Civil Rights Photographer’s FBI Ties
In many ways, civil rights photographer Ernest Withers would have been the perfect FBI
informant, said leaders of the movement whom
he photographed during quiet moments in
their hotel rooms, at strategy meetings and in
the midst of powerful street protests.
This Story
Mixed reactions to civil rights photographer’s
FBI ties
Photographer Ernest Withers worked with FBI
Guidebook that aided black travelers during
segregation reveals vastly different D.C.
He was known to them as “Ernie” and later
lionized as the “original civil rights
photographer.” It was Withers who took
photos of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. the
day he was slain on the balcony of the Lorraine
Motel in Memphis, and it was Withers who
documented the trial of the men who killed
young Emmett Till.
The revelation this week by the Memphis
Commercial Appeal that Withers also assisted
an organization that many in the movement
considered an enemy further exposes the
desperation of the federal government to gain
access to the highest levels of the civil rights
leadership.
The FBI kept an extensive file on King and his
aides, and distrust between the movement’s
leaders and the agency was great. Civil rights
leaders knew their hotel rooms were bugged
and were careful about what they said even on
their home phones, knowing that federal
agents were listening. They felt like people
inside and outside of their organizations were
always watching them.
“It was just par for the course,” said Juanita
Jones Abernathy, widow of King’s close friend
Ralph Abernathy. “They could be in strategy
sessions, and the FBI had a way of calling
almost immediately after they had made plans
for something to inform them of what they had
planned to do. They would check into hotels,
and the FBI was in the room across the aisle.”
“But they kept moving,” she said.
Withers, who died in 2007 at 85, provided
photographs, scheduling information and
biographical sketches to two FBI agents in
Memphis, according to files the Commercial
Appeal attained through a Freedom of
Information Act request. The photographer
was a former police officer, and the Memphis
newspaper noted that Withers had eight
children and may have needed the money paid
to informants to support them.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a founder of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
knew Withers well and said he is disappointed.
The photographer moved freely in the tight
circle of King’s lieutenants, taking pictures and
selling them to black magazines such as Jet and
other outlets. He would give the photos free to
the ministers who led the movement and could
not afford to pay.
Those pictures have been collected in books
and show a rare intimacy with civil rights
leaders.
“He was very close,” Lowery said from his home
in Atlanta. “He was beloved. I’m surprised and
I’m a little disappointed, but I suspect he did it
with his tongue in check knowing that he was
not doing anything to hurt the movement.”
According to FBI files obtained by the Memphis
newspaper during a two-year investigation,
Withers worked closely with two FBI agents in
the late 1960s.
“There was nothing he could report on us that
would hurt us,” Lowery said. “We were not an
undercover group. We didn’t have any need to
hide. We weren’t planning any ambushes or
surprise attacks. We were quite open with
what we were planning to do. We publicized it
and invited people to join it. He probably knew
that as well as anybody.”"We felt there was nothing wrong with saying
who we had or hadn’t seen. Lots of people
talked to the FBI and did so innocently,” Bond
said. “They believed that they were helping in
some legitimate law enforcement reason.”
When agents began asking questions about
politics – who was a communist, or about
specific political figures – the SNCC leaders
became more wary.
“We know some people in the movement were
informants. I grew up in a political culture in
which an informant – somebody who told on his
friends – was the lowest form of life,” Bond
said.
Withers’s daughter, Rosalind Withers, told
local news organizations that she did not find
the newspaper report convincing. “This is the
the Commercial Appeal. “My father’s not here
to defend himself. That is a very, very strong,
strong accusation.”
Abernathy said Withers’s family has her
sympathy and concern. Withers was closer than
any other journalist when King traveled to
Memphis in 1968 for the sanitation workers’
strike. It was there that King was assassinated,
and Withers, who lived in Memphis, captured
the sad, bloody aftermath beyond police lines.
Many details of Withers’s relationship with the
FBI have not been disclosed. The bureau keeps
information on all its informers but has
declined repeated requests to release any files
on Withers.
As a whole, journalists were largely supportive
of the movement’s aims, said former
Washington Post columnist William Raspberry,
who was part of the small cadre of black
journalists who covered civil rights. “There’s a
distinction to be made between those
informants who pretended to be something
other than what they were and those who were
pressured,” said Raspberry, who noted that
civil rights activist Julius Hobson – who ran the
D.C. chapter of the Congress on Racial Equity -
was later revealed in FBI files to have been an
informant.
“His experience was that sometimes you have to
throw them a little something to get them off
your back,” Raspberry said.
By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
