A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

17 For a discussion of the Blaine controversy and other incidents leading to the integration of the Memphis Police Department, including the police slaying of sanitation worker James Mosby, see Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle, 81–111.

  18 Details on Ernest Withers’s police hiring, training, and career come from his police personnel file, in the author’s possession. See also HistoryMakers interview, Session 1, tape 4, story 4, Ernest Withers remembers his time as a Memphis, Tennessee police officer.

  19 David Acey’s quote is from WKNO-TV, Brother’s Keeper.

  20 Lawrence and Withers may have met briefly in May 1948 when the agent helped conduct a loyalty investigation of the photographer’s friend Howard Cash, who was applying for a job as a postal carrier. Cash and Withers had served together in the army and later joined a veteran’s group included on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. The probe uncovered no subversive activity by Cash, who passed his check and served a long career with the Post Office. Though Withers was unwittingly interviewed by a Bureau informant, it’s uncertain if he and Lawrence actually met then. See FBI report, “Loyalty of Government Employees,” 121-3958-6, (May 19, 1948), from the Memphis field office. See also, FBI, 100-344537-40, “United Negro and Allied Veterans of America,” an October 4, 1946, report by the Houston field office.

  21 Author’s interview with retired Capt. Jerry D. Williams, October 7, 2014. See also, Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 52–53.

  22 Ernest Withers MPD personnel file. For a characterization of Quianthy’s police career, see “Lee Quianthy Rites Monday—Led Fearless Crime Fight,” CA, March 1, 1968.

  23 See WKNO-TV, Brother’s Keeper. Also, HistoryMakers interview, Session 1, tape 4, story 4, Ernest Withers remembers his time as a Memphis, Tennessee police officer; Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 53–54.

  24 Withers personnel file. The file includes four transcribed hearing interviews—one each with Withers, Johnson, his mother Mary Johnson, and liquor store owner Joe Raffanti—along with other reports.

  25 Jim Willis, “Photographer Recalls His Varied Vocations,” MPS, May 2, 1975.

  26 Author’s interview with Williams. The retired captain’s account of long-running corruption has many points of corroboration. For a discussion of payoffs received by Memphis lawmen during Prohibition, see Dowdy, Mayor Crump Don’t Like It, 45–48.

  Chapter Eleven

  1 Precisely what happened that day between fourteen-year-old Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant, twenty-one, has been the subject of much conjecture and controversy through the years. Among the most recent accounts is Timothy B. Tyson’s painstakingly researched The Blood of Emmett Till, based, in part, on an interview with an elderly Bryant, who backpedals on much of her original story. She had testified at trial that Till grabbed her by the waist and spoke obscenities. “That part isn’t true,” Bryant confessed to Tyson. She confirmed what witnesses have consistently said, that Till whistled at her as he was leaving. But Bryant was adamant: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

  2 This account is taken from a variety of sources, primarily: The transcript of the Emmett Till murder trial at Sumner, Mississippi, September 21, 1955 (the transcript is included in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2006 reexamination of the Till murder); Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, 17–20; John N. Popham, “Brothers Admitted Till Abduction, Sheriff Says,” New York Times News Service as published in The Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1955, 1; Chicago Tribune Press Service, “Kidnap Admissions Told At ‘Whistle’ Trial,” as published in The Washington Post, 59.

  3 References to photos Withers shot before the Till trial come from “Items Top Baptist Confab Slate,” TSD, September 3, 1955, 1. Also, “Slate of Top Events On Convention Program,” TSD, September 10, 1955, 1.

  4 WKNO-TV, Brother’s Keeper.

  5 The story quickly caught on in the black press and later in the larger media. See, “Is Mississippi Hushing Up A Lynching: Mississippi Gunmen Take Life,” Jet magazine, May 26, 1955, 8–11. Also, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “The Grim and Overlooked Anniversary of the Murder of the Rev. George W. Lee, Civil Rights Activist,” The History News Network, George Mason University, May 9, 2005. And, Simeon Booker and Carol McCabe Booker, Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, 20–21.

  6 See “ ‘KKK’ Strikes; Minister Slain Gangland Style,” TSD, May 14, 1955, 1.

  7 For more on the federal investigation of Lee’s murder see Booker, Shocking the Conscience, 24–25.

  8 Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 68–70.

