 Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. It's a pleasure to welcome you here to our first program of the African American History Month. And actually our first program since the recent unpleasantness. So welcome back. Whether you're here in the William G. McGowan Theater or joining us through Facebook or YouTube, we're pleased that you could join us. Before we hear from Preston Lauterbach about his new book, Love City, the Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up next week here in the McGowan Theater. On Monday, February 11th at noon, Cara Dixon Buick will be here to talk about her new book, The Girl's Next Door, Bringing the Homefront to the Frontlines, which tells the story of the young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And on Thursday, February 14th at noon, we'll be screening the documentary film Chisholm 72, Unbought and Unbossed, which takes an in-depth look at the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, and the first to seek nomination for the presidency. Chisholm's 1969 oath of office is now on display in the East Rotunda Gallery two floors above us. Please go to our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates, and you'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. The billions of pages and miles of film at the National Archives hold countless stories of our past. Every day, people come to our research rooms and dive into our online catalog to seek out the stories that are meaningful to them. But anyone who spends significant time doing research comes to realize that there can be stories behind the stories, revealing complexities below the surface. The photographs that Ernest Withers took during the 1950s and 1960s became enduring images of the civil rights movement. While they worked closely with the movement's leaders, he was also an FBI informant. In his new book, Bluff City, Preston Lauterbach examines the work and actions of Ernest Withers with all their complexities. Acknowledging the assistance of our special access FOIA unit, Lauterbach was able to access FBI files to reconstruct that history. In addition to Bluff City, Preston is also the author of the award-winning Beale Street Dynasty and the Chitlin Circus, which was a Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe and NPR Book of the Year. He is a former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellow. He's appeared on numerous NPR talk shows, including On Point, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air, and contributed to the HBO documentary Elvis the Searcher. He's also had articles appearing in Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Oxford American. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Preston Lauterbach. Thanks. So I think that just about every author of every book has come to a dark crossroads. And you reached that point when you've said everything that you have to possibly say about what you're writing a book about, and yet the advance money is gone and it's not coming back, and you've still got 150 pages to go. And authors have different ways of dealing with this dilemma. Some have turned to the curative powers of the bottle. Some have sought spiritual salvation through prayer. Myself, I fill out FOIA requests. And so when I reached my own dark crossroads, a lantern appeared on the horizon in the form of a little note, a little envelope in my PO box that came from the National Archives and said, the files that you have requested are available for viewing. And because of that, I am here today. So as was mentioned earlier, the National Archives was absolutely essential to my being able to tell the complete story of this fascinating, complex, mysterious character, Ernest Withers. Now, and let me say for a minute or two another nice thing about National Archivists is because I think that they tend to get a bit of a bad rap. You have people online who think that the National Archives are sitting on the truth about how cadre of Castro's Cubans and aliens assassinated John F. Kennedy. And so there's a lot of noise from people like that about all the secrets that are being stifled. My experience as a regular legitimate, semi-sane historian would be the opposite of that, that it's a tremendous group of people who are quite dedicated to accessing information, who are undoubtedly overrun with requests for that information and get to it, you know, when they can. But everybody was so helpful here at the National Archives with the production of this book were quite available to me. I spoke to several of them on the phone and they would tell me things like, well, if you request 20 years of this person's FBI files, we'll probably be able to give it to you in 20 years. But if you request six months, we'll get it to you in six months. And so that's what I did. So I found them, you know, very helpful and open. And ultimately it was the National Archives that made a complete look at Ernest Withers story possible. So Withers was primarily known as one of the key photojournalists of the Civil Rights Movement. He was based in Memphis, Tennessee on Beale Street, but he traveled to Mississippi to cover the murder or excuse me, the trial of Emmett Till's murderers. He traveled to Montgomery, Alabama the next year in 1956 to cover the conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott and the rise to prominence of one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He traveled to Little Rock to cover the integration of Central High School the very next year. And he made, in these settings, he made some of the pictures that really help tell the story of that time. In writing this book, and during those years, he was also becoming, I think he was equipping himself with the ability to be an intelligence agent. And after his death, it was revealed that he indeed had been functioning