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<h1><font size=4><b>Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant
to spy on civil rights movement<br><br>
<br>
</b></font></h1><h2><b>He provided agency with insider's view of volatile
period</b></h2><font size=3>By Marc Perrusquia <br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withers-fbi-informant/?print=1" eudora="autourl">
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withers-fbi-informant/?print=1<br>
<br>
</a>Sunday, September 12, 2010 <br><br>
At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it, splashed
across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting. Instinctively,
Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn't just a murder. This was
history.<br><br>
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting with
aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle.<br><br>
Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.<br><br>
Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street newsman
made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel -- King's room -- and
walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked. After all, this
was Ernest C. Withers. He'd marched with King, and sat in on some of the
movement's sensitive strategy meetings.<br><br>
A veteran freelancer for America's black press, Withers was known as
"the original civil rights photographer," an insider who'd
covered it all, from the Emmett Till murder that jump-started the
movement in 1955 to the Little Rock school crisis, the integration of Ole
Miss and, now, the 1968 sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis
and his death.<br><br>
As other journalists languished in the Lorraine courtyard, Withers'
camera captured the scene:<br><br>
Bernard Lee, tie undone, looking weary yet fiery.<br><br>
Andrew Young raising his palm to keep order.<br><br>
Ben Hooks and Harold Middlebrook gazing pensively as King's briefcase
sits nearby, opened, as if awaiting his return.<br><br>
The grief-stricken aides photographed by Withers on April 4, 1968, had no
clue, but the man they invited in that night was an FBI informant --
evidence of how far the agency went to spy on private citizens in Memphis
during one of the nation's most volatile periods.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-details-invaders-history-2/#document/p9/a6">
Withers shadowed King the day before his murder</a>, snapping photos and
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-details-invaders-history-2/#document/p9/a0">
telling agents about a meeting the civil rights leader had with suspected
black militants</a>.<br><br>
He later
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/reports-to-fbi-from-mlk-funeral/#document/p2/a0">
divulged details gleaned at King's funeral in Atlanta</a>, reporting that
two Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffers blamed for an
earlier Beale Street riot planned to return to Memphis "to resume
... support of sanitation strike'' -- to stir up more trouble, as the FBI
saw it.<br><br>
The April 10, 1968, report, which
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/reports-to-fbi-from-mlk-funeral/#document/p2/a1">
identifies Withers only by his confidential informant number</a> --
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/pages-from-foia-reveal-withers-as-informant/#document/p2/a0">
ME 338-R</a> -- is among numerous reports reviewed by The Commercial
Appeal that reveal a covert, previously unknown side of the beloved
photographer who
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2007/oct/16/ernest-withers-1922---2007-ernest-withers-dies/">
died in 2007 at age 85</a>.<br><br>
Those reports portray Withers as a prolific informant who, from at least
1968 until 1970, passed on tips and photographs detailing an insider's
view of politics, business and everyday life in Memphis' black
community.<br><br>
As a foot soldier in J. Edgar Hoover's domestic intelligence program,
Withers helped the FBI gain a front-row seat to the civil rights and
anti-war movements in Memphis.<br><br>
Much of his undercover work helped the FBI break up the Invaders, a Black
Panther-styled militant group that became popular in disaffected black
Memphis in the late 1960s and was feared by city leaders.<br><br>
Yet, Withers focused on mainstream Memphians as well.<br><br>
Personal and professional details of Church of God in Christ Bishop
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/sweet-willie-wine-ge-patterson/">
G.E. Patterson</a> (then a pastor with a popular radio show), real estate
agent
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/pushing-jobs-for-invaders/#document/p4/a0">
O.W. Pickett</a>, politician O. Z. Evers and others plumped FBI files as
the bureau ran a secret war on militancy.<br><br>
When community leader
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-draws-links-between-invaders/#document/p4">
Jerry Fanion took cigarettes to jailed Invaders</a>, agents took note.
