JENNIE K. WILLIAMS, PH.D
I was born and raised in Knoxville, TN, a town most people have heard of but can’t recall why.
My father, a clinical psychologist, is from Brooklyn, NY. Like any decent Jew raised up on the streets of Flatbush, Dad was a full-blown radical leftist by junior high. My mother, also a clinical psychologist, grew up all over the United States because her father, Fletcher Thompson, was in the FBI. (I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry, I’ll come back to this.)
My grandfather Fletcher, my grandmother Ruth, my mother (green purse and matching shoes), my mother’s siblings, and J. Edgar Hoover. My father at a protest in 1970. Admittedly, he was also selling buttons, but the kid had to eat, okay? (Dad left home at 14, so he was on his own by the time this was taken.)
Before they passed in 2017 and 2018 respectively, I was very close to Fletcher as well as his wife of 73 years, my grandmother Ruth.
In so many ways, they were wonderful. Even in their 90s, Ruth and Fletcher were devoted to living lives of meaning and service. And to me, they were ideal grandparents: unfailingly kind and loving, and keenly interested in my life and accomplishments.
But why am I sharing this with you? Because history is personal, and this—along with what I’m going to tell you next—is why it’s personal for me.
Fletcher and me and his and Ruth’s 70th anniversary celebration dinner; Ruth opening a Christmas present from me (earrings I had made for her), Fletcher and a very young me.
My grandmother, Ruth DeLoache Thompson, was born in Saluda, South Carolina in 1923.
From the census, I can tell that my grandmother’s grandparents and great-grandparents were enslavers. I also knew this because, every so often, Ruth would mention African American men and women who lived on her family’s land when she was young. They had “stayed on after the war,” she would say.
Images: My grandmother Ruth holding my aunt Jennie, after whom I am named; a map of my grandmother’s homeplace, Saluda, SC; a reference to an overseer bearing my grandmother’s maiden name in the WPA interview of a formerly enslaved woman named Rachel Sullivan. (I do not know if this man was kin to me, but he might as well have been. Either way, I know what my people did.)
Now, of all the things my grandfather could have been involved in at the FBI, I have spent the most time thinking about COINTELPRO.
As I’m sure you know, COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal counterintelligence programs conducted by the FBI between 1956 to 1971. The program aimed to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt American political organizations perceived as subversive—including, of course, civil rights leaders.
Over the last ten years of my grandfather’s life, I conducted numerous interviews with him regarding his life and career. He also entrusted me with his “papers” from the Bureau—an archive he was not entirely sure that he was supposed to have in his possession in the first place.
I asked my grandfather everything I could think to ask him, and I asked it all every way I could think to ask it.
On some subjects—the Kennedy assassination, for example (Fletcher was one of two agents LBJ sent to Dallas immediately after the assassination to conduct the initial investigation), my grandfather was quite open and engaging. But when it came to the Bureau’s illicit surveillance and harassment of Civil Rights leaders, Fletcher said very little except “I did not know of any such program, and if I had, I would have been very disappointed in the Bureau.”
Of course, you know, like I know, that there are many, many ways to interpret such a statement, and when Fletcher passed away at 96 in 2017, I figured I’d learned everything I ever would about my grandfather’s career.
But then, in August 2021, an acquaintance added me to an email chain full of people I didn’t know.
Very quickly, however, I made up my mind that I didn’t particularly want to know anyone on this email chain. You see, as one reply-all came in after another, it became clear that this was an email chain comprised of Very Confident Men whose favorite pastime was, evidently, holding forth for one another on matters they knew little to nothing about—a circle of peacocks admiring each other’s feathers, if you will. Now, a better person than I would have let them be. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, after all. But I did not. Instead, I sent a reply-all of my own, and then—to my great surprise—I received a reply: “That was very funny,” it read, and below that, a name: Oliver St. Clair Franklin.
Image: Oliver and me, September 2024.
From our very first conversation, I could tell that Oliver and I were kindred spirits. Even so, I never could have imagined what we would soon discover—that I was carrying a missing piece of his ancestral history, and that he was carrying a missing piece of mine.
A few months later, I was driving across the country—from Santa Cruz, California, where I had a postdoctoral fellowship, to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, where my family has always vacationed—and I decided to call Oliver to help pass me pass the time. As we chatted, I mentioned that I was going to spend some time at my parents’ house after the beach.
