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AS THE INVADERS GREW IN NUMBER, SO DID GOVERNMENT anxiety over Black Power. On March 4, 1968, the FBI director’s office issued a document that expanded the counterintelligence program against so-called black-nationalist hate groups, outlining five major goals.

1. Prevent the coalition of militant black-nationalist groups. In unity there is strength . . . An effective coalition of black-nationalist groups might be . . . the beginning of a true black revolution.
2. Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black-nationalist movement. . . . Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. . . . King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed obedience to white, liberal doctrines (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.
3. Prevent violence on the part of black-nationalist groups. . . .
4. Prevent black militant nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them to three separate elements of the community. . . . First, the responsible Negro community. Second, . . . the white community. . . . Third, . . . the Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group; it adds “respectability” in a different way.
5. . . . Prevent long-range growth of militant black-nationalist organizations, especially among youth. . . .

J. Edgar Hoover asked FBI field offices to provide a summary of local black nationalist activity, a list of potential targets for COINTELPRO operations, and suggestions for action. “These should not be general . . . but should be specific as to target, what is to be done, what contacts are to be used.” Each field office was to file a progress report with Hoover’s headquarters every ninety days.

With this memo, Hoover’s office put maximum pressure on field agents throughout the country to find and counteract militant groups. While local offices were to carry out the program at the grassroots level, the instructions urged, “We should emphasize those leaders and organizations that are nationwide in scope and are most capable of disrupting this country.”1

As the COINTELPRO document arrived at the federal building in Memphis, Rev. James Lawson invited a leader who was “nationwide in scope” to come support the strike in Memphis: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hearing about Lawson’s invitation to King, reporter Kay Pittman Black of the Press-Scimitar contacted the Atlanta headquarters of the SCLC to see when King might make it to Memphis. She learned that he had speaking engagements elsewhere through March 15 and passed on this information to the FBI.2

As news of a possible visit from King circulated, Lawson assembled the strikers for a sit-in at City Hall. They had regularly gathered to fill the public building and demand attention, sometimes even spreading out bread and cold cuts on a long table to make their lunches. Lawson told the workers and their supporters, including Black Power advocates, that the situation had reached a crisis point. If they continued their sit-in at City Hall and refused to leave, they would be arrested and taken to jail. “I am ready to be arrested,” Lawson said.³

John B. Smith was not. He walked out of City Hall with another Invader. Memphis police captain Jewell Ray noticed the Black Power boys and told two uniformed patrolmen to tail them and find a reason to arrest them.

Out on the street, the two Invaders flagged a ride. A young African-American man picked up the pair. He didn’t know them.

Within a few blocks, the police stopped the car. They arrested the motorist for reckless driving and took the Invaders to jail on the granddaddy of all trumped-up charges, disorderly conduct.

The police threw the three young men into a holding cell that was already cramped with more than a hundred sanitation strike supporters who’d heeded Lawson’s call to sit in at City Hall. A press photographer snapped a picture of John B. looking cool on the other side of the bars.

The next day’s news coverage of the sit-in and the mass arrests lumped the Invaders in with Lawson and the strikers. John B.’s picture appeared in the Press-Scimitar, straightening his sunglasses, seemingly unimpressed, over the caption:

“INVADER” BOOKED

John Smith, wearing a jacket with the word “Invaders” on the back, was one of 118 strike supporters arrested.4

The press story gave the impression that John B. had gone to jail in solidarity with the sanitation men. Covering up the police’s sham arrest of the two Invaders, it also gave the impression that the Invaders had been part of the strike. That could be useful for the strike only as long as Black Power presence scared up some productive negotiations. But Invader involvement could also harm the strike, linking the nonviolent direct action with the much-feared militant revolutionary threat.

Though the core Invaders had been under surveillance since the previous July, they had so far been all talk and no violence. The police had no evidence to charge them with any crime. Cab had even stood eye to eye with Agent Lawrence in the FBI office and explained that he didn’t mean his violent rhetoric literally, and that assurance seemed to be playing out as hard fact.

The MPD’s Invaders infiltrator, Marrell McCullough, would say, “During that time, in the sixties, there was a lot of talk of violence, and this group was no different—a lot of young people getting together, making violent statements and doing a lot of violent talk but actually committing no acts of violence.”5 According to McCullough, the Invaders’ armaments consisted of a Saturday-night special—a light-caliber six-shooter—not exactly the tool to wreak widespread havoc.

The FBI even admitted that John B.’s arrest for disorderly conduct had been a “put-up.” After the subsequent press coverage, Agent Lawrence wrote that his assets Ernest Withers and Kay Pittman Black

independently advised they regretted the arrest of John B. Smith and the attendant publicity . . . as all this did was to make a martyr and hero of Smith in the eyes of the young impressionable Negroes to whom he and Charles Cabbage have been trying to peddle their Black Power philosophy. . . . In other words, the Memphis Police Department gave him the publicity he so badly wanted, and in order to satisfy an emotional wish to see him arrested, the Police Department may well have helped to create an irresponsible militant agitator whose actions may create a series of incidents which may later haunt them.6

Despite having an informant and an infiltrator covering the Invaders, law enforcement had no proof to show that the Black Power group planned any action to match its violent talk.

This evidence problem would soon change.

John B. got out of jail, feeling resentful of Lawson. Smith sensed that the minister was merely using the Invaders. Lawson wanted the fearsome Black Power group involved so that the city would feel threatened, but he didn’t want the young men making any real decisions.

John B. reasoned that if Lawson wanted the Invaders to bring the hot rhetoric, they would deliver. He put together the seventh issue of Afro-American Brotherhood Speaks, subtitled Black Thesis. The cover carried the slogan “Black Power!!” over an illustration of a clenched fist in militant salute.

The lead article, written in preacher rhythm, tallied the dues of being black:

Rents are high, apartments are filthy, and white policemen patrol your community ready to crack heads at any moment. Dues are what we pay when this country will not enforce law to protect us, but rather laws to keep us under control. When these same police beat us half to death and the policemen are promoted and given a raise. Dues are what we pay when the city we live in spends millions of dollars on riot control and nothing on trying to alleviate the conditions that cause them.

A piece on the strike criticized its direction: “The preachers have got us so busy singing praying and marching that we aren’t doing anything . . . Why has the community let the preachers take over, and tried to lead in a fight which [t]here must be some real fighting[?]”

By circulating the newspaper outside a strike meeting, the Invaders could purposefully give the impression that it carried some official sanction.

Meanwhile Lawson, after getting out of jail himself on the night of March 5, called together the striking sanitation workers and their supporters at Clayborn Temple. The next day, he announced, they would gather at the temple for a twelve-thirty march, down Beale and up Main to the police station they’d all just come from. They would, Lawson reportedly said, create incidents to cause further mass arrests, a Gandhian tactic that Lawson learned of while working in India.

Charles Cabbage picked up a pile of Afro-American Brotherhood Speaks from the office where his girlfriend worked on Beale Street and went over to Clayborn Temple. Outside he was surrounded by Black Power kids—maybe forty by Ernest Withers’s count. One of them handed Withers a copy of the paper.

While putting together the issue, John B. had felt that words weren’t enough. He had had an idea. He got in touch with an artist he knew, in fact, the kid who’d named the Invaders: Donnie Delaney.

Donnie drew up the idea, and John B. tacked the illustration on as the last page of the new issue. It looked hastily drawn, but on its full page, it depicted the clearly labeled components of a homemade explosive device under the heading MOLOTOV COCKTAIL.