Ernest Withers: Civil Rights Photographer, FBI Informant
Sameea Kamal
Sep 15, 2010
Ernest Withers was known by many as "the original civil rights
photographer." He captured the iconic images of Martin Luther King
Jr. on the night King was shot in Memphis, and other leaders of the
movement in the 1960s.
However, Withers reported in more ways than just his photography he
was also an FBI informant.
After a two year investigation conducted by Memphis newspaper The
Commercial Appeal, the famous civil rights photographer was
discovered to have provided the FBI with details about where King was
staying and information on his meeting with black militants on April
3, 1968 the day before his assassination.
According to the newspaper, Withers' spying went beyond just Martin
Luther King, Jr.
FBI reports indicated that the photographer collaborated for years
with FBI agents to monitor the civil rights movement.
The reports reveal a covert, previously unknown side of the beloved
photographer," according to the paper's Marc Perrusquia.
The paper's investigation showed how Withers assisted J. Edgar
Hoover, a controversial FBI director who long covertly monitored King
and others considered radicals.
Withers gave the FBI a "front-row seat" to the civil rights and
anti-war movements in Memphis, according to The Commercial Appeal.
Withers is an iconic figure in Memphis, with a namesake museum is
scheduled to open in October. However, the impacts by these
revelations remain to be seen.
Withers reportedly provided information on various groups like the
Invaders, a militant black power group, church leaders, politicians
and business owners. Experts believe Withers was paid for spying.
D'Army Bailey, a retired Memphis judge and former activist once
watched by the FBI, told the paper that the agency's covert tactics
are something you would expect in the most ruthless, totalitarian regimes.
The newspaper's investigation was a two year struggle. The newspaper
submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain Withers'
informant file, which the Justice Department rejected, and refused to
acknowledge it existed.
The government did, however, release "369 pages related to a 1970s
public corruption probe that targeted Withers -- by then a state
employee who was taking payoffs -- carefully redacting references to
informants -- with one notable exception," said Perrusquia.
In those documents, the government inadvertently left a single
reference to Withers' informant number, which unlocked the secret of
the photographer's 1960s political spying when the newspaper located
repeated references to the number in other FBI reports released under
FOIA 30 years ago, the newspaper reported.
The revelation comes weeks after a lawsuit filed against the FBI by
the American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San
Francisco Bay Guardian after the federal agency failed to comply with
a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain records on
surveillance against Muslim communities in Northern California.
Filed in March of this year, the request requires the FBI to disclose
records to show 'whether and how' they are investigating Islamic
centers and mosques, Christian churches and Jewish synagogues,
"assessing" religious leaders, and whether the agency is infiltrating
communities using undercover agents and informants.
Adel Somaha, a community activist in the Bay Area currently studying
criminal justice, said he was personally approached by the FBI after
sending a letter to the agency's chief officer, expressing concerns
about ways to resolve issues facing the Yemeni community.
A U.S. citizen with a U.S. custom seal, Somaha had previously worked
with Congresswoman Barbara Lee to discuss challenges the community faces.
Somaha wrote that he looked forward resolving these issues for the
benefit of both nations. After sending his letter, Somaha received a
call from an FBI agent, who said he had gotten his information and
picture from the police academy that he was a part of.
The agent wanted to meet with Somaha at both his home and office,
which Somaha refused. Instead, he agreed to meet at a public location
in Oakland.
"His questions were very personal questions," Somaha said of the
meeting. "They had nothing to do with the concerns in that letter.
They were just leading to 'what do you think, are you the right
person to work for us?,' asking me to spy."
The Bay Area resident said he was told they were looking for people like him.
"I can see things that they can't see," he said. "But we need our
mosques to be free of hate. They're places of spiritual education,
not spy stations."
The fear of investigation impacts the communities by causing fear,
stress, and prevents development, education and growth, he said.
"We claim to be a diverse society, but there's no telling who's going
to be the next target," he said.
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Charges That a Civil Rights Hero Was an FBI Spy Shouldn't Shock Us
by Barbara Ransby
September 15 2010
I was up late the other night going over barely legible copies of
declassified FBI documents from the 1940s and 1950s. I'm researching
Eslanda and Paul Robeson, and the FBI documents reveal the enormous
resources the government expended to spy on the Robesons for more
than two decades. I was not surprised, then, when I woke up the next
day to this week's blockbuster news about Ernest Withers, a
distinguished black photographer who died in 2007 and who, the
Memphis Commercial Appeal declares, was paid by the FBI to spy on
civil rights movement leaders during the 1960s.
