A Spy in Canaan Read online

  Withers took Kathy Roop Hunninen’s wedding photos—and secretly funneled scores of pictures and bits of intel about her to the FBI. A former war protestor and civil rights activist, she suffered years of trauma and depression after she lost her federal job in 1986 when reports surfaced of the FBI’s long-running investigation of her as a suspected Communist in Memphis in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “This man has ruined my life. He has ruined my life,” Hunninen said. “Betrayal? Betrayal isn’t even the word. I have been scarred for life.”

  * * *

  —

  NONE OF THIS can change the good he did. Though he remains obscure to many, arguably Withers is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. He shot as many as a million photos over sixty years documenting black life in the South. If he’d only shot three he would still secure a spot in the pantheon of immortal shutterbugs: King on that integrated bus. Till’s great-uncle pointing that accusing finger. And his haunting photo of Memphis’s striking garbagemen dressed in their Sunday best, carrying those “I AM A MAN” signs as they protested for the most basic of rights—to make a living wage; to work with dignity; to be treated as human beings. Each was pivotal and consequential.

  “I view him as a guy who ran significant risk to photograph and record our history,” said Andrew Young, King’s close aide who was later elected mayor of Atlanta and appointed by President Carter as ambassador to the United Nations. “He always showed up. And that was important to us. Because that helped us get our story out.”

  Whatever motivated Withers to collaborate with the FBI—money, patriotism, or his long ambition to be a cop—his story is instructive. It opens a window into a dark, injurious period. We know the macro, the sweeping, big picture of our government’s spying on Americans. But we know so little of the micro, the intricacies of how authorities induced or compelled individuals to inform on their fellow citizens. Even now, fifty years later, restrictive laws make those types of details elusive. It is not my intention to erode the memory of Withers, nor to reduce him. He will forever remain a Memphis hero. Instead, my hope is that the story of Ernest Columbus Withers will help fill in many of those gaps that still exist in the twin histories of civil rights and government surveillance.

  1.

  IN THE SHADOWS

  APRIL 4, 1968

  WILLIE RICHMOND LOGGED THE TIME: 4:10 p.m. He’d been spying on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for over four hours now. From his post at the back of a brick firehouse overlooking the Lorraine Motel, the Memphis policeman aimed his binoculars across the street toward King’s second-story room. He marveled at what he saw—as if he could reach out and touch everything. “The view from the fire station window was very good,” he later reported. In his field glasses, Richmond could see a kaleidoscope of detail: the concrete steps, the motel balcony, the railing glazed in a gaudy turquoise, the dark numbers on the door—306—and the many visitors coming and going, appearances he carefully recorded on a notepad throughout the bright afternoon.

  And he could see Ernest Withers.

  The affable photographer pulled into the Lorraine’s parking lot shortly after four, the policeman noted, a little less than two hours before it happened, before the world stood still—before a sniper shot King as he stood on the balcony outside his motel room at a minute after six o’clock, a half hour before the sun set.1

  As always, Withers blended right in.

  King knew him and liked him. They’d first met nearly twelve years earlier, in 1956, when the personable freelance newsman had journeyed down from his hometown of Memphis to Montgomery, Alabama, where King would make history and Withers would shoot a photo for the ages. The U.S. Supreme Court had just outlawed segregated seating on that city’s public buses. The year-long Montgomery bus boycott was over. Withers rose at four that morning. With pluck and an uncanny knack for being at the right place at the right time, he aimed his camera as the then twenty-seven-year-old civil rights leader climbed the metal steps of a Montgomery City Lines coach with his closest friend, Ralph Abernathy, and took a seat near the front.

  Click!

  He shot a beautifully composed photo: King—slender, pensive—gazes out the window. He wears a stylish fedora propped high on his forehead. Abernathy sits to his left, looking hard at the camera. Behind them are a busload of white faces—an assortment of housewives out on their morning errands; a couple of young boys looking alternately curious and bored; a prim woman in a dress suit studying the passing scenery through the shiny glass. At the very back, a white man stands in the aisle. His feet are crossed in a carefree stance; his arms spread wide, gripping both overhead rails. Like the others in this Norman Rockwell–like image, he appears content, seemingly oblivious to this revolutionary moment in American history.

