographing one for me if this is possible.”1

  Withers was handed off to other agents, principally Howell S. Lowe, a junior agent who had worked with Lawrence since 1968. The photographer continued to report on “mainstream militants.” From his position on the SCLC board, he relayed months of details: Cornelia Crenshaw and Ezekiel Bell are pushing again for more “militant activity,” he said; they are planning a King memorial service; his old friend Joe Crittenden was renting a flatbed truck as a speaker’s platform for the event; the chapter again was broke—just $212 remained in its treasury.2

  The scope of his monthly or periodic reports remained broad and sweeping: a report in June 1970 updated the files of sixteen people (some reports involved dozens of individuals), including Clarence Cecil Adams, a black veteran who fought in the Korean War and was held for three years as a POW before defecting to China and ultimately returning to Memphis in 1966 to face charges by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite efforts to blacklist him, Adams had successfully taken a test “to enable him to sell stocks, bonds, and insurance,” Withers reported.

  That September, the photographer reported he’d traveled to nearby Earle, Arkansas, with several Memphis pastors rallying support for Rev. Ezra Greer, wounded days earlier when armed whites attacked marching activists in what became known as “The Earle Race Riot of 1970.” He reported that Memphis pastors Ezekiel Bell, Dick Moon, and Roosevelt Joyner all spoke or attended, as did Joe Crittenden, and that he “took photographs of everyone.” He later reported that upstart politician Minerva Johnican was working with the League of Women Voters to establish another “Black United Front” to focus on voter registration and racial violence issues.3

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  BUT INCREASINGLY HIS focus turned to fringe groups like the small Black Panther Party contingent that formed in Memphis in late 1970. The revolutionary black nationalist organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 began as a line of self-defense against widespread police brutality in that city. The Panthers created a variety of “survival” programs to feed and clothe poor children and promote cultural awareness. But their violent rhetoric damaged their reputation, as did a series of shootouts with police in 1969 in Los Angeles and Chicago. In a story almost certainly coordinated with the FBI, Press-Scimitar reporter Kay Pittman Black broke the news to Memphians in December 1970 that the Panther movement had arrived. But months before that, Withers had scouted leads for the Bureau:4

  Two Black Panther Party members are visiting Memphis, he told agents that February; former Invader Maurice Lewis wants to build a Panther organization in the city, Withers said in May. That June, he turned over the personal phone numbers of two members of the newly formed group; he reported interstate contacts with Panthers from Mississippi. By year’s end, he identified individuals handing out Black Panther Party newspapers on Beale Street.5

  Then h
e went deep. Just as he’d done with the SCLC—as he’d done with the Invaders, the peace movement, and the Communist Party’s youth organization in Memphis—Withers penetrated the Panthers. He became an insider. The first clear indication involves an incident in January 1971. Influenced by confrontations in other cities, the fledgling Memphis Panthers had an armed standoff with police. A group of them broke into vacant units at the Memphis Housing Authority’s Texas Court Apartments. They squatted there with poor families who’d been denied decent housing. The Panthers—eight men and three women—surrendered without incident. While preparing for trial, the Panthers produced a brochure publicizing the situation. Titled “Is Providing Housing for the Homeless a Crime,” the brochure featured photos shot by Withers—an image of the young activists being led away in handcuffs; another depicting a poor family outside their rundown home.6

  Eventually, Withers penetrated the Panthers’ very inner circle. He’s listed in a June 1973 report as one of seven “active members” in the Panthers’ Memphis chapter. Perhaps he used that old charm and wit, perhaps he pretended to be more militant than he really was. But this phase of his informing is extremely difficult for even the photographer’s most ardent supporters to argue away. Clearly, Withers, a World War II veteran then in his fifties, didn’t suddenly become a black revolutionary. Records show he was part of an FBI-MPD team that had worked hard to infiltrate the group. One of the other members, Tyrant Moore, was an undercover police officer. Details that Withers was kicking back to the FBI indicate that the Bureau was prepared to meet the Panthers with deadly force if necessary.7