4 As part of McCollough’s cover, he enrolled at Memphis State. He appears in a variety of intelligence reports that veer from pure black militancy. For example, McCollough was assigned to help monitor an August 1969 draft resistance rally. FBI memo, Draft Resistance Union of Memphis file, 100-4630-62&63 (August 25, 1969).
5 “Mr. Smith”: Transcript of the MPD statement of Walter Bailey (April 6, 1968). Questioned by Insp. Graydon Tines, Bailey agreed he’d asked officers to use the alias when phoning him through the motel switchboard. Tines contends in the report he wanted names of guests “as security measures for Dr. Martin Luther King.” intelligence officers: Author interview with Eli Arkin, Sept. 9, 1997.
6 in federal court: Ernest Withers (The HistoryMakers A2003.147), interview by Larry Crowe, 06/28/2003, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 8, Ernest Withers remembers the days preceding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s assassination. tight restrictions: Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 764.
7 FBI memos. economic boycott: 100-4105-89&90 (April 5, 1968). Withers, listed as Source One in the report, told Lawrence on April 3, 1968, about a strategy meeting he attended the night of April 2 that spilled into the early morning of April 3. The meeting comprised members of King’s SCLC executive staff; Community on the Move for Equality (COME), the ministerial alliance overseeing the sanitation strike; and the Black Organizing Project (BOP), the Black Power group also known as the Invaders. According to the twenty-page report, Withers gave Lawrence a detailed account of the meeting, including a presentation by Jesse Jackson, who spoke of his Operation Breadbasket program. Jackson spoke of plans to contact “all storekeepers or grocers” in Memphis’s black neighborhoods and insist “very emphatically” they cease selling Hart’s Bread, Wonder Bread, and Coca Cola or face a “massive Negro boycott,” the report said. Jackson also spoke of a “massive nationwide boycott” of Plough because of its hiring practices. Jackson said that Plough chairman Abe Plough was a close friend of Mayor Henry Loeb, who was fighting dues check-off for the sanitation workers. Jackson said unions, including the Teamsters, would likely cooperate, stopping nationwide shipping of Plough products. cozy: 100-4105-93&94 (April 6, 1968). According to the report, Withers, as Source One, said Hosea Williams, spoke “on the late evening of April 3, 1968,” with Invaders leaders Charles Cabbage and John B. Smith. Williams told them that he and SCLC staffer James Orange “would be willing to continue to talk with them,” as “he and Orange were probably better able emotionally to deal” with them. See also, 100-4105-89&90. Lawrence wrote that Withers told him Williams considered the Invaders “belligerent” but rationalized that “nevertheless they are Negroes” and they would have to “form a united front” and “maintain liaison with them.” “get your guns”: 157-1092-30&31 (February 27, 1968). Smith spoke at a night rally at Clayborn Temple, and has been alternatively quoted as saying, “You better get some guns” or “Get your guns,” maintaining, “You can’t pray your way out.” An unidentified source told Lawrence about Smith’s speech that night. The following morning, Withers confirmed it. Listed in the report as Source Two, the photographer said Smith said, “We have to get some guns.” “Source two stated that Smith did not call for actual fighting of the police but still emphasized on several occasions that the black people, or Negroes, should obtain guns,” Lawrence wrote.
8 FBI memo, 157-1092-273&274 (April 5, 1968). Withers said King and aides Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton ate dinner with Charles Cabbage, Edwina Harrell, and Don Neely of the Invaders.
9 FBI memo. “drop a pigeon”: 100-4105-93&94. “won’t be blackmailed”: Ibid.
10 three in four Americans: “Half of 160 Negroes In a Survey Oppose Dr. King on Vietnam,” The New York Times, May 23, 1967, 3. Marian Logan: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 600–01.
11 holocaust: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Showdown For Non-violence,” Look magazine, April 16, 1968, 23–25. In his book, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence, James A. Colaiaco featured this quote from King in a longer form in demonstrating the militant tone of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. King believed such a campaign was needed to not only reverse rampant poverty but to stem inner-city rioting. “Our nation is at a crossroads of history,” King had said in unveiling the campaign. “It is impossible to underestimate the crisis we face in America.” “Commie”…“traitor”: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 601–02.
12 The observations attributed to Lawrence here come from his personal notes handwritten in retirement. His family allowed the author to copy them.