Agents wrote reports when
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/photos-of-catholic-priests/">
Catholic Father Charles Mahoney befriended an Invader</a>, when car
dealer
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/pushing-jobs-for-invaders/#document/p1/a2">
John T. Fisher offered jobs to militants</a>, when
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/james-lawson/#document/p7/a0">
Rev. James Lawson planned a trip to Czechoslovakia</a> and when a
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-draws-links-between-invaders/#document/p5/a1">
schoolteacher loaned his car to a suspected radical</a>.<br><br>
Each report has a common thread -- Withers.<br><br>
As a so-called
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/other-informants/#document/p1/a3">
racial informant</a> -- one who monitored race-related politics and
"hate'' organizations -- Withers fed agents a steady flow of
information.<br><br>
Records indicate he snapped and handed over photos of
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/photos-of-catholic-priests/">
St. Patrick Catholic Church priests</a> who supported the city's striking
sanitation workers;
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/political-candidates/#document/p2/a1">
he monitored political candidates</a>,
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/car-tag-number/#document/p1/a1">
jotted down auto tag numbers for agents</a>, and once
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/photos-of-civil-rights-worker/">
turned over a picture of an employee of the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission</a> said to be "one who will give aid and comfort to the
black power groups." In an interview this year, that worker said she
came within a hearing of losing her job.<br><br>
"It's something you would expect in the most ruthless, totalitarian
regimes,'' said D'Army Bailey, a retired Memphis judge and former
activist who came under FBI scrutiny in the '60s. The spying touched a
nerve in black America and created mistrust that many still struggle with
40 years later.<br><br>
"Once that trust is shattered that doesn't go away,'' Bailey
said.<br><br>
In addition to spying on citizens, Hoover's FBI ran a covert operation,
called COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence or "dirty tricks'' program
that attempted to disrupt radical movements. It did this with tactics
such as leaking embarrassing details to the news media, targeting
individuals with radical views for prosecution or trying to get them
fired from jobs. First launched in the 1950s to fight communism, by 1967
it was aimed at a range of civil rights leaders and organizations deemed
to be threats to national security. Congressional inquiries later exposed
it for widespread abuse of personal and political freedoms, including a
fierce campaign against King.<br><br>
Yet much of the detail of the FBI's domestic spying, including the inner
workings of its informant network in Memphis, remain untold. Tracing
Withers' steps through thousands of pages of federal records reveals
substantial new details about the extent of the FBI's surveillance of
private citizens.<br><br>
In Withers, who ran a popular Beale Street photography studio frequented
by the powerful and ordinary alike, the FBI found a super-informant, one
who, according to an FBI report, proved "most conversant with all
key activities in the Negro community.''<br><br>
"He was the perfect source for them. He could go everywhere with a
perfect, obvious professional purpose,'' said Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian David Garrow, who, along with retired Marquette University
professor Athan Theoharis, reviewed the newspaper's findings.<br><br>
Many political informants from the civil rights era were unwitting,
unpaid dupes. Yet Withers,
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/other-informants/#document/p1/a3">
who was assigned a racial informant number</a> and produced a large
volume of confidential reports, fits the profile of a closely supervised,
paid informant, experts say.<br><br>
"It would be shocking to me that he wasn't paid,'' said Theoharis,
author of the books "Spying on Americans" and "The Boss:
J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition".<br><br>
"Once you get to this level if you're a criminal informant versus a
source of information they're at a higher level. They're controlled.
They're supervised,'' said Theoharis, who discerns a valuable lesson in
the revelation of Withers' political spying.<br><br>
"It speaks to the problem of secrecy. The government is able to do
things in the shadows that are really questionable. That goes to the
heart of our (democratic) society.''<br><br>
It's uncertain what impact the revelation will have on Withers' legacy.
The photographer was lionized in the final years of his life. Four books
of his photography were published, exhibits of his work made
international tours and a building on Beale Street was named for him.
Congressman Steve Cohen proposed a yet-unfunded $396,000 earmark for a
museum, set to open next month, to preserve Withers' archives.<br><br>
Yet, even 40 years after the fact, the FBI still aggressively guards the
secret of Withers' activities. The one record that would pinpoint the
breadth and detail of his undercover work -- his informant file --
remains sealed. The Justice Department has twice rejected the newspaper's
Freedom of Information requests to copy that file, and won't even
acknowledge the file exists.<br><br>
Responding to the newspaper's requests, the government instead released
369 pages related to a 1970s public corruption probe that targeted
Withers -- by then a state employee who was taking payoffs -- carefully
redacting references to informants -- with one notable
exception.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/pages-from-foia-reveal-withers-as-informant/#document/p2/a0">
Censors overlooked a single reference to Withers' informant number</a>.
That number, in turn, unlocked the secret of the photographer's 1960s
political spying when the newspaper located repeated references to the
number in other FBI reports released under FOIA 30 years ago. Those
reports -- more than 7,000 pages comprising the FBI's files on the 1968
sanitation strike and a 1968-70 probe of the Invaders -- at times
pinpoint specific actions by Withers and in other instances show he was
one of several informants contributing details.<br><br>
Witness accounts and Withers' own photos provided further corroborating
details.<br><br>
"This is the first time I've heard of this in my life,'' said
daughter Rosalind Withers, trustee of her father's photo collection, who
said she wants to see documentation before commenting at length.<br><br>
"My father's not here to defend himself. That is a very, very,
strong, strong accusation. "<br><br>
A son, Rome Withers, who runs his own Memphis photography business, said
he, too, was unaware of his father's secret FBI work, but doesn't believe
it diminishes his courageous work documenting the civil rights
movement.<br><br>
"He had been harassed, beaten, shot at. He was a victim'' who often
faced hostile mobs and violent police forces. "At that time, when
you are the only black on the scene, you're in an intimidating
state.''<br><br>
Andrew Young, now 78, said he isn't bothered that Withers secretly worked
as an informant while snapping civil rights history.<br><br>
"I always liked him because he was a good photographer. And he was
always (around)," he said. Young viewed Withers as an important
publicity tool because his work often appeared in Jet magazine and other
high-profile publications. The movement was transparent and didn't have
anything to hide anyway, he said.<br><br>
"I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money
on the side.''<br><br>
* * *<br><br>
There was a time in 1968 and 1969 when Lance "Sweet Willie Wine''
Watson was considered the most dangerous man in Memphis. As "prime
minister'' of the Invaders, a self-styled militant organization whose
rhetoric included overthrowing the government, Watson frightened black
and white Memphians alike. The FBI assembled a huge file on him.<br><br>
Today, Watson, who goes by the name Suhkara Yahweh, is more conciliatory.