as an FBI operative throughout most of the years of the Civil Rights Movement through some of his biggest stories. In fact, he had been reporting for the movement in the black press and on the movement for the federal government. And so this news, it was after he was gone, so he didn't have the opportunity to really explain it and break it down. So this news hurt him. I think that it really stigmatized him. I mean, being an FBI informant and being a black man and an FBI informant during the Civil Rights era is something that's very hard for people to wrap their minds around. We've all seen the wire. We know how snitches need to be treated. But withers is a different kind of a case as my research and the documents provided by the National Archives helped to reveal. In fact, I think that his becoming an FBI operative was a lot more surprising, interesting, and compelling than I thought it would be. And I'll get to that. But first, a little bit about his photography. So my purpose in writing this book, in light of the fact that that news about him being an informant was already out, was one, to get into his photography and to really seriously look at his photojournalism. And two, to understand better what working for the FBI really meant. And instead of putting this responsibility on Ernest for having turned informant, putting the responsibility on the FBI for having turned him informant. And to see really what they did with him and to him and how they used him in this particular role. Because it got a little dramatic. First, a fun photo. This is December 1956. To your left there or on the left of the frame is Elvis Presley at the center is the winner of the Miss WDIA Memphis Beauty Contest. WDIA was the all African American radio station that had debuted in Memphis back in 1948 and was the only all black radio station for a period of time after that. To the right you see the King of the Blues, BB King. So two kings, both local boys out of the Memphis area. The King of Rock and Roll and the King of the Blues. It's a nice photo and it's an interesting moment in time for the King of Rock and Roll over there because this is December 1956. And this is the year that Elvis went stratosphere. Five number one hits. Y'all can probably all whistle them as soon as I named the titles. But it's Hound Dog, Don't Be Cruel, Heartbreak Hotel and a couple others that escape me right now. But he is at the absolute top of peak Elvis right here. And he's doing something that we kind of take for granted now but was a little bit risky then. He's posing with African American people because the probably the most challenging domestic issue in the news at this time was integration. This was at the peak of the Montgomery bus boycott that was taking place over in Alabama involving a third king who we'll get to in a moment. And Elvis is and withers is telling this story is making this comment about segregation or rather integration I think by putting Elvis in such comfortable, relaxed, intimate sort of terms with African American people. Elvis I mean the most sensational white superstar of the time is symbolically standing for integration and withers has captured that moment. And so this particular picture ran in believe the Chicago defender. So Mr. Withers worked for a variety of he was a freelancer and so he worked for a variety of news outlets. The Chicago defender, the tri-state defender in Memphis, Baltimore, Afro-American, Cleveland calling post, little bit for jet, little bit for ebony. And so basically he was the go to guy for black news photos in the deep south during this time. Now this was taken in December 56. I think December 7th, 1956. Two weeks later, he made this photograph. I'm going to use the laser pointer just a circle. See it's this one right over here. And so you can see the headline gives on spot report of how Montgomery ended racial segregation on its buses. The photograph that I circled there is of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And his aid to camp Ralph Abernathy at the front of the bus. Very powerful symbolic moment in our history. As I said, integration and segregation were the biggest domestic news stories that were happening at this time. Withers in Memphis and his editor, L. Alex Wilson, got the call that a federal judge had essentially desegregated bus travel that after a year, the Montgomery bus boycott, which had been started in part by Rosa Parks and sustained in part by Dr. Martin Luther King, had been a success. And so Withers and his editor, L. Alex Wilson, got up at four o'clock in the morning and they got on the city bus. And they really wanted to be the first black people to ride at the front of the bus. But there were two ladies who were already seated in front when they got on. They didn't get their names or didn't report their names anyway. And so they were actually the second African-American men to ride the front of the bus in Montgomery. Well, after a while, who should board but Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 27 years old at this time. And this was the moment, this was the episode that brought him to fame in many ways. And this was the photograph on the front page. This is the Memphis edition of the Defender, but this was the photograph that ran on the front page of the Chicago Defender and really showed the world who Dr. Martin Luther King was. Some backstory on the photograph. I'll circle it one more time. If you can see right here, there is a kind of scowling old white face in profile, right in front of King. King is seated kind of behind him. And then at the back of the bus, there is a white man standing. And you see the two African-American men who are mixed in between. And a nice perspective point that kind of carries your eye through that whole story. So once again, this is Withers putting himself in the