  Through the years Withers would use his unique access to capture many other memorable pictures: King as he preached; as he froze with suspicion when police confronted him outside Medgar Evers’s funeral; as he marched through Mississippi’s sweltering heat.

  King posed for a series of portraits Withers shot right here at the Lorraine two years earlier in 1966, up in room 307. Not many journalists could penetrate the civil rights leader’s personal world. The white media found him to be stiff and guarded. Yet Withers, always affable, always a hearty laugh to set his subject at ease, teased out another side of King, capturing him in rare repose. In one shot, King reclines on his bed in his shirtsleeves, resting without a care against the headboard. He stares nonchalantly out his open motel door in another, toward the direction from which the sniper’s bullet would come two years later, when he’d returned to rally the city’s striking sanitation workers.2

  “He had all the access he wanted,” Andrew Young, King’s right-hand aide, would recall years later. “Yes, I remember Ernest Withers as a lot of fun. And any time you went to Memphis, he was with us and we laughed together. We joked together, and he was sort of one of the family.”3

  So it was on the day of the assassination that no one, not officer Richmond watching from the firehouse, not the various members of King’s entourage out enjoying the cool spring air, found it at all irregular as Withers mingled in the courtyard.

  And no one seemed to notice as Withers slipped off repeatedly over the course of Memphis’s volatile, seven-week-old garbage workers strike to meet with a tall white man in a dark suit, an FBI agent, who was handing him cash.

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  THE LORRAINE PULSED with energy that afternoon. The tempo had moved at a furious pace ever since King took up residence there a day earlier. Aides and visitors coursed through the complex. At any given time, one might catch a glimpse of a famous face, Jesse Jackson or Andrew Young, or even Abernathy or King himself, passing through the courtyard or along the balcony or down to the greasy-spoon diner for a bite to eat.

  It was “a beehive of activity,” Withers told the man in the suit.4

  The Lorraine often had that feel. As a hub of black life in segregated Memphis, it hosted many of the big names who passed through the city, entertainers like Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and Nat King Cole, and many of the great ballplayers, including Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige. It opened at the height of Jim Crow as a small, two-story inn, a beacon of light surrounded by flophouses and prostitutes five blocks from the Mississippi River in downtown’s dreary warehouse district. The Lorraine Motel’s recent addition, a modern, two-story motor lodge, built of ordinary cinder block, added more rooms, more light, most noticeably a space age–styled tower out front ablaze in flashing neon, proudly proclaiming the “Lorraine Motel.”5

  When King came to town he stayed there, too. But never had any of his trips to Memphis been so anticipated—so watched.

  Officer Richmond stayed busy. He jotted down auto tag numbers. He scribbled names of faces he recognized. A group of young troublemakers, Black Power advocates, had set up operations in room 315, several doors down from King along the balcony’s concrete deck, he recorded.

&
nbsp; But, for the moment, the plainclothes policeman focused on Withers.

  He watched as the photographer climbed back into his sedan with Rev. James Bevel, the fiery, “crazy genius” of King’s executive staff. Two other men got in, too. Richmond couldn’t identify them. It didn’t matter, really. Bevel was enough. As one of King’s top aides, he was a prime target.6

  Logging the time, 4:20 p.m., Richmond watched as the car sputtered out of the Lorraine’s busy lot and disappeared down Mulberry Street.

  * * *

  —

  WITHERS WAS SPENDING long hours with King’s staff.

  He’d stayed late into the night the last two days, in strategy meetings, listening to the explosive arguments and pleas for order, as the men met with local activists and community leaders. They rehashed the recent excitement—the riot, the National Guard troops, the brutal cops, the unrelenting pressure from white leaders who deeply resented King, an outsider, injecting himself in Memphis’s affairs. King and his aides had come to town two weeks earlier to assist the city’s 1,300 striking sanitation workers. The garbagemen had walked out in a wildcat strike after two coworkers were crushed to death in a malfunctioning packer. They stepped away from poverty-wage jobs, into the streets to protest.

