A Spy in Canaan Read online

  Filed under “Racial Matters,” a long-running Hoover program that kept a suspicious eye on black America, Lawrence’s thirteen-page report fueled deepening skepticism within an already hostile FBI as to whether King intended to keep his movement nonviolent. Who knows, Bevel may have been only venting that day. Just showing his crazy side. But to the FBI this was valuable, fresh intel. A suspected Communist, King’s quirky aide was a man under intense watch—a man Hoover’s strategists back in Washington believed was flirting with treason.20

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  EIGHT BLOCKS NORTHEAST of the Lorraine, Withers dropped off Bevel at Clayborn Temple, the venerable, Romanesque Revival stone church that served as headquarters for the sanitation strike. It buzzed with people. Withers had spent many an hour here since the strike started back in February, listening to the impassioned speeches, the strategy sessions, the caustic arguments, and the angelic singing, absorbing the electric energy. He’d move through the crowds with the ease of a politician. Everybody knew him. A former cop who’d walked a beat on Beale Street and who now ran a popular photography studio there, he had arrested or assisted several of the strike supporters over the years. He’d shot baby pictures, graduation photos, and family portraits for many others. Even more knew him as a newsman—a high-profile freelancer for Jet magazine, the pocket-sized “Bible” of black America, and the weekly newspaper, the Tri-State Defender, the Memphis satellite operation of the Chicago Defender.

  At events like these, the rallies, the big marches, he typically wore professional attire—a suit and tie, sometimes a pair of dark, plastic-rimmed eyeglasses that made him look a bit like Bo Diddley. He commanded attention. Two box-like contraptions dangled from his neck, each an old-fashioned twin lens reflex camera that required him to peer down through a viewer mounted on top. He was as much a fixture here as the massive, arched windows of glittering stained glass, the sweeping, panoramic balcony, and the imposing, four-story bell tower. Like a hidden microphone, or a fly on the wall, he was invaluable to agent Lawrence.

  Withers briefed Lawrence on the backgrounds of strike leaders, people like Rev. James Lawson and O. Z. Evers, both middle-aged community leaders viewed by the FBI as militant agitators; he told the agent about a power struggle that threatened to splinter the strike’s brittle alliance of supporters; he provided current, real-time news. The government could move swiftly on his tips, but his greatest asset was his intimate knowledge of Memphis.21

  So many unfamiliar faces were showing up at protests and rallies. Lawrence needed someone to connect the dots: Who was who? Who knew who? Who was related by blood? Who worked together, and on which causes? What were their occupations? Where had they gone to school?

  Withers, described by Lawrence as a source “most conversant with all key activities in the Negro community,” could deliver all of that.

  These FBI investigations purportedly aimed to prevent violence, to preserve civil order. If that’s all it had been, perhaps when it finally came out years later there would have been far less consternation, far less fury about what the FBI had been doing. At the time, to the government, there seemed ample justification. Less than a year earlier, race riots had devastated Newark and Detroit. But the response—the overreach and the many abuses—would forever taint these operations.

  In Memphis, Lawrence helped the Memphis Police Department open a domestic intelligence unit, a sort of FBI Lite, one of many “Red Squads” that cropped up across the country. Swapping information with the FBI on virtually a daily basis, MPD’s Red Squad numbered a dozen or more officers. It recruited informants, surreptitiously opened mail, and reportedly even tapped phones as it assembled files on hundreds of law-abiding citizens doing nothing more than exercising basic rights of free speech and dissent.

  “It shows how dirty, how rotten, how filthy they were,” said Bobby Doctor, who came under investigation in 1968 and nearly lost his job as a field-worker for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in Memphis when Lawrence gave the agency a report on his political, and personal, activities—details mined, in part, by Withers.22

  The FBI’s “vacuum cleaner approach”—sucking up broad swaths of information—was typical then. Stymied by the courts, which had limited Hoover’s efforts to prosecute and blacklist suspected subversives, the agency undertook secretive, at times illegal, efforts to undermine activists extrajudicially.