position to tell the story. But what a lot of people don't know is this shot, as many great historic photos from Matthew Brady on have been, was staged. Withers helped to set it up. So the gentleman that you see there, who's kind of scowling, he looks like he's really upset about this sudden change in the social order which has taken place. He's actually a minister who was supportive of the bus boycott. Likewise, the man standing at the back of the bus was probably placed there by the photographer in order to tell the story. So you see Withers is working with the front page newspaper motif. And he's really telling this story in such a powerful and profound way, knowing exactly where and how it's going to be displayed. And he's distilled all of these elements of what was going on in the news in this one photo. A major moment in Withers' development as a storyteller, I think, and as an intelligence agent, took place that morning at four o'clock as they were boarding this bus. As I said, he was traveling with his editor, L. Alex Wilson, who's this very tall dapper guy in a snap brim fedora, very well-educated, very erudite, very serious old school newspaper man when that really was something else. And Withers looks up to Wilson. And so they're out walking towards the bus at four o'clock in the morning. And Withers is at this moment in history. And so he asks Wilson, he said, well, how am I supposed to tell the story? How are we supposed to capture the essence of these moments? And Wilson told Withers something that he never forgot. He said, you have to ask yourself, does it hurt? Is it true? What good does it do? And so that really became the photographic ethos for Withers as he covered the moment, the movement and the moments of the movement. Now, through these years of the late 50s, Withers is also becoming increasingly of interest to and really the civil rights movement is becoming of increasing interest to the FBI. Going back to the first big story that Withers covered, the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. There was no federal involvement in that case. And it was an out and out miscarriage of justice. The people who were accused of killing the boy were found not guilty in court. And yet later told a magazine writer that they had in fact done it. They got away with murder. And so there was outrage as there should have been. And most of it was directed at the federal government. People were asking the notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, where were you? People are being killed and miscarriages of justice are taking place. And Withers was there. And so he understood that. He was there in Montgomery when there was very minimal federal involvement except for the federal courts that issued the order to desegregate bus travel. He was there in Little Rock when he saw a new and unprecedented level of federal involvement in the civil rights movement. So when the first nine students, nine African American students, tried to show up to Central High School in Little Rock, they were barred by the governor of state. And riot broke out. Well, the very next day, the 101st Airborne was sent by President Eisenhower. And FBI agents were sent to investigate this violence and to try and get to the bottom of who was behind the violence, preventing these kids from entering the school. And in fact, they got in. And so Withers was there. And he witnessed this change in federal involvement from total non-interest in the Emmett Till trial to support of African American citizens in their rights in Little Rock. His Withers involvement with the federal government stepped up in another case that's probably less famous than those, but I think just as important, it's called Tent City. Happened over in West Tennessee. There were a couple of counties near Memphis where Withers was based that were engaged in widespread voter registration fraud, keeping African American voters away from registering and from lodging their votes. But a combination of federal agents and the black press, including Withers, helped to expose these election commissions for keeping people away from the polls, which ultimately led to federal charges against these election commissions. And what at the time was seen as a victory for the movement and certainly for those local voters. And so just getting back to the big picture of Withers and the FBI, we look at J. Edgar Hoover and the way that he investigated and pursued Dr. King and attempted to discredit Dr. King. And we know that that's what happened. Withers wasn't aware of that at the time. None of that had taken place and it wasn't on the record. What he saw was an increasing federal presence and an increasing federal assistance for the movement. And that Tent City case that helped bring Withers into the FBI fold was what pushed President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy in the direction of a voting rights, civil rights strategy. So that's what they decided based on the outcome in Tent City. We're going to pursue this voting rights thing. We can't get people to get behind civil rights. Well, they have to get behind voting rights because that is what everybody in this country as citizens is entitled to. And so by about 1960, 61 during the Tent City case, Withers is regularly meeting with a Memphis FBI agent by the name of William H. Lawrence. And Lawrence was the agent in charge of the so-called Racial Intelligence Division. So that was, you know, if you went over to the J. Edgar Hoover Building now, I don't know if they still have a Racial Intelligence Division. I hope not. But that existed during the 1960s and there were various programs and areas of interest for that particular segment of the FBI. And so there were a number of cases that the FBI nationally was interested in and things that happened locally. And Withers as a