13 Children’s Crusade: Halberstam, The Children, 438–42. against the Vietnam War: Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 576–77. Branch describes how Bevel interrupted King’s January 1967 vacation in Jamaica to lobby him about the war. Andrew Young recalled the incident like this in a January 30, 2013, interview with the author, “He said, ‘Jesus came down and sat down on the dryer while I was washing clothes. And he sat on the dryer and told me I had to get Martin Luther King to go to Vietnam and stop this war. Take a boatload of prominent citizens and put themselves on the Mekong Delta.’ I said, ‘Bevel, you know, that’s not very realistic.’ He said, ‘But I have to talk to Dr. King.’ ” burned their draft cards: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 556–57; and Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 599–600. sent copies: 100-4105-62&63.
14 FBI memo, 157-1092-256&57 (April 4, 1968). Withers, listed as Source Three in the report, drew Lawrence’s attention to a young man from Detroit who “has threatened some newsmen” and was associating with members of the Invaders.
15 See testimony of retired FBI agent William H. Lawrence, HSCA Vol. VI (November 21, 1978), 552. Lawrence testified that he spoke virtually daily with his secret informant, often by phone, or “in person under what we hoped were safe conditions.”
16 FBI Teletype, headquarters file on sanitation strike, 157-9146-X8 (February 26, 1968) (NW).
17 “Uncle Tom”…“white ministers”: Beifuss, At the River, 116–17.
18 FBI memos. “police snitchers”: 100-662-1154&55 (March 13, 1968). particularly bitter: 100-662-1158&59 (March 15, 1968).
19 put his feet up: Ernest Withers (The HistoryMakers A2003.147), interview by Larry Crowe, 06/28/2003, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 8, Ernest Withers remembers the days preceding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.
Chapter Three
1 HSCA, Final Report, Dr. Martin Luther King Findings. See pages 325–74 for discussion of the FBI’s investigation of the King murder; 441–59 for discussion of the FBI’s conspiracy investigation. The committee’s official finding states, “The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation performed a thorough investigation into the responsibility of James Earl Ray for the assassination of Dr. King, and conducted a thorough fugitive investigation, but failed to investigate adequately the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination.”
2 “Court Order Too Late; Police Burn Intelligence Files,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 11, 1976, 1. The newspaper reported that MPD burned “100 garbage bags full of domestic intelligence files” at the direction of Mayor Wyeth Chandler. The incineration at the city’s Scott Street sanitation substation came as the mayor’s office learned the ACLU was seeking a temporary restraining order in federal court. During a series of interviews with the author in 1997, Arkin said he supervised the destruction of the files.
3 Chan Kendrick et al. v. Wyeth Chandler et al., U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Order, Judgment and Decree entered September 14, 1978, by Judge Robert McRae. The order reads in part, “The provisions of this Decree prohibit the defendants and the City of Memphis from engaging in law enforcement activities which interfere with any person’s rights protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, including but not limited to, the rights to communicate an idea or belief, to speak and dissent freely, to write and to publish, and to associate privately and publicly for any lawful purpose.”
4 Ath
an Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan, 136–42. Theoharis writes that COINTELPRO “was initiated without the knowledge or authorization of either the attorney general or the president.” The FBI no longer wished to simply prosecute communist leaders, determining that “more aggressive and extralegal techniques were essential and feasible.”
5 Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., 124–34. Garrow writes that King was greatly distraught by the FBI’s tactics. “They are out to break me,” he told a friend. To another, King remarked, “They are out to get me, harass me, break my spirit.”
6 Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., 182–83. See also, Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972, 280–84.
7 HSCA MLK report, Vol. VI, 407–43. Includes a narration by chief counsel G. Robert Blakey and testimony from Marrell McCollough.
Chapter Four
1 Kevin McKenzie, “SCLC Women Honor Photographer Withers for Civil Rights Role,” The Commercial Appeal, April 6, 2003, B2. Withers, then eighty, was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award in Atlanta by Evelyn G. Lowery, founder of the SCLC Women’s Organizational Movement for Equality Now, Inc., and wife of Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, longtime SCLC president. “We kind of call him the original photographer of the civil rights movement,” Mrs. Lowery said.
2 Marshand Boone, Oral History Interview of Ernest Withers for The Civil Rights and The Press Symposium at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, 2004.
