26

SEVEN MILES WEST OF THE LOEB CELEBRATION, MARTIN Luther King, Jr., lay despondent.

After leaving the scene of the riot, he and his group had checked into the Holiday Inn-—Rivermont, a high-rise hotel overlooking the Mississippi River, about a mile and a half from where the march began. They took a suite on the eighth floor. King had got into bed fully clothed and pulled up the covers.1

While burning through a chain of Salems, he spoke to Ralph Abernathy, who’d been his adviser so long, he’d posed for Ernest Withers’s camera next to King on the front seat of the first integrated bus in Montgomery.

“Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here,” King said. “Maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course.”

Abernathy had never seen King like this nor heard him talk this way. In his depression, King contemplated calling off the Poor People’s Campaign.

To lift King’s mood, another aide arranged for an important friend to get in touch. Stanley Levison phoned King’s room from his home in New York City.

An adviser and fund-raiser for King’s SCLC, Levison had been a faithful friend for many years. Formerly an affiliate of the Communist Party–USA, Levison had been Hoover’s justification for investigating King, as a possible Red influence of the civil rights movement.

The bureau tapped Levison’s phone and picked up his conversation with King in Memphis. Agents heard King tell Levison that a local Black Power group called the Invaders had incited the riot.

In the confusion of March 28, 1968, it’s easy to lose sight of the day’s key issue—the possibility that the FBI sabotaged Dr. King’s march. The riot happened during a month of increasing federal anxiety over the Poor People’s Campaign and two days after the FBI proposed smearing Dr. King to curtail support among potential supporters. If the bureau had indeed encouraged the riot, it would need someone else to blame. Creating a wedge between King and Black Power fit the bureau’s COINTELPRO objective of preventing the rise of a black messiah who could electrify and unify the black nationalist movement, beginning a true black revolution.The conduct of Ernest Withers’s longtime handler, William Lawrence, in documenting the riot, provides clues of treachery.

While King smoked in bed, Ernest Withers conferred with Lawrence. The next day Lawrence finished a long memo about the riot, which the Memphis office sent on to Hoover.

Lawrence had three sources of information about the demonstration: Ernest Withers, Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter Kay Pittman Black, and a third party whose observations closely match those of MPD undercover officer Marrell McCullough, who had infiltrated the Invaders. Addressing the factors that contributed to the violence, Lawrence wrote that Lawson’s COME strike support group had unwittingly armed anyone who showed up to march.

The COME group handed out literally hundreds of prepared placards made of cardboard and carried on long 4-foot pine poles. It was apparent to these three sources prior to the march that many of the youngsters were planning to use the placards as sticks and clubs because they were indiscriminately ripping the cardboard away, leaving a 4-foot pole in their hands which many of them waved in a threatening manner.2

Lawrence was referring here to the I AM A MAN strike support posters. Addressing how the two-by-twos became weapons, Lawrence’s “source one” for this memo—Withers—made the most specific accusation against an Invaders leader in provoking the riot.

Source one pointed out that prior to the start of the March 28, 1968 march that John [B.] Smith and some of his associates were in his opinion inciting to violence in that they were indiscriminately giving out the 4-foot pine poles to various teenage youngsters in the area and John Smith was heard by source one to tell these youngsters, identities not known, not to be afraid to use these sticks. He did not elaborate as to what he meant.3

Later in the summary, Lawrence wrote, “Source one [Withers] pointed out that as mentioned . . . these individuals [the Invaders] had done much by their previous statements and actions . . . to incite some of the more ignorant and greedy youths who were in the march.”⁴ By “previous statements and actions,” Withers reportedly meant the Molotov cocktail handout that the Invaders had distributed three weeks before the march.

Lawrence’s—and the FBI’s—explanation for the origins of the riot was that COME had handed out the sticks, the Invaders had instructed youths in using them as weapons, and a nonviolent march had become a riot.

But there are problems with this formulation. For one, Invaders leader John B. Smith denied that he had handed out signposts to youngsters at the march or encouraged their use as weapons. Such a denial is what one would expect, but Smith got some pretty strong backup from the police officer who’d infiltrated the Invaders. In 1978 Marrell McCullough testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was conducting an inquiry into the King assassination. McCullough corroborated Smith’s claim:

I was with the Invader group, and they never joined the march. They were just walking around the temple here talking. . . . John [B. Smith] spent most of his time right around the door of the temple. . . . I never saw him [remove the sticks from the placards and pass them to youngsters,] and I never saw anyone passing sticks out to the youngsters, other than the sticks with the placards on them.

Asked about Lawrence’s March 29 memo stating that Smith had urged people to commit violence, McCullough replied, “I would characterize [Smith’s statements] as rhetoric of violence but nothing specific as to ‘take this stick and break a window.’”