The news came as a shock to many who knew Withers, including close
friends and allies of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a trusted
photojournalist who was allowed into private, intimate gatherings
where others could not go. But as I think of how government
surveillance schemes have worked over the years, Withers' story
should not be too much of a surprise. I don't know if the allegations
against Withers are true; I have not seen the original documents. But
I can say, from what I know of other informants and other cases, that
it is wholly plausible.
In my research on civil rights movement organizer Ella Baker years
ago, I scoured hundreds of letters, memos, and reports from various
anonymous FBI informants. As I read, I wondered to myself, did she
know she was being spied upon? Who were these people prying into her
life and work? What a betrayal! Many of the documents explain why the
informants were credible. They explain that he or she was "trusted"
by the subject and therefore was a reliable source. Some documents
explain that "the informant called the subject under the pretext of
inviting her to dinner, and asked…" some detail the FBI needed to
undermine Baker's activism. Reading these documents, you have the
unsettling feeling that her spies were not unfriendly strangers or
hostile interrogators, but people who were friends and even
confidants. Such was the the unsavory nature of the FBI's work on the
civil rights movement, and it mirrors how the anti-communist witch
hunts of the McCarthy era unfolded.
Still, it was hardly unique. The Black Panther Party, an anti-police
brutality group that grew into a larger political organization in the
late 1960s, was a special target of FBI surveillance. The COINTELPRO
(Counter Intelligence) unit of the FBI was set up to focus largely on
monitoring and undermining the activities of the Panthers, whose
chapters eventually stretched from New York to Detroit to Oakland.
They often reached out to disaffected urban youth who were angry and
beaten down by the system, and didn't know where to direct their
frustrations. The Panthers offered a target for that anger, and an
analysis to explain it. However, the nature of their work meant their
recruits were often vulnerable. So, when the FBI looked to for spies,
it turned to the Panther members themselves.
The tragic police killing of young Panther leaders Fred Hampton and
Mark Carter in their home in Chicago in 1969 was one result. The
person who later admitted to setting Hampton and Carter up, telling
the police all the details of where they were sleeping and how the
apartment was laid out, was viewed as a committed organization
insider. Informant William O'Neal was so trusted that he was one of
party chair Fred Hampton's bodyguards in 1969. Twenty-one years
later, on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, O'Neal killed himself.
His relatives speculated that he spied on the Panthers to save
himself from prison time for an unrelated offense.
These stories remind us not only that our government has routinely
violated the basic civil liberties of so many black activists over
several generations, but it reminds us of the complexities and
limitations of presumed racial loyalty. The Black Press was given
access to movement events and meetings in the 1960s that white
reporters were not. Why? It was assumed that a level of racial
solidarity and loyalty existed. Maybe that was true. But maybe it
wasn't. We continue to project false expectations onto politicians
and self-appointed race leaders because of phenotype rather than
politics, ideas and other more tangible markers of "loyalty" to
oppressed people. Everyone who looks like "us" is not a friend, and
everyone who looks different is not automatically the enemy. This is
a simple lesson that some of us still have to learn.
Who knows what motivated Ernest Withers, if the reports are indeed
true, to use his access to the civil rights movement's inner circles
to aid the FBI and undermine the movement. Was it naivete, fear,
greed or a combination of all three? Whatever the motives, his case
is not unique.
Anyone interested in a glimpse into the extensive FBI surveillance of
1960s black leaders and activists, and many others, can go to the
electronic reading room of the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act)
section on FBI.gov. Commonly requested files are online. Searching
Dr. King's name yields tens of thousands of documents. Others who
were secretly investigated by the FBI include: United Farm Workers
leader Ceasar Chavez; the venerable scholar, writer and activist,
W.E. B. DuBois; and even the Black contralto, Marian Anderson. The
agency cast its net widely.
Perhaps the best contemporary parallel to rampant and often unchecked
governmental surveillance of activists in the 1960s is the current
and persistent hype about the threat of terrorism. There remains much
fear-mongering about domestic terroristslurking in sleeper cells,
living next door, waiting to leap into action to cause untold havoc
and mayhem at any moment. This kind of hysteria recruits spies, some
who might have only their suspicions to offer, suspicions often
animated by racism and xenophobia. Since 9/11, Arab Americans and
American Muslims have suffered some of the results of overzealous
citizen spying. We know that there was also illegal warrantless
eavesdropping on U.S. peace groups in recent years by the National
Security Agency. And "Democracy Now!" and other alternative media
reported in June that the State Department is reviving its domestic
spying program under a new name, replacing the TALON (Threat and
Local Observation Notice), which was deemed illegal and shut down
several years ago.