  “They would pretty much take everything. My theory is because you just never know,” said Kenneth O’Reilly, author of Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972. “If you don’t collect it in the first place you don’t have a chance of using it later. That’s what a police state does.”23

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  IF WITHERS LOOKED in his mirror as he pulled away from Clayborn Temple that afternoon, King’s last afternoon, he might have seen James Bevel walking from the curb, up a short flight of steps and through the arched church doorway, into the buzz of the crowd.

  Never had the movement in Memphis been so alive. There’d been sit-ins here. And a great push for school desegregation. But, overall, the volatile reformation of Birmingham and Montgomery and Albany had bypassed Memphis. Until now. The city’s inhuman treatment of the sanitation workers, nearly all of them black, had sparked a flaming fire. As Bevel mingled in the crowd in the late afternoon, he could see youths singing; he saw circles of striking workers huddled in the pews, talking, and a throng of activists, the curious and others, just milling about.

  And he saw a tall, slender militant in a dark suit—one of the Invaders—Marrell McCollough, who agreed to drive him back to the Lorraine.

  * Starting that February, headquarters circulated a series of memos revisiting old gossip about King’s “sexual aberrations” and his new, heightened militancy. A key memo concluded that the march on Washington might not only lead to violence, but violence might be its goal. A memo on March 4 urged the need to “prevent the rise of a messiah” like King, “who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” Following the violence in King’s March 28 demonstration, the Memphis office was advised to “get everything possible on King” and to “stay on him until he leaves Memphis.”

  2.

  A MOMENT OF PEACE

  THE SUN WAS SINKING FAST now as Marrell McCollough pulled his sporty blue Volkswagen Fastback into the parking lot below the Lorraine’s balcony, below Dr. King, who was standing along the railing like a lone soldier on a parapet.

  For years, questions followed: Why was King here—out in the open? Why didn’t he get a more secure room? Was he lured here?

  Many of the questions—the accusations, really—would focus on McCollough, the well-dressed college student down in the lot.

  At twenty-three, the former military policeman was making a name in the blossoming student movement at Memphis State University, where he’d enrolled that winter. More recently, he’d become a militant. He joined the Invaders, a group of young Memphis men trying hard to emulate the rhetoric of H. Rap Brown, the self-styled revolutionary who was credited with saying, “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.”1

  The Invaders sent chills through Memphis’s old, conservative order.

  McCollough quickly found acceptance in the group. Few of the young Invaders had cars. With his stylishly contoured 1967 Fastback, so unlike the common, bug-like Beetle, he found an instant rapport with the militants, who only half-jokingly dubbed him their “Minister of Transportation.”2

  He found rapport, too, with the younger members of King’s staff, men like Bevel and the bearish, three-hundred-pound Rev. James Orange, both of whom he’d met days earlier at the Lorraine. McCollough had spotted the two Southern Christian Leadership Conference aides that afternoon at Clayborn Temple, where Withers had dropped off Bevel an hour earlier, and he agreed to drive them back to the motel.*1

  Watching from the firehouse, MPD’s officer Richmond spied them through his field glasses as they arrived.3


  Richmond knew McCollough—and knew he was no militant.

  He was a former patrolman, now an undercover cop working under a code name, Max, assigned as part of a joint FBI–MPD operation to infiltrate—to eviscerate—the Invaders. But its aim reached far beyond that. Like Withers, McCollough helped keep watch on Memphis’s budding New Left, on its student activist and peace movements, even the old-guard civil rights struggle, all deemed to be riddled with Communists and dangerous radicals.4

  Coupled with the unrest that plagued King’s previous visit—as well as old suspicions about his commitment to nonviolence—the operation shifted into high gear. As Withers and McCollough floated in and out of the Lorraine and detectives peered through binoculars from across the street, another dozen or so uniformed policemen and sheriff’s deputies patrolled the immediate area. Even the Lorraine’s meek owner, Walter Bailey, was conscripted into service. Using an alias, “Mr. Smith,” police regularly phoned him through the switchboard to learn who’d checked in and out of the motel. Down at police headquarters, a small squad of army intelligence officers in business suits cluttered the hallways, almost tripping over themselves for bits of news to phone back to Washington.5

  As Bevel and the others piled out of McCollough’s Volkswagen, the rangy undercover policeman stepped onto the pavement and looked around. King was still up on the balcony, talking. He was joking and laughing, shouting down to Jesse Jackson and others in the parking lot. It was 5:55 p.m.