photographer who was well known on Beale Street, who had been in all of these key stories and who had gained a lot of community trust and recognition on a national level, he became a great source for the FBI. He had access. He had trust. He had press credentials. He could go anywhere he wanted to go and be anywhere he wanted to be just about to take the pictures and gain the information. And so he was, Withers was looking at cases like the Nation of Islam. And it's really interesting. The Nation of Islam case I think shows how Withers moderated or translated for his community as a Black man on Beale Street for the federal government. So with the Nation of Islam, you've got J. Edgar Hoover who thinks that the Nation of Islam is a viciously anti-white, un-American cult. That's a quote from one of Hoover's civil rights manifestos. And so Withers actually got the opportunity to go into the mosque on Beale Street and to really get to know the brothers there and to figure out, well, I mean, are they really this viciously un-American anti-white cult? And what he found was more of an uplift organization. So young members were telling, young members of the organization were telling Withers, no, no, no, we were urged not to drink, not to fight, not to smoke, not to eat pork, not to abuse women. All these things that the church never told us to do. And one young man who Withers got to know was what used his spare time to research African history. Withers cornered the minister of this particular mosque and said, well, what is it with all this hatred of white people? And the minister said, I don't even mean that, you just got to say that stuff to fill the seats. And so Withers really got to the bottom of what was going on with the Nation of Islam, at least in Memphis, and provided some clarity and some perspective that was otherwise not available to the FBI. And he functioned in this way in certain other cases as well. But of course with the FBI, it was hard to stay out of sticky situations because that tended to be where the FBI got. Oh yeah, and Withers was often pretty funny in the way that he helped to help the FBI to understand what was going on with African American civil rights groups. So when his handler was curious about the Nation of Islam, Withers said, you know, ultimately, I don't think it's anything to worry about. They have two major obstacles to becoming popular in Memphis on Beale Street. Pork and Jesus. Barbecue and the Baptist are just too much a part of Memphis culture for anybody to speak against them and really gain a lot of steam as an organization. So Withers used his wit where he could to help add some some clarity to what the FBI was doing. Now throughout the the 60s, Withers is aging. Once you hit the age of 40, you gain a certain perspective on the world and you feel like you understand the way it is and should be. And he was a person who was conservative, you would say. He was an NAACP man. He was a patriot. He had been a veteran of World War II. His father was a veteran of World War I. His sons, he had several, he had a big family and several of his sons joined the service. And so he really is an American in a way that I think people are very cynical about now and think of as being quite corny. Being an American, being a patriot really meant something to him. Pursuing the goals of the civil rights movement in a way, in a certain way, was very important to him. That is the nonviolent pro-legal way that took cases to court that initiated real legal change. That was the way the NAACP had gotten things done in the Brown versus Board case, the Montgomery bus boycott case. And that's really the way that Withers began to conceive of the movement. And so as an FBI spy, he's looking for things that could actually hurt that vision and that process of civil rights. So he's looking for communists, any sort of influence of communism, and violence. And so throughout the mid-60s, the threat of violence continued to increase in the movement with the growth of black power. And Withers was there when some of the leaders of the black power movement nearly came to blows with the man posed there next to Dr. King in a Memphis motel room as the philosophical conflict between nonviolence and violence became much more pronounced. And jumping ahead a little bit to really what ends up being the dramatic conclusion of this book and the Withers story, in the spring of 1968, a sanitation worker strike took place or began in Memphis. And so this really thrust Withers into a really important case that would define, well, that would end up changing American history. Throughout those years of the 60s, the FBI, of course, is becoming increasingly interested in Dr. King and what King is doing. And so when King came to Memphis, he did so just as the FBI is really stepping up in its pursuit or in its what they call co-intel pro. Y'all ever heard of co-intel pro before? So it is the counterintelligence program. So regular intelligence gathering is, you know, typical spine. You're seeking out information. You're getting it however you can get it and you're providing it for whatever it may be worth, okay? But counterintelligence is something different. Counterintelligence is actively disrupting individuals and organizations who are behaving in some way that can be deemed un-American, whatever that is. And so the co-intel pro, the counterintelligence program that was launched against the civil rights movement in 1968, largely targeted this Black Power movement. And on March the 4th, in fact, of 1968, a series of objectives were outlined by J. Edgar Hoover to counteract what was going on with Black Power. And so there was actually a racial conference that took place in this city in March of 1968 and several of the FBI leaders got together to try and figure out, well, what are our goals and what are we