Withers may be gone, but government spying on American citizens
engaged in many kinds of oppositional activity seems to be alive and well.
--------
Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant to spy on civil
rights movement
http://www.commercialappeal.com//news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withers-fbi-informant/
He provided agency with insider's view of volatile period
By Marc Perrusquia
Posted September 12, 2010
At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it,
splashed across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting.
Instinctively, Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn't just a
murder. This was history.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting
with aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle.
Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.
Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street
newsman made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel -- King's room
-- and walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked.
After all, this was Ernest C. Withers. He'd marched with King, and
sat in on some of the movement's sensitive strategy meetings.
A veteran freelancer for America's black press, Withers was known as
"the original civil rights photographer," an insider who'd covered it
all, from the Emmett Till murder that jump-started the movement in
1955 to the Little Rock school crisis, the integration of Ole Miss
and, now, the 1968 sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis and
his death.
As other journalists languished in the Lorraine courtyard, Withers'
camera captured the scene:
Bernard Lee, tie undone, looking weary yet fiery.
Andrew Young raising his palm to keep order.
Ben Hooks and Harold Middlebrook gazing pensively as King's briefcase
sits nearby, opened, as if awaiting his return.
The grief-stricken aides photographed by Withers on April 4, 1968,
had no clue, but the man they invited in that night was an FBI
informant -- evidence of how far the agency went to spy on private
citizens in Memphis during one of the nation's most volatile periods.
Withers shadowed King the day before his murder, snapping photos and
telling agents about a meeting the civil rights leader had with
suspected black militants.
He later divulged details gleaned at King's funeral in Atlanta,
reporting that two Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffers
blamed for an earlier Beale Street riot planned to return to Memphis
"to resume ... support of sanitation strike'' -- to stir up more
trouble, as the FBI saw it.
The April 10, 1968, report, which identifies Withers only by his
confidential informant number -- ME 338-R -- is among numerous
reports reviewed by The Commercial Appeal that reveal a covert,
previously unknown side of the beloved photographer who died in 2007 at age 85.
Those reports portray Withers as a prolific informant who, from at
least 1968 until 1970, passed on tips and photographs detailing an
insider's view of politics, business and everyday life in Memphis'
black community.
As a foot soldier in J. Edgar Hoover's domestic intelligence program,
Withers helped the FBI gain a front-row seat to the civil rights and
anti-war movements in Memphis.
Much of his undercover work helped the FBI break up the Invaders, a
Black Panther-styled militant group that became popular in
disaffected black Memphis in the late 1960s and was feared by city leaders.
Yet, Withers focused on mainstream Memphians as well.
Personal and professional details of Church of God in Christ Bishop
G.E. Patterson (then a pastor with a popular radio show), real estate
agent O.W. Pickett, politician O. Z. Evers and others plumped FBI
files as the bureau ran a secret war on militancy.
When community leader Jerry Fanion took cigarettes to jailed
Invaders, agents took note. Agents wrote reports when Catholic Father
Charles Mahoney befriended an Invader, when car dealer John T. Fisher
offered jobs to militants, when Rev. James Lawson planned a trip to
Czechoslovakia and when a schoolteacher loaned his car to a suspected radical.
Each report has a common thread -- Withers.
As a so-called racial informant -- one who monitored race-related
politics and "hate'' organizations -- Withers fed agents a steady
flow of information.
Records indicate he snapped and handed over photos of St. Patrick
Catholic Church priests who supported the city's striking sanitation
workers; he monitored political candidates, jotted down auto tag
numbers for agents, and once turned over a picture of an employee of
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said to be "one who will give aid
and comfort to the black power groups." In an interview this year,
that worker said she came within a hearing of losing her job.
"It's something you would expect in the most ruthless, totalitarian
regimes,'' said D'Army Bailey, a retired Memphis judge and former
activist who came under FBI scrutiny in the '60s. The spying touched
a nerve in black America and created mistrust that many still
struggle with 40 years later.
"Once that trust is shattered that doesn't go away,'' Bailey said.
In addition to spying on citizens, Hoover's FBI ran a covert
operation, called COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence or "dirty
tricks'' program that attempted to disrupt radical movements. It did
this with tactics such as leaking embarrassing details to the news
media, targeting individuals with radical views for prosecution or
trying to get them fired from jobs. First launched in the 1950s to
fight communism, by 1967 it was aimed at a range of civil rights
leaders and organizations deemed to be threats to national security.
Congressional inquiries later exposed it for widespread abuse of
personal and political freedoms, including a fierce campaign against King.
