17

ERNEST WITHERS GRABBED A LEAFLET CIRCULATING right outside his office, at Handy Park on Beale Street.

War, violence, murder and hating are the monstrous enemies of human life. Trying to cover them over with the pious mouthings of patriotism cannot cleanse them of their evil stench. . . .

The war gives most Americans a chance to forget about poverty, segregation, racism, unemployment, slums, and the lack of equal opportunity. . . . Why are over 50% of the Vietnam deaths from Shelby County young and poor Negro boys? Why are we spending $30 billion in Vietnam for war and less than $3 billion to end slums and poverty here at home? . . .

The American white man cannot be trusted overseas until he can be trusted in matters of prejudice, segregation, freedom, poverty, and slums here at home.

The arguments were classic Jim Lawson. The leaflet closed with three quotations. One came from Stokely Carmichael, and one came from Dr. King, who’d publicly denounced the war in April 1967. The third, perhaps the most poignant, was sourced to an unknown marcher in Mississippi who’d said, “Ain’t no Viet Cong ever called me a ‘nigger.’”1

Withers vented his feelings about Lawson confidentially to his handler. He felt Lawson was climbing into “the intellectual bed of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr., who recently gained many headlines by bitterly attacking U.S. policy in Vietnam and urging Negroes not to support the war.”² On April 4, 1967, King had said, “We have been wrong from the beginning in our adventure in Vietnam,” and named the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”³

By attacking the war, Withers felt, Lawson had “demeaned himself in a most demogogic fashion,” as Agent Lawrence reported, “resorting to cheap unadulterated demogogery [sic] and untruths in the material.” To Withers, the material fell into the dangerous category of propaganda that his mentor L. Alex Wilson had warned him about: “calculated to inflame the emotions and not the reason of the reader.”

Lawson had recently appeared on a panel discussion broadcast over local TV. A reporter asked him if he was a Communist, and though Lawson denied party membership, he answered, “We could learn much from the Communists.” That statement stuck to his FBI file entries for years, justifying continued investigative scrutiny.

Withers was not alone in opposing King’s antiwar activism. Jackie Robinson, an influential voice in race after breaking the color barrier in major league baseball, penned a column that the Associated Negro Press syndicated to African-American newspapers throughout the country. Twenty years to the day after Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he published these words:

Everybody has his idols.

Dr. Martin King is one of mine.

He is a man of tremendous ability and courage and I believe that he is a dedicated man. However, when you have an idol it does not necessarily mean that you agree with everything he says or does. It happens that I do not agree with Dr. King in his stand on Viet Nam.

Robinson believed that King’s antiwar focus pulled the leader’s eyes from the ghetto. He applauded King’s accomplishments and defended his right as a man of God to oppose bloodshed, but he reminded him that his original mission still needed him.

“We have heard the ‘black power’ cries,” Robinson wrote, “Let’s hear more on domestic situations from Dr. King.”4

King needed to develop new tactics, as law enforcement learned how to “sterilize” the effectiveness of street protests. In Birmingham and Selma, police had attacked protesters, resulting in embarrassment to the state and nationwide sympathy for the marchers’ cause. In Memphis, sailors and Marines, furloughed from nearby Millington Naval Air Station, turned out to peace demonstrations to heckle protesters and support the war, but police knew that any confrontation between them and antiwar demonstrators would engender public sympathy for the antiwar side. So they made every effort to keep pro-war hecklers moving along, and they refrained from making contact with the peace activists as well. Every week in the spring of 1967, Lawson organized Saturday peace vigils, and every week the Memphis police gained more experience both in defusing confrontational street activism and in protecting protesters.

Without conflict, the movement went stale. In the summer of ’67 the weekly peace vigil, seldom attracting more than thirty people, dwindled as the heat rose.

For his part, Agent Lawrence was pleased. The new approach “definitely frustrated and sterilized the demonstrators,” he wrote. “Further, it prevented any possible assaults of the demonstrators which could well play directly into their hands, propaganda wise, by rendering them into a martyr status.”5

But the peace vigils fostered another worrisome development. At one of them, Withers overheard a young man talking about forming a Black Power group in Memphis. Withers began to pay close attention to his Black Power advocate, photographing him with Lawson as they demonstrated together. Withers saw that the young man tooled around town on a Honda motorcycle.