  In six minutes King would be dead.

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  AFTER DROPPING OFF Bevel at Clayborn Temple, Withers drove to Beale Street. It’d been a long day. He’d spent most of it up in federal court, listening to lawyers wrangle. Mayor Henry Loeb desperately wanted to stop King from leading another march, and he’d filed for an injunction to stop it. A segregationist, the tall, pasty Loeb had fought the sanitation strike at every turn. His constituents were tired of it: Garbage piling up in the streets. Lawless rogues tossing rocks and bottles at the few trucks running. And now King. But Judge Bailey Brown would have none of it. An appointee of President John F. Kennedy, Brown hardly was a gushing liberal, but he respected constitutional guarantees: King would march next week, he ruled, under tight restrictions—no weapons and with a fixed number of marchers per row.6

  Already, Withers had spent the better part of four days with members of King’s staff. Now, it seemed, there’d be more—the march was scheduled for the coming Monday, April 8.

  Withers had passed along a range of details to Lawrence so far. Sitting through long-winded strategy meetings and late-night conversations, he’d picked up on a certain intensely militant tone: Here was Jesse Jackson, then twenty-six, tall and imposing, speaking of economic boycott, of halting trucking by one of the city’s biggest manufacturers, Plough Inc., makers of St. Joseph aspirin. There was Hosea Williams. He seemed awfully cozy with some of the city’s young militants. Withers reported that the activist was meeting with John Burl Smith, a leader of the Invaders, who’d worked up a crowd of garbagemen earlier that spring, getting them up on their feet when he shouted from the pulpit, “You’d better get your guns!”7

  King, too, was meeting with the Black Power militants, Withers said. He’d seen him lunching with three of them just yesterday, on April 3, in the Lorraine’s diner.8

  The FBI’s stated objective in investigating King involved preserving civil order. The irony was that the civil rights leader aimed to do just that, to prevent more violence. Many people had blamed the disruption of the last march on the Invaders. King knew he needed to pacify these young firebrands—control them—if he hoped to put on a peaceful march. Withers didn’t hold that back. He said the Invaders were demanding money—trying to extort King, promising peace in return for cash. They are trying to “drop a pigeon” on the SCLC, he told Lawrence. He reported this from Bernard Lee, King’s personal assistant: “We won’t be blackmailed by them.”9

  These were real-time bits of intelligence that helped the FBI assess the rapidly developing events.*2 Not only was the situation on the ground in Memphis changing—King was too. He’d adopted a series of increasingly militant positions over the previous two years. The King we celebrate today—the Dreamer, the champion of equality, the apostle of nonviolence—wasn’t the King many saw in April 1968. He’d become a deeply polarizing figure. Nearly three in four Americans—almost half of African Americans—disapproved of King’s position on the war. Even some of his closest advisers considered the Poor People’s Campaign, to be launched as soon as King could disengage from the sanitation strike, a gross miscalculation. They feared chaos, possibly even battles with police. New York socialite Marian Logan, a key SCLC fund-raiser, worried King would not “be able to preserve the nonviolent image and integrity” of his organization.10

  Undeterred, King seemed to almost invite that possibility. He’d dismantled legal segregation. Now, he eyed an even bigger foe: America’s wealthy elite. This was class war. And King viewed the Poor People’s Campaign as a sort of desperate last stand.