going to do about it? The objectives of that particular counterintelligence program were, as follows. One, prevent the coalition of Black Nationalist groups. So you had a lot of different Black Power groups that were local, regional, scattered about the country in sort of different cells, I guess you'd say. They weren't necessarily organized under one body, one name, and the FBI didn't want that to happen. One of the things that scared the FBI at that time was the idea of a Black Revolution. So you see that over and over in the documents of the FBI at the time. Number two, second objective is to prevent the rise of a Black Messiah who could unify and electrify the movement. Number three, prevent violence on the part of Black Nationalist groups. And number four, prevent Black Nationalist groups from gaining respectability by discrediting them. And so that is where your counterintelligence comes in. You discredit groups by making them look bad, by highlighting their flaws, their negativity, by bringing up dirt out of their past, by misusing their words. However, there are a number of ways that this can be done. Well, one of the people who, J. Edgar Hoover feared, could be one of these Black Messiah figures was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in the spring of 1968 was building up towards his pork people's campaign, which was going to be a massive march on Washington that was going to lead to the building of Shantytown, I think, on the Smithsonian lawn. It was going to lead to a great camp in of poor people of all colors, of all ethnic backgrounds from all regions, not just the Black Civil Rights thing, but it was this movement towards economic justice that King was pushing in the last months of his life. And so he was leading up to this poor people's campaign. And this was the FBI's worst nightmare. In my research, I read an interview with the head of FBI Racial Intelligence at this time. And he was kind of slowly going through the list of people who felt threatened by this poor people's campaign, coming to Washington, and really bringing poverty to the forefront of the discussion. And you can see he's kind of dissembling. And he says, well, it's, I seem to remember the director of the FBI was concerned about this. And several members of Congress seem to be somewhat worried by this. And if I recall, the president of the United States was also greatly concerned by the possibility of this poor people's campaign. And so the King's campaign really had everybody's attention. On the 26th of March in 1968, G.C. Moore, who was the head of racial intelligence, suggested planting newspaper editorials that were, quote, designed to curtail the success of MLK's Washington Spring Project fundraising. The MLK's probably my abbreviation and not a part of the quote. He probably said Martin Luther King there. But he said, so this is what they wanted to do. They wanted to misinform the public about what King was doing to raise funds for this spring project in order to disrupt it, as you heard in the objectives of Co-and-Tell Pro that was happening. Well, all of this energy converged on Memphis. On March the 28th, 1968, Dr. King came to town to Memphis to support and march with the sanitation worker strike that had taken place for about six weeks up to that point. And he landed at about 1030, went straight to the head of the march. The march ended up being massive. Most of the sanitation strike demonstrations had been a couple hundred people. This was closer to 10,000, so it would have been on par with any of the largest demonstrations of the movement during the 1960s. What happened here was exactly what the FBI wanted. A king led peaceful demonstration turned violent. A riot broke out. Windows along Beale Street, where the studio was, the Black Main Street of Memphis, were smashed. Protesters clashed with the police. Ended up being a fatality, massive amounts of injuries, property damage. The real bottom line, though, King was, King looked bad in this. He had never had, as I said, one of his own demonstrations turned violent from within. This was the first time it happened. It was right on the eve of that poor people's campaign. It perfectly fit the FBI objective of preventing this poor people's campaign and the COINTELPRO objectives of disrupting and discrediting and creating divisions between the various factions of the movement. Well, what does this have to do with Ernest Withers? What does this tell us about Ernest Withers? If you look on the cover of your books, which I know you've all purchased and have in your hollow hands right now, you will see one of Withers' famous photographs. It is the I am a man photo. So on the morning of this march that turned into a riot, he gathered up a number of the sanitation workers and they carried this now iconic slogan, I am a man, on signs that were nailed to posts. Well, it was the first time in six weeks that posts were used to or sticks were used to display signs. It doesn't seem to be that big of a deal. Well, it was those posts that were used in the riot to break the windows. So those posts were the tools of the violence that marred Dr. King. And you have Ernest Withers, the iconic photographer and storyteller of the civil rights movement, who in fact, I'll tell you how I found out about this. I was here and I was in a hotel room and I was waiting for the Smithsonian to open up. Sorry, I ran around on you a little bit, National Archives. I went to the Smithsonian too. And I was waiting for the Smithsonian to open up and listen to some Withers interviews that are archived there. And I found this interview with him online in a college archive, Rhodes College in Memphis, that had been done in 1981. And I'm listening to him talk about these times, 1968. And he says, well, if anybody started that riot, I started that riot because I was