MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Civil rights movement veterans are struggling to explain the motives of a revered photographer recently unmasked as an FBI informant who spied on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others even as he captured their most intimate moments. His children don’t think it’s true.
This was to have been the season to honor the late Ernest C. Withers for his historic work, with his photos displayed at a museum bearing his name.
All that has been overshadowed by The Commercial Appeal newspaper’s revealing he was an informant who regularly tipped authorities about civil rights leaders, many of whom trusted him so completely that he was allowed to sit in on their most sensitive meetings.
“Personally, and as a family, we do not believe what has been alleged. It still has to be proven,” said Withers’ youngest daughter, Rosalind Withers, in an interview at the unfinished museum on Memphis’ Beale Street, set to open later this year.
The newspaper reviewed thousands of pages of federal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, providing a glimpse into the FBI’s surveillance of civil rights leaders.
D’Army Bailey, a former Memphis judge and activist, said colleagues knew the FBI was watching.
“It’s a very serious and disturbing thing; it’s not a surprising thing,” Bailey said, adding that he suspects Withers wasn’t the only one passing information on to the FBI.
Ernest Withers, often called “the original civil rights photographer,” died in 2007 at age 85.
His crisp black-and-white pictures chronicled the seminal Emmett Till murder trial in 1955, racial integration at the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis that brought King to the city where he was assassinated.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, then a close aide to King, said no one suspected Withers was an informant. Although Withers had access to the leaders, he was not in any “decision-making, influencing position.”
“He was a basic photographer who was always around,” Jackson said. “He was a man we had high regard for.”
To his children, Withers was just a photographer, a charitable family man and a believer in King’s message of racial equality.
Andrew Jerome Withers, Rosalind Withers and Frances Williams vow to do their own FOIA request and talk to the FBI in efforts to clear their father’s name.