  For King, this Memphis campaign—his latest crusade against injustice—started almost as a dream, a glorious step back to the movement’s vibrant early days.

  As many as fifteen thousand people gathered the night of March 18, 1968, to hear him speak. Withers was there with his cameras. The crowd roared with enthusiasm. Shouts of “Tell it!” and “Go on! Go on!” rang through the hall. There was a thunderous ovation. King was so moved, so inspired, he agreed to return to Memphis to lead a march.7

  Then disaster struck.

  On March 28, 1968, as King walked arm-in-arm with Abernathy and Memphis religious leader H. Ralph Jackson, leading as many as ten thousand demonstrators through downtown Memphis, violence broke out at the back of the march. Hot-headed youths smashed store windows. They looted. Police responded with Mace and clubs. In the melee, an officer shot and killed a fleeing protestor, Larry Payne, just sixteen. His mother was inconsolable.8

  The media blamed King. He couldn’t sleep. He was drinking heavily.

  The trouble in Memphis widened deep divisions among his staff. They seemed to be spinning apart. But after regrouping in Atlanta, they returned on April 3, King determined to lead a peaceful march. His very reputation depended on it. Still, the city’s leaders obtained an injunction blocking another march. Worse yet, young militants hounded King, playing a dangerous game of extortion, seeking money in exchange for peace.9

  For all the tension, it was peaceful that afternoon, that last day. King got up late. He ate a catfish lunch with Abernathy. His brother, A.D., a pastor in Louisville, Kentucky, had arrived. Together, the two brothers phoned their mother in Atlanta. They joked and laughed. When Andrew Young arrived from court with the good news—the injunction had been lifted—King was so giddy he tossed a pillow at his aide. Like two college fraternity brothers, they had a pillow fight.10

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  —

  UP ON THE eighth floor of the federal building, an austere office tower overlooking the Mississippi River’s great sweep past downtown Memphis, special agent William H. Lawrence sucked on a dark tobacco pipe and reflected on the many developments. Spread before him were his notes, a scrawl of long, run-on sentences containing the many bits of intelligence Withers had relayed, his accounts of the raucous meetings, the shouting matches, the young militants, and a small but titillating detail his informant picked up the night of that rousing speech: King in the company of as many as a dozen staff members—and “one unidentified female.”11

  Lawrence was under enormous pressure. J. Edgar Hoover’s years-long campaign to discredit the civil rights leader had been reenergized, by two startling developments: King’s hugely unpopular opposition to the Vietnam War and his Poor People’s Campaign, a plan to unleash thousands of impoverished citizens in Washington later that spring to camp, to protest—to disrupt government operations if necessary—until officials did something substantial to end poverty. Hoover wanted dirt. Something good. Something to finally knock the wind out of King.*

  Lawrence had seen Hoover’s fervor for King before.

  The agent had opened a file on the civil rights leader back in 1965, trying to prove he’d had an “extramarital relationship” with singer Harry Belafonte’s first wife, Marguerite, an attractive movement volunteer. The salacious tidbit never amounted to anything, just thirdhand gossip, a tale Lawrence picked up from two of his “racial sources,” Memphis activists who’d heard it through the movement grapevine. Unreliable or not, it didn’t matter. When his report hit Washington, Lawrence was ordered to press his sources for more. Agents in New York and Atlanta were put on it, too. Those were the weeks after King won the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover was enraged: King—a degenerate. How could they give him the Nobel Prize?12

  So Lawrence went back. The story was the same: Several years earlier, King was said to have been “infatuated” with Mrs. Belafonte. He made “an utter fool of himself,” following her “from city to city,” Lawrence reported. But it was just gossip. His sources knew nothing.13

  Now, at forty-eight, the square-jawed Lawrence knew his career was winding down. He’d seen incredible highs and lows over his twenty-four years with the FBI, virtually all of it served in Memphis in internal security, chasing Communists, radicals, and other Americans viewed by Hoover as real or potential domestic enemies. In 1954, Lawrence arrested Junius Scales, the wealthy Communist Party-USA organizer who’d been in hiding for years—a huge coup. Lawrence was legend in Memphis. He and his colleagues shattered the Communist Party there, driving the few surviving members underground or out of Tennessee altogether.