  9 pictures attributed to staff writer Moses J. Newson: TSD, September 17, 1955, 5. photo of Till’s mutilated face: TSD, September 10, 1955, 1. appears shaky at best: Among the most credible sources making the claim is bestselling author Timothy B. Tyson, who writes in The Blood of Emmett Till on page 75 that both Jet photographer David Jackson and Withers “snapped pictures of Emmett’s body at the (Chicago) funeral home, Withers a close up and Jackson a full-body shot.” Tyson continues: “Withers’s close-up of Emmett’s face, published in Jet on September 15, four days before Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam went on trial for the killing, was passed around at barbershops, beauty parlors, college campuses, and black churches, reaching millions of people. Perhaps no photograph in history can lay claim to a comparable impact in black America.” However, Jet reporter Simeon Booker, who accompanied Jackson to the A. A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home on September 2 when Till’s body arrived from Mississippi, gives credit to only Jackson (see Simeon Booker, “Best Civil Rights Cameraman In Business Dies,” Jet, April 21, 1966, and Booker, Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, 62). Additionally, a 2016 Time magazine production, “100 Photos: The Most Influential Images of All Time,” credits only David Jackson with the Till death photos. “I was told by the Johnson Archive that all the photos they sent me were taken by Jackson,” Time producer Paul Moakley said in an e-mail to the author. Withers didn’t take credit for any of the death photos in Pictures Tell The Story or in key interviews with WKNO-TV and The HistoryMakers digital archive. One possibility for the confusion involves the 1955 pamphlet Withers produced, the “Complete Photo Story of Till Murder Case.” It includes one of the death pictures. However, in the foreword to Pictures Tell The Story, Brooks Johnson notes the photos in the pamphlet were shot “mostly by Withers.” If Withers did shoot any of the death photos, he probably did it independently of the Booker-Jackson visit. He would have had to travel to Chicago, where the teen’s body arrived on Friday, September 2, 1955, taken pictures sometime over the weekend while the body was on display, then quickly returned to Memphis. On the morning of Till’s September 6, 1955, Chicago funeral, Withers was in Memphis, shooting pictures for the National Baptist Convention there (see Withers photos, TSD, September 10, 1955, 1 [bottom of page].

  10 “8-Man Team Covers Till Case Trial,” TSD, September 24, 1955, 1.

  11 Characterizations of the open racism at the trial are found at: L. Alex Wilson, “Jim Crow Press At Trial; Frisk Newsmen: Picking of Jury Delays Opening,” TSD, September 24, 1955, 1; Booker, Shocking the Conscience, 65–66. See also, HistoryMakers interview, Session 1, tape 2, story 8, Ernest Withers discusses his experience covering the Emmett Till murder trial.

  12 This account of Withers in the courtroom comes from Booker, Shocking the Conscience, 74.

  13 See Corbis Images online photo gallery, http://www.corbisimages.com/​stock-photo/​rights-managed/​U1292863INP/​mose-wright-testifying?popup=1.

  14 For Withers’s accounts of selling the Mose Wright photo see: WKNO-TV, Waters interview; Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 60.

  15 Ernest Withers and Daniel Wolff, The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs, 9.

  16 This account comes from a 1951 statement by Withers in his MPD perso
nnel file, in author’s possession.

  17 WKNO-TV, Brother’s Keeper. See also Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 43.

  18 See Ernest C. Withers and Daniel Wolff, Negro League Baseball. The book explores the detail of Withers’s storied history chronicling baseball in Memphis.

  19 Shelby County property records.

  20 Edmund Orgill: “Tells Plan of Action,” TSD, October 29, 1955, 1. murdered in a lounge: “Reward for Slayer of M. Young,” and “Where Brutal Murder Occurred,” TSD, December 24, 1955, 1.

  21 “Baffling Mystery Cloaks Violent Death of 11-Year-Old Boy On Mississippi Farm; Victim of Another Puzzling Death in Mississippi,” TSD, November 5, 1955, 1.

  22 “Gus Courts, Miss. NAACP Head Tells How He Was Shot Down; Mississippi’s Fourth Victim of Violence Escapes Death,” TSD, December 3, 1955.

  23 Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, 120. See also Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 23–24.