the one who brought those sticks, who rented the saw and who sawed the lumber and distributed those poles. Let me jump ahead here. And the FBI knew about this. So I don't know if y'all can see that very well, but see the big redaction there, that big black swath through all of that text. What that says is FNU Harvey, which is first name unknown, brother of Fred Harvey, blah, blah, blah redaction, rent a skill saw, which was taken to the minimum salary office of AME church next to Claiborne Temple, where JC Brown cut the pine wood into four foot lengths for the placards. The Withers interview I listened to said it was me and Harvey and JC Brown who cut those sticks for the placards. And so I don't know what's under that redaction, but it could possibly be a mention of the confidential informant. So here he is involved with this instrument of violence and this riot that marred Dr. King's reputation. It's such a critical time. But, you know, it's really the crux of this mystery because you don't know he had, he just as well could have been doing what L. Alex Wilson taught him to do in Montgomery those many years before of telling the story, of depicting it in a way that was true and good and didn't hurt anybody. But he was also at the time a paid informant of the FBI who had his hands on the instruments of destruction in this particular case. So it's really a, it's quite a bizarre scenario in my book. Excuse me for just a sec. Now getting back to Withers FBI Handler, William H. Lawrence. So what you're looking at here is a page from a summary that Lawrence wrote on March the 29th, 1968. And so I think what you see here is a document that was written on March the 29th, 1968, the day after the riot that's kind of summarizing everything that happened. And Lawrence has used something that Withers told him in this to say, let me see if I can find exactly what it was. So, okay, Withers is Source One at the top of the paragraph there. Source One stated that in recent weeks, blah, blah, blah, blah, prior to the start of the March, John Smith, who's one of the local black power activists in Memphis and some of his associates were in his opinion inciting to violence in that they were indiscriminately giving out the four-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. So that's information there that's being attributed to Withers by the FBI. And what he's saying specifically there is that a man named John B. Smith who was part of a group called the Invaders was the one who took the post and gave them to young kids who then went and smashed the windows at Smith's urging. Let's see if we can there's another perspective on this as well. So this is from a later this is from a later document a summary that Withers handler Mr. Lawrence wrote on May the 6th 1968. And so what he gets to what Lawrence eventually gets to here is and in this one Withers is actually Source Two but Lawrence says Source Two recalled hearing John B. Smith tell some of the youngsters don't be afraid to use these sticks if you have to. So the difference is in the March 29th memo the day after the riot there was no direct quote it was an attribution of an unnamed source saying that John Smith did this stuff. On this May 6th memo the story is getting a little bit better. He's now using a direct quote that the source has supposedly supplied. And then if you jump ahead to another summary that Lawrence has written about these events it gets even better in that one Withers has advised Lawrence that the group that handed out these polls were making a grave mistake. It was like giving all these angry kids a bunch of baseball bats. Of course it was going to turn then he uses the direct quote. So Lawrence's story keeps getting better and better every time. And I assume that Lawrence never knew that anybody would find out that he was embellishing in this way. But not so fast. In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations held hearings to investigate the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and this particular riot was looked into because what ended up happening was Dr. King had no plans beyond the day of that March that turned riot to be in Memphis. Well after the violence he was determined to come back to Memphis and to prove to the world on the eve of this Poor People's Campaign that he could lead a peaceful march. It became his what he called the dress rehearsal for the Poor People's Campaign. He had to resurrect his reputation as a nonviolent leader or else his DC program was going to be a total flop. And y'all know what happened when King came back to lead that makeup march in Memphis. He never had a chance to lead it. He was killed. So he had no plans to be in Memphis past March 28th but the riot changed that. It brought him back and that's where he was assassinated on April the 4th 1968. It's a whole bunch of dominoes that are collapsing there. So that is what ended up bringing interest to the riot. The riot was looked at as a possible as something that could have have been staged in order to embarrass King in order to set him up for the assassination. And I interviewed a person who was on this committee, congressman named Harold Ford and he said that they had complete subpoena power and a travel budget. And so they went around subpoenaing federal documents and traveling and doing interviews. And so they did a widespread massive investigation of all that had taken place. They ended up calling William Lawrence the Memphis FBI man to the stand and asking him about these very documents that we've just looked at. Well, is it true that your source told you that John Smith, the leader of the Black Power Group was the one who was distributing these sticks? And of course Lawrence said, yeah, it's true. Turned out that the committee also called three more witnesses and all of them contradicted Lawrence