When, in response, Oliver asked what I would be working on while I was in Knoxville, I figured it was as good a time to come clean about Fletcher’s career as any. “I’m going to organize my grandfather’s papers,” I said, adding, “he was an Assistant Director in the FBI.” I will never forget Oliver’s reply: “You know, I hope your grandfather was Fletcher Thompson,” he said. I pulled over immediately.
As soon as I got to a gas station, I called Oliver. “How do you know my grandfather’s name?” I asked. Here is what he told me…
In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King came to Baltimore where, for safety reasons, he stayed with Oliver’s parents, the Rev. Oliver St. Clair Franklin and Mrs. Hyla Franklin. Perhaps you see where this is going.
By 1964, of course, the FBI was tracking Dr. King’s every move by any and all methods, be they legal or, more often, not. And so, shortly after Dr. King’s departure, the Rev. and Mrs. Franklin realized that they, too, were being targeted by Hoover’s men. Knowing, at the very least, that their home phone had been tapped, they began to wonder and worry about what they might not know.
What they needed, Oliver’s father eventually decided, was a man on the inside—a Bureau man with some semblance of a conscience who might be persuaded to let them know if and when they had cause to fear for their family’s safety. So, in search of such a man, the Franklins reached out to a powerful and connected friend, Judge William Hastie. (As you probably know, William Henry Hastie, was the first African American to be appointed as a federal district court judge, as well as the first African American to be appointed as a federal appellate judge. And—by the way—his hometown? Same as mine. Knoxville, TN.)
Anyway, Judge Hastie did not disappoint. He did indeed have a man on the inside whom he trusted. His name was Fletcher Thompson. From then on, Oliver told me, it was not uncommon for his father—who remained active in the struggle for civil rights despite the FBI’s harassment—to exclaim, about some crisis or another, “I’ve got to talk to Fletcher about this!”
Dr. King in Baltimore in 1964; an advertisement for Oliver’s father’s church printed in the Baltimore Afro-American, December 28, 1857; Judge William Hastie.
Now, to understand the significance—to me, I mean— of what Oliver told me, you have to understand that one of the primary reasons I found my grandfather’s career so painful to think about was that he always seemed extremely and exclusively proud of his work.
But this? This complicated things, and in a welcome way. This complicated him, and I did not see it coming. It is possible, however, that I should have.
My grandfather Fletcher was born in 1921 in Spotsylvania County, VA, the youngest of nine children born to Jennie Lee Brown Thompson and Charles Hiram Thompson.
Fletcher’s birth was a difficult one for Jennie Lee, so much so that she was advised not to have any other children afterward. Unfortunately, however, she fell pregnant again less than two years later. Her death certificate, dated April 9, 1923, indicates that she died of an “infection following [an] abortion.”
In the wake of Jennie Lee’s death, Fletcher’s father—daunted by the prospect of raising nine children on his own—decided to send Fletcher to be raised by his (Fletcher’s) paternal grandparents, James L. Thompson and Julia A. Thompson. (Technically, Julia was Fletcher’s step-grandmother, but that’s neither here nor there.)
So who were these elders who raised my grandfather? I don’t know much about them, but I do know something of significance.
Image: Jennie Lee Brown Thompson’s death certificate, 1923.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, James—the man who eventually raised my grandfather—was a ten-year-old boy living on his family’s farm in Mountain City, TN.
Tennessee seceded from the Union in June of 1861, and according to the Confederacy’s First Conscription Act, passed less than a year later, every man between 18 and 35 owed the South at least three years of military service. James, of course, was far too young to enlist. At 42 years of age, however, James’s father, Henry Haws Thompson would have been welcome in the Confederate Army.
Ultimately, Henry did elect to serve, but he fought for the Union, not the South.
All told, Henry Haws Thompson was one of the lucky ones. A year and a half after his enlistment he fell ill and was sent to a hospital in Chattanooga to recuperate. Six months later, he was discharged from both the hospital and the army; the war was over. Oh, and by the way, the town where Henry Haws Thompson mustered out? It was Knoxville, TN. This, however, is not the end of Henry’s story.
Henry Haws Thompson survived the Civil War, but he would not survive the chaos and fury of Reconstruction.
Images: Henry Haws Thompson’s Civil War service record; record of Henry Haws Thompson’s treatment in a hospital for soldiers in Chattanooga, TN, 1864.