Yet much of the detail of the FBI's domestic spying, including the
inner workings of its informant network in Memphis, remain untold.
Tracing Withers' steps through thousands of pages of federal records
reveals substantial new details about the extent of the FBI's
surveillance of private citizens.
In Withers, who ran a popular Beale Street photography studio
frequented by the powerful and ordinary alike, the FBI found a
super-informant, one who, according to an FBI report, proved "most
conversant with all key activities in the Negro community.''
"He was the perfect source for them. He could go everywhere with a
perfect, obvious professional purpose,'' said Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian David Garrow, who, along with retired Marquette University
professor Athan Theoharis, reviewed the newspaper's findings.
Many political informants from the civil rights era were unwitting,
unpaid dupes. Yet Withers, who was assigned a racial informant number
and produced a large volume of confidential reports, fits the profile
of a closely supervised, paid informant, experts say.
"It would be shocking to me that he wasn't paid,'' said Theoharis,
author of the books "Spying on Americans" and "The Boss: J. Edgar
Hoover and the Great American Inquisition".
"Once you get to this level if you're a criminal informant versus a
source of information they're at a higher level. They're controlled.
They're supervised,'' said Theoharis, who discerns a valuable lesson
in the revelation of Withers' political spying.
"It speaks to the problem of secrecy. The government is able to do
things in the shadows that are really questionable. That goes to the
heart of our (democratic) society.''
It's uncertain what impact the revelation will have on Withers'
legacy. The photographer was lionized in the final years of his life.
Four books of his photography were published, exhibits of his work
made international tours and a building on Beale Street was named for
him. Congressman Steve Cohen proposed a yet-unfunded $396,000 earmark
for a museum, set to open next month, to preserve Withers' archives.
Yet, even 40 years after the fact, the FBI still aggressively guards
the secret of Withers' activities. The one record that would pinpoint
the breadth and detail of his undercover work -- his informant file
-- remains sealed. The Justice Department has twice rejected the
newspaper's Freedom of Information requests to copy that file, and
won't even acknowledge the file exists.
Responding to the newspaper's requests, the government instead
released 369 pages related to a 1970s public corruption probe that
targeted Withers -- by then a state employee who was taking payoffs
-- carefully redacting references to informants -- with one notable exception.
Censors overlooked a single reference to Withers' informant number.
That number, in turn, unlocked the secret of the photographer's 1960s
political spying when the newspaper located repeated references to
the number in other FBI reports released under FOIA 30 years ago.
Those reports -- more than 7,000 pages comprising the FBI's files on
the 1968 sanitation strike and a 1968-70 probe of the Invaders -- at
times pinpoint specific actions by Withers and in other instances
show he was one of several informants contributing details.
Witness accounts and Withers' own photos provided further
corroborating details.
"This is the first time I've heard of this in my life,'' said
daughter Rosalind Withers, trustee of her father's photo collection,
who said she wants to see documentation before commenting at length.
"My father's not here to defend himself. That is a very, very,
strong, strong accusation. "
A son, Rome Withers, who runs his own Memphis photography business,
said he, too, was unaware of his father's secret FBI work, but
doesn't believe it diminishes his courageous work documenting the
civil rights movement.
"He had been harassed, beaten, shot at. He was a victim'' who often
faced hostile mobs and violent police forces. "At that time, when you
are the only black on the scene, you're in an intimidating state.''
Andrew Young, now 78, said he isn't bothered that Withers secretly
worked as an informant while snapping civil rights history.
"I always liked him because he was a good photographer. And he was
always (around)," he said. Young viewed Withers as an important
publicity tool because his work often appeared in Jet magazine and
other high-profile publications. The movement was transparent and
didn't have anything to hide anyway, he said.
"I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money
on the side.''
* * *
There was a time in 1968 and 1969 when Lance "Sweet Willie Wine''
Watson was considered the most dangerous man in Memphis. As "prime
minister'' of the Invaders, a self-styled militant organization whose
rhetoric included overthrowing the government, Watson frightened
black and white Memphians alike. The FBI assembled a huge file on him.
Today, Watson, who goes by the name Suhkara Yahweh, is more
conciliatory. He runs a community development organization in his
impoverished South Memphis neighborhood and ministers to youths and the needy.
Still, he decorates his living room with mementos: A bumper sticker
reading "Damn the Army, Join the Invaders''; a glass case containing
a military-styled jacket with "Invaders'' emblazoned on the back; and
a portrait of Ernest Withers displayed prominently over his fireplace.
"That's my daddy,'' Yahweh, 71, said one afternoon last winter,
relating how Withers often gave him money and advice.