including John B. Smith who I've spoken to myself. And he said, no, of course not. I wasn't there handing out the lumber telling people to break glass or anything like that. It's absurd. Well, that's what you would expect the guy who got accused of it to say. Ernest Withers was also called before this tribunal. And we don't know exactly what his testimony includes. It hasn't been released. But the committee said the informant denied having provided certain information that had been attributed to him and placed in his informant file. So there's another contradiction of Lawrence's the FBI's version of events. And this is probably the most interesting contradiction of the FBI version of events. It comes from a man named Morrell McCullough. So Withers was not the only infiltrator of the civil rights movement. Morrell McCullough was a Memphis police department officer, a younger guy who wore an afro and torn up jeans and dressed essentially in the costume of the black power activist and ended up joining the invaders, the black power group that got tagged with all of this violence. And he said in his testimony, I was with the invader group and they never joined the march. They were just walking around the temple here talking. That was where the march was organized. John B. Smith spent most of his time right around the door of the temple. I never saw him remove sticks from placards and pass the sticks to youngsters. And I never saw anyone passing sticks out to the youngsters other than the sticks with the placards on them. I would characterize Smith's statements as rhetoric of violence but nothing specific as to take this stick and break a window. And so all of this evidence to me ends up looking as though the FBI has used withers to pin this riot on this black power group when in fact they did not take these specific actions that the FBI has alleged that they have. This what you see here on this slide is some handwritten notes from Agent Lawrence. And this is right around the time that he testified in front of the House Select Committee. He has gotten in touch with withers before withers came to testify. And this is what Lawrence told withers. So withers is due to testify at November the 22nd, 1978 at about 10 a.m. Lawrence got him on the phone at 8.15. And this is what he said. I never revealed or disclosed withers identity and did not know how committee learned of his identity. Committee asked me if info attributed to him in my letterhead memo of 329 being the one where John Smith is accused of using the sticks had actually been furnished by him and I had to reply that it had been. I told withers in his testimony to avoid being so taciturn or evasive that he could inadvertently commit perjury by denying that he had furnished info which I had attributed to him. That if he chose to do so that it would nevertheless create a situation indicating that he or I had perjured ourselves in that I said one thing and he the other. So you have an FBI agent in certainly not directly threatening language but just pointing out that if withers should testify that he in fact did not provide this information that somebody has committed perjury which is pretty serious stuff. I don't know what y'all think about this considering the power dynamic between an FBI handler and a confidential informant but it would seem to me that the FBI handler is putting a certain amount of pressure on withers to testify in a certain way. So ultimately the committee did not level any perjury charges but they did conclude that this 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 that is the black power group that got blamed for all of this stuff. And so it's just you know an absolutely chaotic and fascinating story that is full of all of these interesting characters that's got this iconic photograph that seems to hold some of the keys to this mystery. And so that really was my jumping off point and that's how far I ended up going with it and I always like to leave some time for questions and answers and I'm leading up to that if y'all have any questions I will wrap this in a minute. But you know there is one little piece of wisdom from Dr. King that I went back to time and time again in trying to make sense of this story and figure out how to deal with it because that was some pressure too and this came from are y'all familiar with the mountaintop speech King delivered in Memphis the night before his assassination just a beautiful and stirring example of his rhetoric with the prophecy of seeing the promised land and that the end of his life was near when in fact it would come the very next day and everybody knows about that I've been to the mountaintop part right but earlier in the speech with withers and attendants King said the following he called himself he reminded everybody that he himself was just a sinner and he said there is a schizophrenia as the psychologist or the psychiatrist would call it going on within all of us he said and there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us and he closed saying there's attention and this is what really reminds me of withers in these troubled times there is attention 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 so thanks and if anybody has questions we have microphones that are set up in either aisle there so proceed sir thank you very much just curious again not clear on the story except for what you brought to us and thank you for that there was some stuff online about him being with the Memphis police department and if you could talk about I guess having that background and his connection obviously you said patriotic aspects of his life and how he would be perceived within the community with having that background and second part of that question as an informant if he was disclosed in some aspect what potentially would be the risks to him in that