Agent Lawrence had already heard about the young radical from NAACP contacts, who told him this fellow came from a conservative local family but had quit the branch youth group. Now he talked of launching an “extremist” campus organization in its place.6 The radical hoped to work hand in hand with Lawson on Black Power and opposition to the war.

Withers asked Lawson what was up. The minister said frustration and anger were boiling over throughout the impoverished community surrounding his church, and he could hear cries of Black Power. Police beatings were both the answer to and the cause of much of the conflict. Should a spark fly, the young people around him would explode.

After making Black Power popular in mid-1966, Stokely Carmichael shot to the top of J. Edgar Hoover’s target list. The FBI director publicly maligned Carmichael as allied with the Revolutionary Action Movement, which was “dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system in the United States, by violence if necessary.”⁷ The bureau anticipated racial violence as angry young people found Carmichael and the hot rhetoric of SNCC appealing. Memphis was on high alert.

On 5/16/67 SA William H. Lawrence purchased from Ernest C. Withers, CS (commercial photographer) five copies of a photograph of the notorious SNCC leader, Stokely Carmichael, since this office had no slick photographs of him. It is felt if he comes here it would be wise to have the photographs.8

Carmichael never came to town, but his ideas resonated deep into South Memphis.

A sweltering Friday night turned into the morning of July 1 as John B. Smith cruised the neighborhood with a couple of friends. John B. had recently come home from two years in Vietnam and proudly wore his olive drab field jacket. He had a job running a forklift at the defense depot, rented his own apartment, and had bought a ’63 Volkswagen Beetle. He was twenty-four years old.

That morning Smith’s old friend and high school basketball teammate Charles Cabbage rode with him. Like Smith, Cabbage had returned home to Memphis recently, not from war but from school. He majored in history at Morehouse College, located in Atlanta, the same city as the central office of SNCC.

While Smith had returned home a patriot, Cab came home a radical. In Atlanta, he’d met Carmichael and been steeped in the city’s activist culture. Atlanta also was home to Dr. King and headquarters of the SCLC. Cab attended a New York City antiwar rally where King spoke in mid-April 1967.⁹

John B. and Cab had grown up in Riverside. It was a tough part of Memphis but home to tidy eight-hundred-square-foot houses where intact, working poor families lived, like their own. Smith and Cab called their section of Riverside “the Valley.”

Riding in John B.’s VW bug, they sipped cans of beer, puffed cigarettes, and argued about politics. Cab ridiculed John’s patriotic innocence, while John mocked the value of Cab’s education.

“You don’t even have a job,” John B. told Cab. “Your broke Black Power ass should have learned how to make some money.”

Cab countered with a diatribe about black people controlling their own destinies.

John B. held to his bottom line that America’s greatness and fairness would prevail for African Americans as it had for the freedom fighters in the American Revolution and the slaves in the Civil War.

As their discussion heated up, John B. pulled into a service station at the corner of Parkway and Third, at about half-past one in the morning.

The gas tank was under the hood, but the catch on the hood was broken. He’d come up with his own way of opening it—he got out and popped it. He happened to note the cap on the gas tank. He handed the attendant a bill and got back into the car to keep fussing with Cab, while the attendant filled the tank.

Afterward the attendant approached John with his change. “I can see you don’t have a gas cap,” he said. “I’ll sell you one for a buck.”

John B. had just noticed the gas cap on the tank when he popped the hood. This would be the second time he’d lost a cap at this filling station.

Cab saw a circular bulge in the attendant’s shirt pocket that was making a greasy stain. He got out of the car. Skinny, deep-voiced, and six foot two, he pointed to the oily bulge. “Just show him that’s not it, and we all leave,” he said.

“I don’t have to show you a motherfucking thing,” said the attendant.

John B. said, “That’s it, I’m calling the police.” He went to the phone booth and made the call.

Other cars were waiting to pull up to the gas pump, but John B. didn’t move his VW. People who’d been hanging out drinking with John B. and Cab near the gas station, at the Log Cabin, came over and stood around the bug.

A police cruiser arrived to see a line of cars stretching down the street and a large group of young black men. Fearing a riot, the cops in the cruiser called for backup.