"If he was (an informant) I don't know anything about it ... He would
call me his son. Right now, I'm still part of the family. I talked to
Rome (son Andrew Jerome Withers) just the other day. I talked to
(Ernest) on his death bed.''
It's a testament to the FBI's effectiveness that the dreaded "Willie
Wine'' had no clue that Withers was constantly informing on him.
Wine was in Atlanta possibly to "con'' money out of the SCLC, reports
indicate the informant told agents. He reported Wine's girlfriend was
pregnant; that Wine was a thief. That Wine and his cohorts had
cat-called voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer at a gathering at
old Club Paradise.
As informant ME 338-R, Withers had plenty to tell the FBI in November
1968 when Willie Wine and others seized the administration building
at LeMoyne-Owen College. What started as a dispute over student
grievances escalated into rebellion when student leaders called in
the Invaders and the local chapter of the radical anti-war group,
Students for a Democratic Society.
Withers, who shot pictures of the crisis for Jet and was seen by
newsmen going into Brown Lee Hall the night of the takeover, told FBI
agents that Wine planned and directed the operation.
ME 338-R said the building was held "in a state of siege'' with
school president Hollis Price inside, according to a Nov. 27, 1968,
FBI report. Although local news accounts made no mention of weapons,
the informant said occupants "definitely had a single-barrel 12-gauge
shotgun, a rifle with a telescopic sight, a bayonet, at least one
Derringer, and one pistol'' -- details confirmed by another FBI
source that night and Willie Wine 42 years later.
"I carried a .25-caliber pistol,'' the ex-militant recalled. The only
time he used his gun that night was when another Invader rifled
through an administrator's cabinet. "I pulled out my pistol. I said
we're not here for that purpose,'' he said.
No charges were filed after officials at the private school chose not
to prosecute.
Over time, however, the FBI would break the Invaders. Utilizing tips
from Withers and other informants plus three undercover Memphis
police officers who had infiltrated the group, authorities prosecuted
as many as 34 Invaders on charges ranging from petty street crime to
arson and the sniper wounding of a police officer.
Although one undercover cop was famously exposed, the Invaders seemed
to have little clue about Withers, who often visited the group's
headquarters on Vance and shot publicity photos for them.
"Ernest, he was a dear friend," said Charles Cabbage, who founded the
Invaders in 1967. Like Wine, Cabbage kept a memento on the wall, a
picture Withers took in 1968 of Cabbage as a radical.
"Anytime he'd see us, he'd start snapping," Cabbage recalled.
Cabbage, interviewed last winter, four months before his death in
June at age 66, said he'd come to wonder what Withers was really doing.
"C'mon man. We weren't that interesting. Why would he take our
pictures constantly?"
As the FBI cast its net, it encountered a range of people whose
beliefs and personal details landed in the bureau's spy files despite
little more than a tangential connection to the Invaders.
An Aug. 7, 1969, report shows the FBI collected 14 photographs of
Father Charles Mahoney of St. Patrick Catholic Church. Notations on
the report, along with other corroborating details, indicate Withers
shot the photos and handed them over to agents. The report quotes the
informant as saying Mahoney "is a close friend'' of Invaders defense
minister Melvin Smith and notes that Mahoney and two other priests
allowed the Invaders to use church facilities.
"The FBI was off base on the civil rights thing,'' one of those
priests, Charles Martin, said in a recent interview. An urban
outreach ministry brought St. Patrick in regular contact with the
Invaders. And when the priests there openly supported the sanitation
strike, there was a backlash, Martin said.
"We were for the workers, the sanitation workers. And a lot of people
in the town didn't like us for that.''
* * *
The Rev. James M. Lawson came into the FBI's focus in early 1968
during the height of the sanitation strike. It was Lawson, then
pastor at Centenary Methodist, who invited Dr. King to Memphis, where
he spoke in support of 1,100 sanitation workers who had walked off
the job to protest low pay and horrid working conditions that led to
the deaths of two men.
"If one black person is down, we are all down!'' King told 15,000
cheering people at Mason Temple the night of March 18, 1968.
Near the speaker's podium, the ubiquitous Withers snapped photos.
Images he shot that night would stand as timeless icons of the strike
alongside those he took of marching sanitation workers carrying "I Am
A Man'' placards and National Guard troops policing Downtown streets.
But the stout photographer with a chatty personality and quick smile
had another, nonpublic, appointment that day, a secret meeting in
which the topic was his friend, Rev. Lawson.