  24 Wilson, “Gives On-Spot Report Of How Montgomery Ended Racial Segregation on Its Buses,” TSD, December 29, 1956, 1.

  25 WKNO-TV, Waters interview.

  26 See “In Montgomery: An Exciting Day For Thousands,” TSD, December 29, 1956, 1.

  Chapter Twelve

  1 Author’s interview with Moses Newson, Nov. 4, 2014.

  2 For a characterization of the Little Rock school crisis see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63, 222–24. Regarding the beating of L. Alex Wilson and Eisenhower’s use of federal troops see Benjamin Fine, “President Threatens To Use U.S. Troops, Orders Rioters In Little Rock To Desist; Mob Compels 9 Negroes to Leave School; Eisenhower Irate; Says Federal Orders ‘Cannot Be Flouted With Impunity,’ ” The New York Times, September 24, 1957, 1; Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 176–80.

  3 Withers’s photo is reproduced in Withers et al., Pictures Tell The Story, 66.

  4 FBI report, “James Rufus Foreman aka James Forman,” September 6, 1961, “Racial Situation in Fayette County” file (hereafter called FBI Little Rock report), ME-100-3595-Sub A-100A. Pages 6 and 7 of this report discuss Withers’s September 28, 1958, visit to the FBI office in Little Rock.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid., 8–9.

  7 Wil Haygood, “The Man From Jet,” The Washington Post, July 15, 2007. Booker used his rapport with the FBI to get stories like “The Negro in the FBI” (Ebony, September 1962), in which Hoover discussed the agency’s handful of black agents. Despite his cooperation, Booker didn’t always get the protection he desired. He was with two busloads of Freedom Riders when they were viciously attacked in Alabama in May 1961. Kenneth O’Reilly writes in Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 that Booker called the FBI’s Cartha DeLoach before the activists reached Anniston, Alabama, where one of the buses was firebombed (see 83–84). Agents watched as vigilantes entered the second bus and beat two riders. The FBI “demonstrated a remarkable tolerance for police brutality” as it maintained a “cozy relationship” with segregationist Southern law enforcement (110–14), O’Reilly wrote.

  8 considered the photographer as a PCI: FBI identification report, January 6, 1958, released May 15, 2012, pursuant to The Commercial Appeal’s litigation and identified as FBI-Withers-886. The report involves a background check performed at headquarters on Withers on behalf of the Memphis office’s consideration of him as a PCI.

  9 Newson interview.

  10 In Racial Matters, O’Reilly (see 107–08) makes a distinction between movement people who had innocent contacts with the FBI and those who “named names” or who took injurious actions. On one end was Julia Brown, a Cleveland informant who worked covertly with the FBI for nine years and whose testimony in 1962 caused eighteen people to be called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer charges that they were Communists. On the other end were pillars of the movement like James Farmer, A. Phillip Randolph, and Andrew Young, who occasionally alerted the FBI to their travel itineraries. “Similarly, John Lewis said the FBI often called Julian Bond at the SNCC offices ‘to find out what was going on or should they be notified, that sort of thing,’ ” O’Reilly reports. Many times, such individuals believed they were merely “informing on themselves”—most often because of the need for protection. Even the radical H. Rap Brown contacted the FBI at times. “When you were down South and something happened you’d call the FBI,” he once wrote.

  11 no records responsive: See Memphis Publishing Co. and Marc Perrusquia v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, case 1:10-cv-01878-ABJ, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Specifically, see “Defendant’s Opposition To Plaintiff’s Motion For Summary Judgment and Memorandum In Support of Its Cross-Motion For Summary Judgment,” hereafter referred to as “Defendant’s Opposition,” filed June 15, 2011, Exhibit D: A letter dated July 31, 2008, to Perrusquia from David M. Hardy, section chief of the FBI’s record information dissemination section. “therefore denied…The FBI denies”: Plaintiff’s “Complaint For Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” filed November 3, 2010, and defendant’s Answer, filed December 6, 2010.

  12 Rome and Billy Withers interview aired by WMC-TV Channel 5 on July 15, 2012. During an uncut version of the interview, the brothers indicated the FBI provided some protection to their father who was often out on dangerous news assignments. If agents asked him questions, “it’s like an obligation to discuss it,” Billy Withers said.