time if you could talk about that from any understanding of that yeah very good questions both he made reference to the fact that Ernest Withers had been a Memphis police department officer and that's kind of an interesting story that is big in the back story section of the book so in 1948 the Memphis police department was all white and due to a building amount of civic pressure to be for people to be policed equally in a 50 percent African-American town the political boss of the city decided it was time to add 12 African-American officers to the police force and Ernest Withers was one of them he came from a politically connected family his father used to run a voter registry and this is kind of in contrast to what I said earlier about it's rural counties in west Tennessee where African-American people didn't vote the opposite was true in Memphis there was a very strong tradition of black political participation and Withers family participated in this they registered voters and their home was open as a polling place and so since they were politically helpful to the to the machine that ran the town when these 12 plum jobs became available one of them went to Ernest Withers as a police officer now he lasted for about three years before he was dismissed due to a bootlegging charge and don't run too far with that because the Memphis police department in fact ran the entire bootlegging racket in the city and the head for time immemorial and it's simply a case of Ernest wasn't cheating by the rules he had decided to go off and work with an unsanctioned bootleger in that respect and I want to answer the second part of his his question of as well which was and I'll do it pretty quickly because I see you standing there but in 19 you're talking about in 1978 if he had been revealed during this house investigation as an okay okay I mean I'd have to completely speculate because I don't know I think he likely feared a loss of business you know he was a very trusted person as a freelance photographer and so that probably would have been the big thing and I think the social stigma would have been something the truth is Memphis is a hustling town and everybody there knows that everybody's on the take and that's a big part of the culture and the situation that he came out of I think that that's part of why it was okay for him to participate you know at least psychologically to himself it was not a betrayal he wasn't like a traitor to the civil rights movement you know I talk to myself blue in the face trying to convince people just because he participated it doesn't mean that he was a traitor to the movement he had his vision of the way things should go but I think that that stigma of being an informant still would have hurt certainly his business certainly his reputation yes hi thank you why the title Bluff City oh okay good part of it I think I just addressed but no Memphis's nickname is the Bluff City and it is built on a river bluff overlooking the Mississippi River but it is also a city of bluffs where you know there has traditionally been a tremendous amount of vice and corruption and trickery gambling rackets bootlegging rackets sex rackets vote rigging anything that you it's a city of bluffs and that's one of my favorite things about it I mean I just I love the characters they're fascinating people and I think that you know we're in a time where we really appreciate these complex characters and Memphis is a great source of that there are plenty of you know reformed crap shooters and pickpockets who I've gotten to know who became civil rights activists and very staunchly and still are activists to this day so there's really no limit to the amount of character complexity the capacity for good in conjunction with the perpetration of maybe a few little pieces of evil here and there the man who built his fortune on Beale Street Robert Church the first black millionaire in the south built it in saloons and brothels and then he took those proceeds and he built good housing for African American citizens he built parks for black citizens during the times of segregation and so the corruption and the goodness they all kind of go together in the bluff city yes I believe you said that withers 1978 testimony between before the congressional committee is still under seal is that correct yeah as far as I know is it going to be sealed for hour or is it one of those things that has a release date on it I don't specifically know the release date but I hope you know I've heard that 2027 there's a batch of MLK documents that are to be made available at that point you probably know better than I do okay make a FOIA request you know it's a you can help me with that right yeah yeah I'd be glad to so we really have no idea what his testimony was but for that committee and whether he followed his handlers guidance or not that is correct and wow to me it looks like because the committee in its in its closing remarks in summaries alluded to his testimony and said that his testimony had contradicted that of the FBI and so I'm fairly certain that because the FBI was so I mean excuse me the committee was so focused on that issue of the sticks and where they come from and how this violence had been caused that that's what they were asking them about they weren't asking them about you know the nation of Islam in 1960 at that point they were they were interested in spring 68 and the violence that had taken place and they were looking to it as a as a domino that fell before the king assassination thank you thank you I don't see anybody rushing for the mic so thank you all for spending a fun lunch hour all the good parts are actually in the book I just did all the boring stuff and so you want to buy one of those that comes free with an autograph or with a free autograph out here in the lobby momentarily I will be there