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IT WAS A gray January day in 1973 as Withers aimed his camera across the street, through a thicket of leaf-bare trees, toward a rambling, two-story
frame house in South Memphis—the local Black Panther Party headquarters. In all, Withers delivered three pictures to the FBI of the home at 1498 Marjorie Street, each shot from a different angle: across the street; up close, near the steps leading to the broad, front porch; and from the backyard, depicting a narrow, rear entrance. Over the coming months, Withers, who’d been converted from racial informant ME 338-R to extremist informant ME 338-E,*1 would describe what he saw inside, too: two .38-caliber pistols, one kept in a room where party leaders Janice Payne and John Charles Smith stayed, the other “in the living room in the coffee table drawer,” Withers told special agent Howell Lowe. “They also have in their possession a 12-gauge shotgun, which is kept in the living room of the house.”8
By pinpointing the home’s points of ingress and egress, and by describing in detail the locations of weapons, he painted a picture—a virtual layout of the home—needed in case police decided to storm the house. In a way, it wasn’t unlike the 1969 incident in Chicago, where police stormed an apartment sketched out by a Bureau informant, firing eighty to a hundred rounds into the home as its denizens slept, killing Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and another man. But there was a critical difference: this home was never stormed.9
“The government looked to crush Black Power and used the rhetoric of its advocates to justify ruthless tactics,” Yohuru Williams writes in the stirring study The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era. He notes that Hoover identified the Panthers as “the single greatest threat to the nation’s internal security.”10
The truth was, despite rhetoric, the Black Panthers in Memphis never posed any large public threat. Withers might have had cause to fear one Panther, John Charles Smith, the former Invader who stood six-foot-two, weighed well over two hundred pounds, and had been convicted for wounding a man and a woman in a shooting. But by the early ’70s, Smith had settled into a decorous life. He drove a school bus. He and chapter leader Janice Payne worked in Vasco Smith’s successful 1973 campaign for Quarterly Court; Payne was employed by the Sickle Cell Anemia Board. She had political aspirations. “Janice Payne continues to hope that she will be able to run for some type of political office,” agent Lowe wrote after debriefing Withers. Party members were regular attendees at meetings of Maxine Smith’s Shelby County Democratic Club, the informant said.11
The Black Panther Party in Memphis “is for all intents and purposes dead,” Withers declared in August 1974.12
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THAT AUGUST WOULD forever change Ernest Columbus Withers. He ran for public office again—and won. On August 6, in a nine-man race, he was elected constable of Shelby County’s Second Civil District. The position involved serving legal papers and was largely ceremonial in terms of battling crime. But as a sworn and bonded peace officer with arrest powers, Withers was a cop again.
Then, twelve days later, heartbreak. Wendell Withers, the fourth of Ernest and wife Dorothy’s eight children—named after his old police partner at MPD, Wendell Robinson—died. Just twenty-three, he’d been in a coma for two years following a car accident. Many friends came to see him over those two years, including Stokely Carmichael, who’d marched with Wendell, and whose photo Ernest had taken and sold to the FBI. In a front-page obituary in the Tri-State Defender, Ernest’s son Perry wrote of the family’s grief, of “one disconcerting crisis after the other.” Ernest would lose three more of his children before his own death in 2007.13
The last known report he filed with the FBI came on December 3, 1975.*2 By then, Withers was working for Gov. Ray Blanton, getting in over his head in the political corruption that engulfed Tennessee. His monthly report included updates on members of the Communist Party’s Young Workers Liberation League—a group of out-of-town Communists had been in Memphis to pick up local members for a convention in Pittsburgh, he said. Janice Payne of the all but nonexistent Black Panthers has a new job. Former Invader Maurice Lewis was meeting for unknown reasons with inmates out on work release. “His wife, Belva, is pregnant,” Withers reported.14
The report included new details on Isaac Taylor, who’d opened an African culture and clothing store in 1968 called the Black Arcade. The FBI kept a file on the store and monitored it for years. In 1975, the agency remained suspicious. Withers said Taylor, who by then had changed his name to Nkosi Ajanaku, dreamed of opening a medical school to train black doctors in Memphis. Two members of the Ajanaku family, a circle of individuals who wore African clothing and promoted African culture, were engaged in a spat and hadn’t spoken for months, Withers said.
“Because of this,” an agent wrote on the last line of the last page of that last report, “the Ajanaku women have become hard to get along with.”
*1 Withers first appears as ME 338-E in an Aug. 11, 1971 report. The development roughly coincides with another blunder. Just as agent Lawrence once made the mistake of placing an informant contact sheet (form FD-209) in a case file, Withers’s new handlers repeatedly placed informant reports (cover sheet for Informant Report or Material form FD-306) in case files. This made them subject to the settlement. The reports reveal more details about what Withers did for the FBI.
*2 According to the FBI’s statement stipulated in the Withers settlement, the photographer continued to work for the FBI until 1976, though no records from that year were released.