Earlier that afternoon, Withers met with FBI agents Howell Lowe and
William H. Lawrence, who ran the bureau's Memphis domestic
surveillance program. A report summarizing the meeting indicates
informant ME 338-R handed over a newsletter listing names and
photographs of community leaders behind the strike -- a virtual
directory of strike-support organizers -- and told agents who produced it.
"Informant pointed out that the paper is printed or laid out by Rev.
Malcolm D. Blackburn ... pastor of Clayborn AME Temple ... The main
editorial work therein is done by Rev. James M. Lawson Jr.,'' the report said.
Withers had a lot to say about Lawson, a veteran civil rights leader
and friend who marched during the strike alongside Withers' wife,
Dorothy, and his daughter, Rosalind.
He portrayed Lawson as the type of left-leaning radical the
government had come to fear -- active in the anti-war movement,
involved with the feared Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
and someone who was planning a trip to the East Bloc nation of Czechoslovakia.
"I'm not surprised,'' Lawson, now 81, said this month when told of
Withers' informant work. Lawson said "the police and FBI were very
clever about entrapping'' blacks and making them informants.
"Any activity in the black community, Ernie was going to be around,''
Lawson said. "It was probably done innocently: 'You just tell us
what's going on and what you see and you get paid for it.' ''
Lawson's was one of many biographies the informant would flesh out for agents.
Reports linked to Withers show he was a font of information for the
FBI during the strike, handing over documents, providing details from
strategy meetings, connecting dots between pastors and suspected militants.
The informant told agents on March 6 that young militants -- Cabbage
among them -- passed out literature at a rally at Clayborn Temple
with instructions for making Molotov cocktail firebombs. Mainstream
leaders "did nothing'' to stop them, the report said.
On April 3, the day before King's murder, the informant passed on
details about a high-level strategy session at the Lorraine between
Cabbage and King, who begrudgingly decided to give the young
militants a role in the strike.
Well into the summer, after the strike was settled, ME 338-R
continued to report on its impact. That July 26, the informant gave
FBI agents a financial report showing the strike-leadership group,
Community on the Move for Equality, had spent $2,600 of $347,000
raised for striking workers to pay attorney's fees and expenses for
members of the militant Black Organizing Project, an umbrella group
encompassing the Invaders.
As Hoover cranked up his campaign against "black nationalist hate
groups,'' anyone giving aid -- money, jobs, political support --
could fall into the crosshairs of COINTELPRO, the FBI's dirty tricks campaign.
The FBI had been spying on the civil rights movement for years, but
in an August 1967 memo, backed by a more thorough order the following
March, the bureau directed Memphis and other field offices to begin
efforts to "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise
neutralize" a range of civil rights leaders and organizations, from
the separatist Nation of Islam to King's moderate SCLC.
In May 1968 a similar initiative was launched against the so-called
"New Left,'' targeting Vietnam War protesters and socialists, among others.
A U.S. Senate investigation in 1975 found widespread abuse in the
program, which lacked statutory or executive approval. COINTELPRO
techniques ranged from contacting an employer to get a target fired
to mailing an anonymous letter to a spouse alleging infidelity,
leaking humiliating information to the press, encouraging street
warfare between violent groups and alerting state and local
authorities to a target's criminal law violations.
Available records provide few details on specific COINTELPRO actions
taken in Memphis. Yet, records indicate Withers fed agents plenty of
raw material.
A schoolteacher loaned militant Cabbage his car, the informant said.
Mary L. Campbell, a supposed black-power sympathizer, was running for
the county Democratic Party's executive committee. Real estate agent
O.W. Pickett, who'd brought food to the Invaders during the LeMoyne
takeover, was thinking of running for Congress. Pastor Malcolm
Blackburn and activist Baxton Bryant were trying to find jobs for the Invaders.
A May 13, 1968, report indicates Withers gave the FBI two photos of
Rosetta Miller, a field worker for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission,
telling an agent she is "one who will give aid and comfort to the
black power groups." Following up that fall, an agent typed a
two-sentence report memorializing a rumor that Miller had recently
married, noting the marriage broke up after just a week. The report
was copied to Withers' informant file.
Interviewed this spring, Miller, who now lives in Nashville, said her
job with the commission came into jeopardy in 1968 when supervisors
questioned her about ties to radicals.
"I was never part of that crap," she said.
Marquette's Theoharis, who worked with the Senate committee that
exposed many of the FBI's abuses, said employment sabotage was a
particularly insidious COINTELPRO tactic.
"Once, (the FBI) got someone dismissed as a Girl Scout leader. It was
crazy," he said.
Records reviewed by the newspaper offered few details of the
secretive COINTELPRO initiative. Yet, frustrated by continuing
support for the Invaders, the FBI clearly was considering such
actions in May 1969 against the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
"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," said a May 8, 1969, report to headquarters in Washington.