Five more cruisers sped into the gas station lot. After hearing John B.’s complaint, an officer asked the grease monkey if he had the gas cap.

“No.”

The police told everyone to clear out. John B. pleaded with them to try harder to get his cap back. When he didn’t stop or move his car, the police arrested him.

“But I’m the one who called you,” he said.

They pushed him into the back of a squad car. He opened the door and got out to explain his case to the lieutenant at the scene. Four cops tackled him, cuffed him, and threw him headfirst back into the car.

Cab and a bystander were arrested as well, for arguing with the police. The bystander reportedly walked away, saying he was not under arrest and would blow the officer’s damn head off, at which point the police grabbed him.

A neighborhood patrolman said he’d seen all these guys drinking together at the Log Cabin. The police theorized that the young black men must have cooked up this plan to trap them.

Downtown, John B. and Cab refused to take alcohol breath tests. John’s cuffs were on so tight, tears came to his eyes. He mentioned this to an officer, who further tightened them. The police took his shoes, shirt, and belt and put him in a cold cell. He thought the temperature was about forty-five degrees. They threw Cab in with him. They shivered there for two hours. John B. emerged with his forehead throbbing, his right hand stiff, and his faith in the system tested.

A few hours later in court, John B. and Cab faced charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The judge fined them $102—he suspected they had been trying to start a riot. “Why would I call police before starting a riot?” asked John B.10 The incident nonetheless became notorious as the Gas Cap Riot.

Two hours in the cold cell and a morning in court converted John B. Smith from an American patriot to a Black Power revolutionary.

The next evening two young men visited Ernest Withers’s studio. One, a tall, skinny guy with a peach fuzz mustache, was Charles Cabbage. The other was the Black Power radical Withers had seen at the peace vigils, who drove the Honda motorcycle: Coby Smith, no relation to John B.

Cab and Coby were on a publicity tour, hoping to spread the story of what had happened to Cab and John B. with the police in Riverside. The Tri-State Defender and the NAACP hadn’t been sympathetic, but Withers had encouraged them to tell their story. Coby did most of the talking. As Withers later told Agent Lawrence, the young man wanted to exploit the Gas Cap Riot as a rallying point for Black Power.

In doing some background research on the Black Power advocates, Withers picked up that Coby Smith and Cab knew each other from Atlanta, where they’d both come under the influence of Stokely Carmichael and SNCC. Coby said he wanted to turn Memphis into an SNCC town. This city needed a good race riot, he reportedly said, and they were going to turn it upside down.11

The bureau had already opened a file on Coby Smith, and now, after visiting Withers, Charles Cabbage got one too.

Cab and John B. had found only trouble from the police they’d called for help in Riverside; just so, Cab, John B., and Coby unknowingly made themselves FBI targets while seeking help from local movement supporters. They told their story to the Tri-State Defender and to the NAACP, but Agent Lawrence had a source in both of them. The NAACP source reported to him that Coby Smith “became obnoxious, demanded immediate action by the NAACP, and indicated he was going to create Negro unrest in the city of Memphis,” while the editor of the newspaper independently corroborated that Smith threatened to incite a riot.12

After the Fourth of July, Coby Smith returned to Withers’s studio. According to a July report from the Memphis FBI to J. Edgar Hoover’s office, Smith said that he and Cabbage had come to Memphis from Atlanta “in the hopes of creating racial disturbance.”

Withers had already checked with local NAACP branch president Jesse Turner about these guys, and he knew Turner and his colleagues felt panicked. Withers next saw Coby at Jim Lawson’s church.¹³

Lawson organized a Vietnam Summer protest in Memphis, as part of a nationwide plan of Dr. King to pressure President Johnson to end the war.¹⁴ As with the Meredith march, the NAACP wanted no part of the antiwar movement or any other street protests, but the Memphis branch’s leadership could control its board member Jim Lawson no more than it could control Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage.

Coby went to Lawson’s peace vigil downtown, which was supposed to be silent, and reportedly shouted “Black Power!” at passersby. To anyone who’d listen, he claimed he’d started the recent race riots in Atlanta. Withers watched Lawson during all this. The minister appeared nervous. He edged away from the Black Power shouts but didn’t stop them.15

In fact, the controversial minister did something that was unconventional even by his own standards. Far from alienating or informing on the Black Power boys, he hired them.