AFTERWORD
THE WITHERS COLLECTION MUSEUM AND Gallery sits in Beale Street’s quiet east end, away from the bustle of the neon-lit night spots, B.B. King’s, Rum Boogie, Blues Hall, Alfred’s, and the others. Still, the museum holds its own. Opened in 2011, it features many of Ernest Withers’s poignant, black-and-white photographs—images of the tumultuous sanitation strike, the Memphis blues scene, Negro Leagues baseball, and the tragic aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder. The museum’s grim assassination gallery includes pictures of the civil rights leader’s blood pooled on the Lorraine Motel’s balcony and of King in his casket. This is sacred ground. Yet the shadowy details of Withers’s collaboration with the FBI remain, as of this writing, out of the spotlight. It’s a history Memphis must face—that it must dissect, analyze, study, and embrace—to fully understand this pivotal period.
In our current moment of fear and political suspicion, the nation is still trying to do the same.
The Church Committee began the search for meaning forty years ago. It opened its report on the FBI’s broad, corrosive use of domestic intelligence informants by quoting Thomas Erskine May. “Men may be without restraints upon their liberty; they may pass to and fro at pleasure,” May wrote in his nineteenth-century work Constitutional History of England. “But if their steps are tracked by spies and informers, their words noted down for crimination, their associates watched as conspirators—who shall say that they are free?”
The question provides an apt framework for understanding Withers—for understanding the vast 1960s surveillance state.
At its peak, the FBI employed more than seven thousand intelligence informants. The agency set few limits on the scope of information they gathered. Former informants testified they reported “any and everything” on targeted groups, handing over membership lists, financial information, and a “broad spectrum” of personal and political detail. The ill effects on democracy were obvious: The system chilled the exercise of constitutionally guaranteed free speech and political association. Many citizens were deterred from political participation for fear their attendance at a meeting or rally “would mark them as a member in an informant’s eyes,” the committee found. They may have feared, too, that an informant’s report would prevent them from gaining a job, particularly one requiring a government security clearance.
The committee’s impact was immediate. The then–attorney general Edward Levi ado
pted sweeping reforms in 1976, testifying that “government monitoring of individuals or groups because they hold unpopular or controversial political views is intolerable in our society.” For the first time, the nation’s domestic intelligence apparatus focused squarely on investigating actual crimes, and terrorism. No longer would it be used, as the Inspector General’s Office later said, “as avenues for intelligence collection.”
Levi’s guidelines laid out a clear protocol. For cause, agents could open preliminary and limited investigations followed by a full investigation only when specific evidence arose of “activities which involve the use of force or violence.” Use of informants was reined in, too. That included greater Justice Department oversight. The reforms triggered a precipitous drop in domestic surveillance. The number of open subversive cases, which had reached a high of fifty thousand in 1961 and hovered around forty-five thousand in 1972 when J. Edgar Hoover died, soon fell to fewer than twenty thousand. As Director William Webster later testified, domestic security investigations had fallen to fewer than five thousand in 1976, and by 1978 the FBI was “practically out of the domestic security field.”
The FBI’s in-house historian, John F. Fox, Jr., recognizes the forces that drove the agency to the lengths it took—the turbulence, the riots, the soul-consuming paranoia. Yet even he isn’t about to defend the Bureau’s actions.
“The unrest really was disturbing to people. And the federal government saw its role as trying to identify the sources of the unrest, to some extent to deal with them,” Fox told me in 2017. “And we didn’t do a terribly good job in many respects. In hindsight, of course, probably we tasked far too widely in looking at subversive ideology versus actual criminal and violent activity.”
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YET FOR ALL the reform, for all the disclosure by the Church Committee and others, we still know little, fifty years later, of the detail: Who were the informers? What motivated them? How did the government induce them to spy on their fellow citizens? A major hurdle in uncovering Withers’s role—and one that still shields the identities of countless others—is the Freedom of Information Act’s “exclusions” provision. Passed by the Reagan administration, it treats informant records as if they don’t exist. It gives the government the right to legally lie—to contend it has no records when a requestor asks about an informer. Literally, it allows a law enforcement agency to “treat the records as not subject to the requirements” of FOIA. The law aimed to protect individuals engaged in the dangerous work of informing on drug cartels. Yet it’s also used to conceal the identities of those very 1960s domestic intelligence informers the FBI now concedes had trampled the rights of wide swaths of law-abiding citizens. Short of some type of legislative relief or an executive action to selectively open some of these files, unraveling the identities of the 1960s-era surveillance state informers and their deeds remains a daunting task.
Typically, unmasked informants have lost their cover in one of two ways: through congressional hearings or an inadvertent disclosure by the government. Congressional hearings in the ’70s led to the unmasking of bookkeeper James A. Harrison as an informant inside Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to the revelation of Klan informer Gary Rowe. More recently, just as government censors failed to redact Withers’s code number, the FBI botched a 2012 FOIA release that revealed Berkeley-based Black Panthers icon Richard Aoki as an informant. These mistakes keep coming.
An FBI memo released in July 2017 names eight informers, including Withers, who were passing information to special agent William H. Lawrence in 1963. Most of those named appear to have been Klan informers.* Inadvertent disclosures like these present opportunities for discovery. But it will require work—intensive digging, research, and, likely, litigation. That costly and time-consuming responsibility will fall mostly on academia. Given its declining state and its core mission—to report current events—journalism can’t be counted on to any large extent.