"...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.''
* * *
Available files don't indicate how or when Withers first teamed with the FBI.
But it would have been hard for the bureau to have overlooked him.
Withers served as a city police officer, hired in 1948 along with
eight other African Americans who composed MPD's first black recruit
class. He didn't last long. He was fired in 1951 for taking kickbacks
from a bootlegger.
By the early 1950s, Withers was making a name for himself on Beale
Street, where he had operated since the mid-40s, chronicling the
teeming night life and the everyday life of black Memphis. By night,
he hung with bluesmen like B.B. King, Bobby "Blue'' Bland, Junior
Parker and Rufus Thomas and, by day, he shot family portraits,
weddings, church socials, political gatherings and sporting events,
assembling one of the great Negro League baseball portfolios.
"He knew everybody," recalled Coby Smith, a political activist who
founded the Invaders with Cabbage and who would come to form his own
suspicions.
Across the street from Withers' studio, attorney H.T. Lockard ran a
law office. When Lockard became president of the Memphis branch of
the NAACP in 1955, a visitor started coming by -- Bill Lawrence of the FBI.
In an interview for this story, Lockard, now a 90-year-old retired
judge, spoke for the first time about his three-year association with
Lawrence, a bespectacled G-man who came to Memphis in 1945 and ran
the bureau's local domestic intelligence operations in the 1950s and
'60s. In the '50s, as the Red scare was at its peak, the FBI kept
close watch on the NAACP and other civil rights organizations
believed susceptible to communist infiltration.
"Because of the nature of the work I was doing, there was a
suspicious feeling that I was either a communist or a communist
sympathizer," Lockard said.
Like so many others recruited by the FBI, Lockard said agent Lawrence
showed up uninvited and made regular unannounced visits to his law
office with no evident purpose. "One stock question was how was I
getting along,'' he said.
Over a period, the agent asked if a certain suspected communist had
joined the local NAACP. Eventually, the man named by Lawrence applied
for membership. Lockard said he declined to enroll him.
It's unclear if the FBI considered Lockard an informant. He said he
was never paid. The FBI visits stopped in 1957, when Lockard left the
NAACP helm, yet he said he developed "an amiable camaraderie'' with
Lawrence that included exchanging Christmas cards for years after the
agent retired in 1970. Lawrence died in 1990.
Around the time Lawrence began calling on Lockard, Withers began his
long and remarkable career chronicling the civil rights movement.
In 1955, Withers covered the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old
African American who was beaten, shot and tossed in a river in Money,
Miss., for whistling at a white woman.
The injustice of the crime -- the defendants, both white, were
acquitted by an all-white jury yet later confessed in a paid magazine
interview -- built the foundation of Withers' fame. Defying a judge's
order that banned picture-taking during the trial, Withers captured
the moment Till's great-uncle Mose Wright stood up at the witness
stand and pointed an accusing finger at the killers.
The Till case helped galvanize the movement, and Withers soon had a
wide array of assignments covering civil rights.
As a freelancer for the Sengstacke family, publishers of the Chicago
Defender and the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Withers covered many
of the seminal events of the era. He was beaten by police covering
Medgar Evers' 1963 funeral and harassed in small-town Mississippi
following the 1964 murders of three Freedom Summer activists in
Neshoba County. He snapped pictures of King and Abernathy riding the
first integrated bus in Montgomery in 1956 and photographed King in
1966 casually reclining in his room at the Lorraine where he would
die two years later.
Trained in photography in the Army during World War II and equipped
with a bulky twin reflex camera, Withers lacked technical skill yet
managed to take profoundly powerful images, largely through his
resourcefulness and unusual access.
Locally, Withers chronicled all the significant events, the Tent City
voter registration drive in Fayette County, the desegregation of
Memphis City Schools and the Downtown sit-ins of 1960.
It was around then that the FBI's Lawrence began showing up at the
NAACP offices, recalls Maxine Smith, the organization's longtime
executive director in Memphis.
"We thought it was for our protection. We had nothing to hide,''
Smith said. "Somewhere along the line we began to suspect''
differently, she said.
What Smith and others didn't know was that by 1963 the FBI had begun
wiretapping King, initially because of the civil rights leader's ties
to adviser Stanley Levison, a suspected communist. The FBI tapped
King's phones, bugged his hotel rooms and, in one infamous episode,
mailed surreptitious audio recordings including a taped sexual
liaison to his Atlanta home along with a letter suggesting he commit suicide.