  In later years, as the social upheaval of the 1960s took root, his focus shifted. He fixed his attention on militancy in the civil rights movement and the New Left: a long list of “extremists,” agitators, peace activists, draft dodgers, Black Power advocates, student reformists, hippies, and revolutionaries—people Hoover thought were pushing the country to the brink.14

  King was one of them.

  The civil rights leader seldom came to Memphis. Consequently, the FBI’s local security file on him never grew very thick. Even now, following his return to the city a day earlier, on April 3, he was elusive.

  Undercover police had followed him from the airport. But a carload of angry supporters cut them off, stalling the pursuit. Running all day from meeting to meeting, King gave a mesmerizing speech that night. He spoke as a rainstorm thundered outside, seeming to prophesy his own death. “I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve s-e-e-n the promised land,” King said, swaying to his own hypnotic cadence. Nearby, Withers shot pictures from his spot in the media pack. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land!”15

  But then he disappeared again. For hours—nothing. All night. No one seemed to know where he was.16

  Still, things were moving fast. Between King’s return and the chaotic pace of the sanitation strike, the daily marches, the frequent clashes with police, Lawrence had more than he could keep watch over. But as the April 4 sun fell toward the Mississippi’s flat, west bank across from the federal building, he had his best racial informant on the case.

  * * *

  —

  AS WITHERS STEERED his car from the Lorraine toward the Memphis skyline, a dozen details weighed on him—Lawrence, another march, the young militants, his neglected business back on Beale Street. But at top of mind now was his passenger, King’s “director of direct action,” the eccentric Jim Bevel.

  Some in King’s organization thought Bevel was mad. He claimed to hear voices. Intense, charismatic—a prolific womanizer—he certainly was peculiar. An ordained minister, he wrapped his rigid, in-your-face
views in Holy Scripture—and shocking profanity. Some derided him as “The Prophet.” He dressed the part, too, in his own eclectic way. Today, riding in Withers’s car, he wore a crisp button-down shirt and dress pants. But just as often he sported a yarmulke, a Jewish skullcap, signifying the Baptist preacher’s connection to God, and a pair of blue country overalls, a testament to what journalist David Halberstam called Bevel’s “own permanent protest of segregation,” a way to honor African Americans kept in poverty by racism.17

  With his news cameras, Withers had been following Bevel around Memphis the past two weeks, picking up on the young pastor’s quirks. He passed a flow of salacious tidbits to Lawrence, a pattern that would continue over the next two years as the activist moved in and out of Memphis.

  Bevel has sex “hang-ups,” Withers said.

  He’s separated from his wife, the beautiful Nashville sit-in leader, Diane Nash.

  He speaks in “extreme vulgarities and obscenities.”18

  But it was Bevel’s intense militancy that most interested the FBI.

  Withers had caught a glimpse of it, Bevel’s fire, his unfiltered rhetoric, when he followed the activist to LeMoyne College two weeks earlier. Overlooked by the media, the unscheduled lecture at historically black LeMoyne would have been difficult for the FBI’s all-white Memphis field office to surveil if not for the enterprising informant.

  Bevel “gave a most virulent black power talk, claiming that the white power structure through economic pressure will eventually attempt to exterminate the Negroes in the United States in some form of genocide,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing Withers. The photographer delivered pictures—and graphic accounts—chronicling the meeting. He said the activist, accompanied by several Black Power militants, had used vile obscenities, “shocking some of the women who were present.” Bevel encouraged the impressionable students to reject the help of white “do-gooders” who had no “real soul feeling” for African Americans, to read the writings of black separatist Elijah Muhammad and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and “come into the black power movement.”19