  “If it fails, nonviolence will be discredited, and the country may be plunged into holocaust,” King wrote in Look magazine. “…It must be militant, massive nonviolence, or riots.” His militancy did more than enrage Hoover—it shocked Middle America. One slim week before King’s rousing March 18 speech in Memphis, protestors had heckled him in Michigan as a “Commie” and a “traitor.”11

  Special agent Lawrence saw King pretty much the same. A resolute Cold Warrior, he viewed the peace movement and much of the country’s social unrest as communist inspired. He didn’t see much difference between a “super-militant nonviolent” activist like King and a “super-militant violent” one like Huey Newton or H. Rap Brown. King’s methods of civil disobedience were like a “Chinese water torture,” Lawrence liked to say, drop after drop of marching in the street, attracting lawless elements looking for an excuse to rob and loot and riot. But the thing that really burned him was King’s position on the war—and Bevel.12

  Bevel was no lightweight—his militant tone had to be viewed seriously. A veteran of the Nashville sit-ins and the Freedom Rider movement, he had orchestrated King’s Children’s Crusade in Birmingham in 1963, dispatching waves of innocent schoolchildren into Bull Connor’s fire hoses and snarling police dogs, a risky calculation credited with accelerating Jim Crow’s demise. More recently, he’d helped convince King to come out against the Vietnam War. Lawrence fumed at the image: King and Bevel—and Harry Belafonte, too. On a gray afternoon a year earlier, the trio had led thousands of war protestors to the United Nations in New York. Many in the crowd burned their draft cards. No, this couldn’t be ignored. When Lawrence wrote his report on Bevel’s searing Black Power talk, he sent copies to FBI offices in Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington. Copies went, too, to the U.S. Attorney, the Secret Service, and military intelligence, a pattern Lawrence would repeat over and over throughout the sanitation strike and across the entire, turbulent era.13

  Even now, up in the federal building, the agent was busy dictating a memorandum for broad distribution. Dated April 4, 1968, the report cited more intelligence from Withers, reporting that “some of the more militant potential troublesome Negro elements are beginning to move into the strike situation.” Lawrence sent copies to the FBI’s Atlanta, Chicago, Washington, and Detroit offices and to the army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group.14

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  IT STILL ISN’T clear how Lawrence and Withers managed to talk for so long without anyone catching on. Both men had the other’s home phone number. That helped. Perhaps Withers also called now and then from the seclusion of a phone booth. Often, they’d meet face to face, careful to not be seen—on a side street, maybe, or out in Memphis’s largely white suburbs.15

  Still, there were close calls. In January, a young activist accused Withers of snitching. The incident blew over. Then came February—the pressure on undercover operators increased. A day after poli
ce routed protestors with Mace and clubs during a march on Main Street, strike organizers held an emotional rally in North Memphis, where supporters detected an undercover policeman in the crowd. They were furious. They seized him. They hustled him to the stage. There, as the crowd buzzed, a circle of men stripped him of his revolver and his Mace canister.

  “He was then taken outside,” a report said. “Negro women at meeting helped protect him from strikers. He was not hurt and was released to other officers of Memphis PD.”16

  Again, in March, word went out: don’t snitch the movement.

  It happened as Rev. H. Ralph Jackson, short, thickset, a heretofore unremarkable African Methodist Episcopal preacher who’d never been involved in the civil rights movement—who’d been labeled an “Uncle Tom”—became a militant activist almost overnight, virtually taking over the leadership of the strike. Jackson had been furious ever since he was sprayed in the face with Mace during the Main Street melee back in February.

  “They would not have Maced white ministers,” he repeated over and over.17

  Jackson was furious, too, about the constant spying, about the “police snitchers.” If he found any undercover officers or informants at these rallies, the preacher railed from the pulpit, he “would not stop them from being beaten up.” Withers sensed the hostility. He told Lawrence the spying had inflamed the already searing tension. “The Negro community is particularly bitter because the Police Department has sent many Negro officers in plain clothes to strike support meetings and several of them have thus far have been exposed,” Lawrence wrote after debriefing his informant.18