By 1967, as more-militant wings spun out of the movement, the FBI
launched a "ghetto informant program'' recruiting "listening posts''
within the black community, many of them white shopkeepers and
businessmen. Increasingly, headquarters pushed agents like Lawrence
to develop information from black leaders.
"He used to come out here a whole lot, right here,'' Smith said in
the living room of her South Parkway home. Smith told how Lawrence, a
music lover, fostered a relationship through her late husband Vasco
Smith's expansive jazz collection. When a 1981 book revealed the
couple's relationship to the FBI, the Smiths sued -- and lost. Still
passionate about the issue, Smith argues she and her husband were never paid.
"Nobody has ever offered Vasco or me one penny. No one dare say
that,'' she said.
Benjamin Hooks, the former national NAACP director, agreed with her assessment.
"I don't know if anyone is trying to say they were snitches. If
that's what they're saying that is a lie," Hooks said in January, 11
weeks before he died. "You couldn't stop the FBI from coming and
talking to you. If you did, they'd make it up anyway. They were
talking to Maxine and Vasco and Hooks all the time.''
When details of the FBI's domestic spy program later leaked in
congressional hearings, officials said there were just five paid
racial informants working in Memphis in 1968. Officials have never
disclosed the identities of those informants; it's unknown if Withers
was included in that group.
"I'd like to know who those devils are," Smith said.
* * *
Perhaps the last man with firsthand knowledge of Withers' covert
life, retired FBI agent Howell Lowe, opted to take his secrets to the grave.
"I won't have my name connected with this," Lowe told a reporter last
year, rejecting an interview for this story. He died Jan. 1 at age
83. Although Withers had died two years earlier, Lowe said he feared
that discussing the photographer's informant work might harm his survivors.
"Some of the things we did were sleazy. We were fighting what we
thought was the possibility of uprising in this country,'' Lowe said.
Lost, too, to history are Withers' motives. A federal source who
first told a reporter about the photographer's secret life several
years ago said Withers, who raised eight children and struggled
financially, had a primary motive -- money.
That same source said Withers' secret informant status came
dangerously close to exposure in 1978 when Congress re-examined the
FBI's investigation of King's assassination. At the time, revelations
about COINTELPRO and the FBI's treatment of King caused many
Americans to wonder if Hoover's hatred of the civil rights leader
somehow morphed into an assassination plot. The U.S. House Select
Committee on Assassinations eventually found the FBI had nothing to
do with the murder.
Yet, with the FBI's Memphis office on trial, Lowe's partner, agent
Lawrence, testified before the committee on Nov. 21, 1978, speaking
of a valued informant who "provided information on racial matters
generally and the Invaders in particular." The informant, paid up to
$200 a month, helped track King in the days before his murder.
Lawrence said he frequently gave his informant instructions ahead of
time, giving him names and topics to look out for and conferring
almost daily with him during the sanitation strike.
"I would call him if I had occasion to alert him to something,''
Lawrence testified. "Otherwise, I would hope that he would call me,
which he frequently did. Then periodically we would meet in person
under what we hoped were safe conditions to personally exchange
information, go over descriptions, any photographs, things of that nature.''
Was Lawrence discussing Withers? The congressional record is unclear.
Nonetheless, as an FBI informant with a symbol number and a large
volume of assignments, Withers would have been handled in a similar
fashion, experts said.
"These are individuals who are going to be directed and paid... They
saw you as a valuable source and a continuing source,'' said
Theoharis, the retired Marquette professor.
Researchers who study the government informant system say patriotism,
desire to do police work, thrill-seeking and money often are
motivating factors. Withers had served in the Army in World War II.
In addition to serving briefly as a police officer, he ran
successfully for Shelby County constable in 1974 and later was
appointed a gun-carrying agent of the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverages Commission.
Withers' legal troubles also can't be discounted as a possible
motive. Withers would claim late in life he was set up in the 1951
kickback incident while working for MPD, yet his police personnel
file contains transcripts that reveal admissions by Withers and
detailed witness accounts supporting the allegations. He was fired
but never charged criminally.
Years later, in 1979, he faced similar charges, this time in federal
criminal court. Then-ABC agent Withers pleaded guilty to extorting
kickbacks from a nightclub owner.
Regardless of his motives, the revelation of Withers' FBI work
doesn't harm his memory for some who knew him.
"It does not alter who he was a person,'' said ex-Invader Coby Smith.
"He did so many more things. That wasn't a fulltime thing to be an
informant for them.''
Rev. Lawson agreed. "It won't tarnish his memory for his family and friends.''
--
-- Marc Perrusquia: 529-2545
.
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