AFTERWORD

IN 1970 SPECIAL AGENT WILLIAM LAWRENCE RETIRED TO a small mountain town in North Carolina.

Lawrence’s top racial informant, Ernest Withers, continued to supply information to the FBI after Lawrence left, until the FBI stung Withers himself.

Ray Blanton, elected Tennessee governor in 1975, appointed Withers to the state alcoholic beverage control board. Beyond his duties as a licensor of nightclubs and liquor stores, Withers functioned as a liaison in Blanton’s wide-ranging corruption network. Tennessee employees sold state-owned vehicles and kept the cash, and they accepted bribes from illegal businesses. The FBI investigated and caught Withers on tape as he helped make arrangements to have a prisoner released from the state penitentiary in exchange for money, a cash-for-clemency scheme. The bureau arranged the whole 1978 operation as part of a wider sting of the Blanton administration. Results included arrests of several top aides, the premature ouster of Blanton from the governor’s office, and a major motion picture, Marie, starring Sissy Spacek as Marie Ragghianti, the whistleblower in the governor’s cabinet who prompted the investigation.

Withers can be heard on the FBI tape complaining that he’d received no money for running bag in the operation. The episode again highlights Withers’s knack for getting into compromising situations. This late 1970s scandal and his removal from the police force back in 1951 bookend his public life with instances of corruption. But growing up in the brutal Crump regime, this was simply how he had learned to survive. And as with certain aspects of his FBI career, particularly monitoring Communist influences, or translating the uplifting features of the Nation of Islam for a suspicious government, you can see some positive in Withers’s pay-for-parole involvement. He helped free a young African-American man who faced a lengthy prison term for a first offense.1

The tenacious pursuit of action that fueled Withers’s singular journalistic contributions also kept him near trouble for most of his adult life. He personifies the flawed hero.

By the time his association with the FBI ended, he had sent his eight children to college, achieving his major family goal. In another ten years, his photography would gain appreciation as an important body of work, historically and artistically, and he would enjoy his last two decades as a living legend, publishing books, delivering lectures, and seeing his pictures exhibited all over the country.

As of this writing, Rev. James Lawson is nearly ninety years old and still leading nonviolence workshops in Los Angeles.

Ernest Withers on Beale Street. 2002, Bill Chapman.

The Invaders would receive attention from Withers and the FBI until 1972. Of the key members, Charles Cabbage died in Memphis in 2010, and John B. Smith lives in Atlanta. Coby Smith still lives in Memphis.

More than a decade after I met Ernest Withers at his office, I interviewed his daughter Rosalind there. Since her father’s passing, Roz had led a total transformation of the building, opening her dad’s old studio into a bright gallery showcasing his photography, and adding a café.

The place buzzed with positive energy, as family members guided tours, while in a nearby archive, undergrads chattered as they cataloged the millions of images the photographer left behind.

Roz and I sat in a banquet room outfitted with tables and a podium.

The FBI revelation had hit her hard. Because her father never talked about it, she has had to grapple with what it meant. She doesn’t shy from the FBI questions, she just doesn’t have many answers. She stands by her father’s one statement about FBI work: that he never tried to learn any high-powered secrets, it would have been trouble. Roz never knew the FBI operative. She only knew the loving, funny, hard-working father.

Roz’s excavation of her father’s history has brought her close to the sister she didn’t grow up with. Now the two women are driving forces of the Withers Family Trust, a nonprofit that encompasses the famed photographer’s vast intellectual property. As the fiftieth anniversary of the King assassination approached, Roz Withers directed a digitization of twelve thousand of her father’s civil rights photos. Many have never been published, many more haven’t been seen for years. The Ernest Withers legacy is still in process.

People from all over the world roam Beale Street and drop in to the Withers Gallery. They see the images of Dr. King on the bus, Elvis and B.B., Moses Wright at the Emmett Till trial, the Little Rock Nine.

I’ve wrestled with what writing this book will mean to Withers’s photography—his ability to continue telling the story, to continue supporting his family, and for us to celebrate his work. I think we have to embrace him for all he was. It’s not as if the most famous, successful, appreciated artists are also the purest, simplest people. And we can’t simply drop people, great people especially, who don’t fit our standards of purity. This is particularly true of how we treat African-American historical figures. Is it our task now to decide how a black person should have navigated a racist world? Without institutional American racism, Withers would never have become involved with racial espionage. But he still would have been a great photographer.

While we sat and talked, I told Roz about how her dad busted me looking through his pictures. I glanced up and saw his name in reverse, printed on the plate-glass window, ERNEST C. WITHERS BUILDING, 333 BEALE. I realized that Roz and I were in the exact room where he’d stuck me.

Looking back on that day, knowing so much more about him now, I wonder if there was a part of Withers that sort of appreciated me sneaking through his things. Could he not sympathize?

I remember how his charisma had me totally at ease and speaking freely. His small-talking Memphis charm, I figure, must have been a great asset for an intelligence gatherer, allowing him in with Nation of Islam brothers, idealistic college students from up North, an activist minister like Jim Lawson, and the militant Black Power advocates the Invaders. I wish I had known to ask him how it felt to be in that courtroom with Emmett Till’s murderers, or on that fluorescent-lit balcony looking at a puddle of Dr. King’s blood.

I wonder what the photographer-hero-spy thought, standing among the crowd at Mason Temple on the last night of Dr. King’s life, listening as the leader said, “There’s a tension at the heart of human nature, and whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it.”2

A bright and upbeat Withers Gallery feels like the right place for this dark path to end. Through a window that the Withers story had opened, I saw the FBI COINTELPRO documents outlining what my government had planned to prevent a great man from improving America. I’d had to consider if this rightfully celebrated journalist had been part of the program. I wondered—should I just have followed what the great photographer said when he closed me into this room?

“Don’t touch anything.”