Famed civil rights
photographer a spy
By Kevin
Spak, Newser Staff
Posted Sep 14,
2010 10:11 AM CDT
(Newser) – Ernest Withers, the famed “original
civil rights photographer” and close confidant of Martin Luther King, was
secretly a paid FBI informant, cluing the government in on all the Civil Rights
Movement’s activities, according to a two-year investigation from the Memphis
Commercial Appeal. Withers tailed King for the feds the very day before his
assassination, telling the FBI about a meeting he had with suspected black
militants.
Withers, who died
in 2007, was a so-called “racial informant” from 1968 until at least 1970, with
one FBI report marveling that he was “most conversant with all the key
activities in the Negro community.” His reports provided details on everything
from budding militant groups to local churches supporting the movement. “It’s
an amazing betrayal,” one historian tells the New York Times.
“This man was so
well trusted.”
Photojournalist
Ernest C. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee.
Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South
Pacific during World War II. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose
photography as his profession.
In the 1950s,
Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo
pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Over the next two decades, Withers formed
close personal relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers,
and James Meredith. Withers's pictures of key civil rights events from the
Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis
sanitation workers are historic. Indeed, Withers was often the only
photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to
the mainstream press.
Withers
photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Whether Jackie
Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz
and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed
the famous and not-so famous. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early
performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and
Aretha Franklin.
In his more than
sixty-year career, Withers accumulated a collection of an estimated five
million photographs; his works appeared in The New York Times, Jet, Ebony,
Newsweek, and Life and were featured in touring exhibits and shows around the
country. For his life’s work, Withers was elected to the Black Press Hall of
Fame and received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art.
Withers and his
high school sweetheart, Dorothy Curry, raised eight children.
Ernest C. Withers
passed away on Monday, October 15, 2007 at the age of eighty-five.