  13 Christine N. Walz and Charles D. Tobin, “The FOIA ‘Exclusions’ Statute: The Government’s License to Lie,” Communications Lawyer, March 2014. See also, Attorney General’s Memorandum on the 1986 Amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, Edwin Meese III, December 1987, http://www.justice.gov/​oip/​86agmemo.htm. Regarding the (c) (2) exclusion aimed at the “threatened identification of confidential informants,” Meese says the provision “contemplates the situation in which a sophisticated requester could try to ferret out an informant in his organization.” The exclusions, used for “especially sensitive law enforcement matters,” provide complete opaqueness, he said: “In other words, an agency applying an exclusion in response to a FOIA request will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

  14 See Memphis Publishing Co. et al. v. FBI, “Defendant’s Opposition,” 40. See also, Exhibit 2 of same, “Declaration of Dennis J. Argall,” 16.

  15 Ibid., “Defendant’s Opposition”: Argall deposition, 19; and Exhibit X, Part 1, 12.

  16 Ibid., Memorandum Opinion by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, January 31, 2012, 17.

  17 Ibid., Notice of Filing of Vaughn index, July 2, 2012, 4–7.

  18 Ibid., Notice of filing of Vaughn index, July 2, 2012.

  19 Ibid., Motion to Vacate Order on Motion to Compel, August 2, 2012; Sealed document, In Camera, Ex Parte Declaration of Dr. John F. Fox, Jr., August 2, 2012; Motion for Reconsideration, August 17, 2012; Notice of Appeal to DC Circuit Court, September 28, 2012.

  20 Ibid., status conference, August 28, 2012, 6.

  21 Settlement agreement, February 22, 2013.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1 FBI report, “Racial Situation in Tennessee, Fayette and Haywood Counties, Racial Matters,” ME-157-184-22 (January 24, 1962), hereafter called FBI Rush report.

  2 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), book II, 175; book III, 449–51, 479–81.

  3 The Justice Department stymied prosecution of suspected subversives in 1956 in the wake of the Junius Scales case. DOJ advised that prosecution under the Smith Act required “an actual plan for a violent revolution.” According to the Church Committee, “the FBI kept on investigating ‘subversive’ organizations ‘from an intelligence viewpoint’ to appraise their ‘strength’ and ‘dangerousness.’ ” (Church Committee, book III, 449.)

  4 Withers’s eighteen-year tenure as a domestic intelligence informer is a long one in comparison to exa
mples listed by the Church Committee: a woman reported on the Vietnam Veterans Against the War for seventeen months; Ku Klux Klan informant Gary Rowe operated for six years.

  5 FBI report, “West Tennessee Voters Project” file, ME-157-646-180 (September 3, 1965) and 157-646-1A-3 (August 5, 1965). Lawrence told Sullivan a third person in the picture was Henry Brim Balser, a Cornell student who, he said, had participated in an antiwar demonstration at the school’s spring 1965 ROTC ceremony.

  6 Author interview with Daniel S. Beagle, May 14, 2015.

  7 By some accounts, no black person had voted in Haywood County since Reconstruction. See William Bennett, “Negroes Claim Vote Prevented,” CA, July 29, 1959. The account of the government’s litigation in Fayette and Haywood counties comes from multiple sources but is perhaps best summarized in two documents by Justice Department lawyer J. Harold Flannery. The papers are both found in the University of Memphis Special Collections’ Tent City Collection. The first, a March 14, 1960, memo to Henry Putzel, Jr., chief of DOJ’s voting and elections section, is found in box 10 folder 16; the other, a February 26, 1963, letter to James R. Prickett, is in box 10 folder 26. See also, “Evictions Case Is Legal First,” CA, December 16, 1960; and United States of America v. Herbert Atkeison et al., civil action 4131, filed December 14, 1960, in the Western District of Tennessee.

  8 Simeon Booker, “Negroes Who Live In Tents Because They Voted,” Jet, December 29, 1960, 12–16.

  9 “Cold War in Fayette County,” Ebony, September 1960, 27–34. Also: “Tent City Negroes Hail Injunctions, Say They’ll Not Return to Fields,” Washington Post, December 31, 1960; and “Negroes Cheered By Eviction Curb,” The New York Times, December 31, 1960.

  10 O’Reilly, Racial Matters, 51–53.

  11 In the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Lawrence’s duties began shifting. He received a week of civil rights law training in 1956 in Washington. (Lawrence personnel file, January 31, 1956, memo.) As the civil rights period deepened, the agent took on dual roles, investigating civil rights activists and the people who antagonized them.