Another point in favor of John B. Smith came out of the HSCA inquiry itself. The committee conducted a thorough investigation of the riot, using its power to subpoena FBI files and gain access to confidential sources. It studied Lawrence’s March 29 memo to headquarters, and his source’s accusation that Smith had handed out the two-by-twos and told people to not be afraid to use them. HSCA took testimony from that confidential source, and found discrepancies between the informant’s testimony and the statements in Lawrence’s memo, concluding: “The informant denied having provided certain information that had been attributed to him and placed in his informant file.”

When Lawrence himself testified before the committee, he stated that his sources of information on the riot and the Invaders had been accurate. Afterward he contacted Withers and told him “that committee had asked me if info attributed to him—in my letterhead memo [of March 29] had actually been furnished by him—and I had to reply that it had been.”5

Lawrence acknowledged that he couldn’t tell Withers what to say to the HSCA, but warned that “denying that he had ever furnished info which I attributed to him . . . would nevertheless create a situation indicating that He or I had perjured ourselves in that I said one thing and he another.”

The HSCA leveled no perjury charges but concluded that “the discrepancy tarnished the evidence given by both the Bureau and the informant, and it left the committee with a measure of uncertainty about the scope of FBI involvement with the Invaders.”⁶

As Lawrence said, someone perjured himself about the Invaders in the riot. All the evidence indicates that it was Lawrence who fabricated the story of Smith inciting violence and misattributed this version of events to his “source one” informant, Withers.

In the months following the 1968 riot, Lawrence would repeat the story of Smith inciting it with greater embellishment. In a lengthy report dated May 6, 1968, he upgraded the statement about the sticks to a direct quote: “Source two [Withers] . . . recalled hearing John B. Smith tell some of the youngsters, ‘Don’t be afraid to use these sticks if you have to.’”7

Perhaps the strangest thing is that Lawrence never pursued the matter further, indicating that his case against Smith must not have been very strong. The FBI never arrested or prosecuted Smith on charges associated with the riot, despite the evidence in its files that he had incited it. The evidence shows that the FBI used Withers falsely as a source of untrue information—a revelation, if not one that clarifies the bureau’s role, or Withers’s, in spoiling the final march of Dr. King.

While Lawrence inaccurately held Smith responsible for inciting violence in his March 29 memo, he failed to disclose his informant’s own proximity to the signposts used that day as weapons.

In a May 6, 1968, report, Lawrence wrote, “[Withers] pointed out that the COME group had organized the march and had made a bad mistake by giving out several hundred pre-constructed pasteboard placards which had been stapled onto long pine poles or sticks.”⁸ The distribution of the poles appears here as a “bad mistake” on the part of COME, according to Withers, the person who brought the lumber to the strike.

Lawrence rehashed the story of the two-by-twos even more flavorfully later in the report.

On the night of March 28, 1968, source two [Withers] advised that the biggest definite contributing factor to the violence in his opinion was the fact that the COME group had for the first time in any of their numerous daily marches furnished wooden sticks to the marchers, as previously they had merely used cardboard placards which could not become lethal weapons. He pointed out that giving out several hundred hard pine sticks was tantamount to giving out an equal number of baseball bats which could easily be used to break windows and which could be used as weapons by the participants in the march.9

Again, it seems strange that the person who supervised bringing the sticks to the march could so quickly claim that what he had done “was tantamount to giving out an equal number of baseball bats.”

In neither instance did Lawrence note Withers’s role in putting the two-by-twos into play, though he seems to have been aware of it. In a memo to the Memphis office dated April 2, 1968, Lawrence provided deeper detail on the origin of the sticks.

[First name unknown] Harvey, brother of Fred Harvey, and who is a teacher at Jeter High School, earlier in the week . . . rent[ed] a Skil saw which was taken to the Minimum Salary Office of AME Church next to Clayborn Temple, where J. C. Brown cut the pine wood into four-foot lengths for the placards.10

Much of this memo has been redacted. But those names—Harvey and Brown—corroborate what Withers told a German sociologist in 1982: “If anybody is . . . responsible for that riot up there, as anybody, I might be responsible, . . . because I and Harvey and J. C. Brown back here went down . . . there to rent the saw to cut the sticks that was used in the riot and we certainly wasn’t doing it by plan.”

Also on April 2, J. Edgar Hoover may have directed the use of FBI funds for some yet unknown endeavor. A teletype from him to the Memphis bureau that day reads in part (the document is heavily redacted):

In the event it is necessary to [name redacted] for actual expenses incurred, authority is granted to pay him up to seven five dollars. If payment is made, obtain itemized accounting of his expenses.¹¹

Agent Lawrence’s signature appears, acknowledging receipt of Hoover’s memo.

Perhaps the FBI Memphis memo describing the construction of the signs and the teletype with Hoover’s payment authorization also contain information linking the FBI to the two-by-twos. But until we are able to view unredacted copies of both, we’ll never know.