Recently a friend told me a story he recalls having heard on the local public radio station. He couldn’t remember just when it was. He thought if was on Fresh Air.
Briefly, the story was that at some time in the 1960s or 70 The FBI was on the lookout for “the wash towel people”. Various urban black people had advised The FBI or its informants that there were people raising money for a cause by selling wash towels from door-to-door. The FBI was convinced, somehow, that these wash towels were stolen from public rest rooms and the money from sales was going to a conspiracy to destroy The American Way of Life.
It eventually developed that people had, in fact, been saying “The Watch Tower people” and were referring merely to Jehovah’s Witnesses who sometimes go door-to-door with their newsletter, entitled “The Watch Tower”. Evidently FBI agents couldn’t understand their dialect.
I feel confident my friend was not making this up, yet I cannot find anything relevant when I try searching The Internet. Even if this were purely an urban legend, I should think there would be some kind of documentation somewhere. Can anyone advise on where I might read about this?