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IN HIS RETIREMENT, Lawrence became a vocal defender of Hoover’s surveillance state. In an opinion piece published in 1977 by The Charlotte Observer under the headline “FBI Agent Acted in Good Faith To Protect the Nation,” he lashed out at the broad, post-Watergate assault on his former employer. “What has changed?” Lawrence wrote. “Does much of the criticism of the FBI spring from a belief that it exceeded its authority on rare occasions, or from a growing ‘fashionable’ attitude that any covert operation taken in the name of national security is somehow illegitimate?”
In Lawrence’s view, the FBI’s war on militancy was wholly justified. He wrote in his personal notes that Withers collaborated “to detect and deter violence,” motivated by “patriotism and concerns of civic morality” to protect “his family, race and community from destructive violence, and not for mere monetary gain.” Preventing violence definitely was a factor. But as the Church Committee and the Withers files demonstrate, the government’s view was often skewed. There was no evidence of any real danger to national security or civil order posed by Kathy Hunninen, Mark Allen, Bobby Doctor, Rosetta Miller, Audrey Dandridge, Allan Fuson, Jerry Fanion, O. Z. Evers, James Lawson, or any of a number of other activists or government employees whom Withers helped the FBI target. The Withers records suggest many other citizens were harmed. It may take years of digging to determine exactly how.
Consider the case of Fr. William Greenspun, the Paulist priest at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, investigated for his association with the Invaders through an outreach ministry. The FBI collected a range of his personal data. That included a January 1970 tip from Withers, who said the priest was “extremely close” to another Invaders sympathizer, Rev. Malcolm Blackburn, the white pastor at otherwise all-black Clayborn Temple. The tip hints at impropriety. Although details are redacted in the Withers settlement, a more lightly censored version of the same report released forty years earlier reveals some of what Withers reported: that Greenspun and Blackburn had taken “recent trips” together. They’d traveled to the priest’s home state of Connecticut, for example, to see his elderly father get married, Withers said. A common sentence of roughly ten words is redacted in both versions of the report. Though it is left to the imagination to fill in the blank, one could rationally speculate Withers had suggested the men were gay.
“It doesn’t surprise me. They’d do anything to smear somebody’s character,” Gloria Greenspun told me in 2017. Mrs. Greenspun knew the now-deceased cleric wasn’t gay—she’d married him in the 1970s after he left the priesthood. But she also understood that her late husband had faced great pushback for his stance on civil rights—supporting the sanitation strike, embracing Black Power militants, and giving office space to the Invaders. “I knew Bill had an FBI file. He told me that,” she said. Yes, she said. Her husband was close to Blackburn, also now deceased. But there was “no basis in reality” of the gay relationship the FBI seemed to imply. “It could have been very damaging,” she offered. Similar damaging personal details colored other FBI reports. An agent wrote in 1972 that Withers said one activist then under suspicion “is a homosexual and is known as such by members of the Negro race.” A source at the local Selective Service office once told Lawrence that a student peace activist under investigation “has furnished a doctor’s certificate certifying he is a homosexual.”
Volatile details like these gave the FBI leverage. Fleshing them out, fifty years later, is challenging. It’s hard to know how often agents acted on such information to disrupt the movement. But the Selective Service office appears to have been a much-used tool. Acting on a tip from Withers, Lawrence contacted the Draft Board trying to secure the induction of militant activist Charles Cabbage. The agent also contacted a source on the board to measure the possible induction of Cabbage’s friend, activist Coby Smith. Others likely received similar treatment. As the Memphis field office reported in 1968, it remained “continually alert” for any Selective Service violations and other legal i
nfractions by activists.
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I MISSED AN opportunity to cast more light on the surveillance in Memphis by never interviewing Withers about his FBI collaboration. It was a mistake and I regret it. But, as I’ve said, I never thought I’d write this story after Jim initially disclosed it. For me it died with James Earl Ray. When Jim wouldn’t provide the cooperation I needed, my view dimmed. I saw this story through the eyes of a reporter, through the short shelf life of news. Indeed, the flurry of reporting by local and national media on events surrounding King’s assassination quickly faded after Ray succumbed to liver disease on April 23, 1998.
I still believe I would have gotten little or nothing from Withers had I confronted him. He was asked to go public in 1978 when he testified in closed session before Congress—he declined. The following year, when he was charged in the Tennessee Clemency for Cash scandal, he never even told his defense attorney, Reed Malkin, that he’d been an informant. He could have used that detail to leverage a better deal with prosecutors. In fact, through dozens of interviews Withers gave across the decades there is just one I know of in which he discusses his relationship to the FBI. That’s the interview he gave for F. Jack Hurley’s essay in Pictures Tell The Story. His discussion of the FBI there is oblique, terse (six sentences in a 192-page book), and wholly unsatisfactory. It omits every critical detail of his service: his pay, his long tenure, the specifics of what he did.
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