3 This quote comes from HistoryMakers interview. Session 1, tape 4, story 1, Ernest Withers recalls Memphis funeral home viewing after Dr. King’s assassination. See also, Boone, Oral History. In an October 31, 2010, interview with the author, Dr. Jerry Francisco, the surgeon who performed Dr. King’s autopsy, said Withers’s account of handling King’s “skull cap” appears accurate. “You have to remove the skull cap in order to get the brain,” Dr. Francisco said. That involves cutting out a circular or oval section of the skull that is roughly 5 by 8 inches in radius. “In order to make a complete examination you have to examine the brain…we would put the skull cap (back) in and tacked the scalp together,” Francisco said. Tacking the scalp involves a couple stitches sewn on either side of the head to ensure “it stays in place.” Embalmers generally prefer to do their own suturing of the scalp later, Francisco said. Similarly, the wounds in King’s jaw and neck were left for the embalmer to suture, the doctor said.
4 This quote comes from HistoryMakers interview, Session 1, tape 4, story 1, Ernest Withers recalls Memphis funeral home viewing after Dr. King’s assassination.
5 For more detail on Withers’s childhood in North Memphis and early adult life, see chapter 10. A discussion of the same can be found in the Chrysler Museum of Art book by Ernest C. Withers, F. Jack Hurley, Brooks Johnson, and Daniel J. Wolff, Pictures Tell The Story: Ernest C. Withers, Reflections in History, 31–55. For an analysis of the manipulation of African American voters and others in Memphis during the years of political boss E. H. Crump, see G. Wayne Dowdy, Mayor Crump Don’t Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis, 22–28.
6 This passage and quote come from a 2006 interview on Real People with Bill Waters, WKNO-TV Channel 10, the Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Memphis. See also, Ernest Withers: His Brother’s Keeper, a video biography produced in 1995 by WKNO-TV.
7 Ibid.
8 Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 38–55. WKNO-TV, Brother’s Keeper. Property records maintained by the Shelby County Register’s Office.
9 “paid very sparingly”: WKNO-TV, Brother’s Keeper. “gave me $10”: WKNO-TV, Real People with Bill Waters. produced a booklet: Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 61. See also, Maurice Berger and Thulani Davis, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
10 WKNO-TV, Real People with Bill Waters.
11 This quote comes from HistoryMakers interview, Session 1, tape 3, story 5, Ernest Withers describes dangerous moments photographing the civil rights movement.
12 Charles Cabbage interview with author, January 2010.
Chapter Five
1 This account comes from several sources, principally Hank Hillin, FBI Codename TennPar: Tennessee’s Ray Blanton Years, 248–49, 255. See also; “Memphis Club Owner Gets Five-Year Term,” CA, December 20, 1975; Michael Lollar, “Jury Calling Officers; Club Favors Suspected,” CA, December 15, 1976, 1; Jerome Wright, “Baldwin Returned As Possible Witness,” CA, January 17, 1977; Don Groff, “Baldwin Guilty in Cocaine Trial As Jurors Return Split Decision,” CA, August 23, 1977; Lawrence Buser, “FBI Informant Known for His Unlawful Acts,” CA, December 20, 1978, 3; Otis L. Sanford, “Baldwin Lists Campaign Gifts Aimed At Buying Influence,” CA, September 20, 1979.
2 “Our Hillbilly Nixon,” CA, Memphis, September 18, 1977, G4; Bill Rose, “The Hillbilly Nixon,” Knight-Ridder newspapers, January 23, 1979.
3 “Governor Promises To Pardon Slayer,” CA, September 16, 1977; Lawrence Buser, “Humphreys’ Father Bares Strain,” CA, September 22, 1977. LeRoy Williams, Jr., “Father Hits Blanton Pardon Plan,” CA, September 19, 1977. Hillin, TennPar, 1–5 and 204–205.
4 Hillin, TennPar. Cole: 108–09 and 178–82. See also, William Bennett, “Parole Cost $10,000, Ex-Convict Testifies,” CA, July 25, 1979. Prater: 124–33. See also, Peter Maas, Marie: A True Story, 128–35, 139–44, 300–303, 346–53. At trial, Prater gave conflicting accounts. He testified he saw Thompson pass Sisk an envelope of payoff money, but under cross-examination said he couldn’t swear what was in the envelope (see William Bennett, “2 Witnesses Link Thompson To Clemency-For-Cash Cases,” CA, July 28, 1979, 3).
5 Hillin, TennPar, 135.
6 Ibid. “in abeyance”: 189. “case is dead”: 230–31. In a May 2, 2012, interview Hillin told the author that politics “almost killed the case completely…The case was over. Closed. Kaput. That was it…They wanted us to shut it down.”
7 Ibid. “it’s final”: 240. “no longer under…investigation”: 242. Also, Larry Daughtery and Nancy Varley, “Sisk Claims Persecution Tactics Used,” The Tennessean, May 28, 1977, 1. The article discusses Eddie Sisk’s accusation that Hillin was on “a vendetta” and a “wild goose chase” aimed at Sisk’s “persecution.”
8 Ibid. Griffin Bell: 215–16 and 219–20. “We were foolish”: 230–31.
9 In the author’s interview with retired agent Hillin, he acknowledged the Withers–Baldwin development was critical. “All that came together at the right time,” he said. “It was an answer to prayers I’d been making. It was huge.” Hillin also cites the cooperation of Sheryl Leverett, who paid $9,500 with money supplied by the FBI for the release of her husband, John, who was sentenced to six to twenty years for armed robbery.
10 These passages from Baldwin’s closed-session testimony are found in USA v. Thomas E. Sisk et al., 79-30054 Middle District of Tennessee, Jencks Materials, Re: Art Baldwin. This file, hereafter referred to as Baldwin file, contains sworn testimony given in closed session by Baldwin to W. Hickman Ewing and U.S. attorney Mike Cody, including sessions on September 6, Sept. 8 (Vol. I) and October 10, 1977 (Vol. II). Kenneth Turner: Vol. I, 47. Minerva Johnican: Vol. I, 50. John Ford: Vol. I, 62. Additional details come from author’s interview with Ewing, December 13, 2011.
11 Ibid., Vol. I, 194.
12 Ibid. secure his release: Vol. I, 189–92. gave the pair cash: Vol. II, 101–03; Vol. II, 32, 101.
13 Ibid., Vol. II, 92–3. At another point, Baldwin says, “You can’t contact Mr. Murrell. Mr. Withers is Murrell’s go-between. You have to go through Mr. Withers to get in contact with Mr. Murrell.”
14 Hillin, TennPar, 255. Details on Withers’s solicitation of liquor from Baldwin are found in FBI reports in the author’s possession, the serial numbers redacted. The reports are a Teletype and a letterhead memo from Memphis to headquarters, both dated May 18, 1978, located in headquarters file 194-161. Withers’s solicitation also was d
escribed by Ewing in author’s interview.
15 Ibid., 271–72. Hillin describes how he and Corbett Hart traced Taylor from the highway patrol to his special duty as driver for the governor’s brother. Withers later testified in court about his tie to Taylor (see Jim Balentine, “Tapes in Court Allege Shelby Political ‘Deals,’ ” MPS, April 8, 1981.
16 Ibid., 272–73. See also, FBI reports, HQ-194-161-24. The key report is a five-page Teletype from Memphis to headquarters. Also, ME-194-39-102 and 105. These are two memos dated October 18 and 19, 1978. Hillin’s book names Taylor, but the patrolman’s name is redacted in the FBI reports. See also, Maas, Marie: A True Story, 402–03.
17 FBI Teletype, 194-161-26 (September 20, 1978).
18 Hillin, TennPar, 292–96.
19 In testimony at trial, FBI agent Corbett Hart discussed numbers of secret tapes recorded in the final push to take down the Clemency for Cash conspirators. See USA v. Thomas E. Sisk et al., U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, 79-30054, Benson trial transcript (April 9, 1981), 1412–1634, and “Excerpt of Proceedings” (April 9, 1981), 1–15.
20 For a detailed account of the final takedown, see Hillin, TennPar, 335–61. Benson’s arrest is found on page 356; Sisk’s on 357–58. See also Maas, Marie: A True Story, 404–05.
21 USA v. Ernest Columbus Withers and John Paul “J.P.” Murrell, CR-79-20009-1, Western District of Tennessee. See “Order to Surrender” (Nov. 27, 1979). Though Withers’s attorney asked he be placed in a halfway house in Memphis, the order required Withers to report to the federal prison camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery at noon on December 13, 1979.
22 year in prison…six months suspended: USA v. Withers, Judgment order (November 13, 1979). Though Withers’s involvement ran deep in the Clemency for Cash case, prosecutors considered his role in the extortion case to be minor. “He more or less did what Mr. Murrell told him to do. He was more or less a bagman,” prosecutor Dan Clancy told the court. “I suggest to the court that Mr. Withers has suffered a lot.” Nonetheless, Judge Harry W. Wellford insisted Withers serve at least six months of his sentence behind bars given he’d been a law enforcement officer. testify in two trials: Otis L. Sanford, “Guilt Is Admitted in Extortion Case,” CA, August 7, 1979.
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