He runs a community development organization in his impoverished South
Memphis neighborhood and ministers to youths and the needy.<br><br>
Still, he decorates his living room with mementos: A bumper sticker
reading "Damn the Army, Join the Invaders''; a glass case containing
a military-styled jacket with "Invaders'' emblazoned on the back;
and a portrait of Ernest Withers displayed prominently over his
fireplace.<br><br>
"That's my daddy,'' Yahweh, 71, said one afternoon last winter,
relating how Withers often gave him money and advice.<br><br>
"If he was (an informant) I don't know anything about it ... He
would call me his son. Right now, I'm still part of the family. I talked
to Rome (son Andrew Jerome Withers) just the other day. I talked to
(Ernest) on his death bed.''<br><br>
It's a testament to the FBI's effectiveness that the dreaded "Willie
Wine'' had no clue that Withers was constantly informing on him.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/willie-wine-conning-sclc/#document/p1/a0">
Wine was in Atlanta possibly to "con'' money out of the SCLC</a>,
reports indicate the informant told agents. He reported Wine's girlfriend
was pregnant; that Wine was a thief. That
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-says-willie-wine-takes-over-invaders/">
Wine and his cohorts had cat-called voting rights activist Fannie Lou
Hamer at a gathering</a> at old Club Paradise.<br><br>
As informant ME 338-R,
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/militant-takeover-at-lemoyne-owen/#document/p3/a4">
Withers had plenty to tell the FBI in November 1968 when Willie Wine and
others seized the administration building at LeMoyne-Owen College</a>.
What started as a dispute over student grievances escalated into
rebellion when student leaders called in the Invaders and the local
chapter of the radical anti-war group, Students for a Democratic
Society.<br><br>
Withers, who shot pictures of the crisis for Jet and was seen by newsmen
going into Brown Lee Hall the night of the takeover, told FBI agents that
Wine planned and directed the operation.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/militant-takeover-at-lemoyne-owen/#document/p15/a1">
ME 338-R said the building was held "in a state of siege''</a> with
school president Hollis Price inside, according to a Nov. 27, 1968, FBI
report. Although local news accounts made no mention of weapons, the
informant said occupants "definitely had a single-barrel 12-gauge
shotgun, a rifle with a telescopic sight, a bayonet, at least one
Derringer, and one pistol'' -- details confirmed by another FBI source
that night and Willie Wine 42 years later.<br><br>
"I carried a .25-caliber pistol,'' the ex-militant recalled. The
only time he used his gun that night was when another Invader rifled
through an administrator's cabinet. "I pulled out my pistol. I said
we're not here for that purpose,'' he said.<br><br>
No charges were filed after officials at the private school chose not to
prosecute.<br><br>
Over time, however, the FBI would break the Invaders. Utilizing tips from
Withers and other informants plus three undercover Memphis police
officers who had infiltrated the group,
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/fbi-targets-invaders/">
authorities prosecuted as many as 34 Invaders</a> on charges ranging from
petty street crime to arson and the sniper wounding of a police
officer.<br><br>
Although one undercover cop was famously exposed, the Invaders seemed to
have little clue about Withers, who often visited the group's
headquarters on Vance and shot publicity photos for them.<br><br>
"Ernest, he was a dear friend," said Charles Cabbage, who
founded the Invaders in 1967. Like Wine, Cabbage kept a memento on the
wall, a picture Withers took in 1968 of Cabbage as a radical.<br><br>
"Anytime he'd see us, he'd start snapping," Cabbage recalled.
Cabbage, interviewed last winter, four months before his death in June at
age 66, said he'd come to wonder what Withers was really doing.<br><br>
"C'mon man. We weren't that interesting. Why would he take our
pictures constantly?"<br><br>
As the FBI cast its net, it encountered a range of people whose beliefs
and personal details landed in the bureau's spy files despite little more
than a tangential connection to the Invaders.<br><br>
An Aug. 7, 1969, report shows the
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/photos-of-catholic-priests/">
FBI collected 14 photographs of Father Charles Mahoney of St. Patrick
Catholic Church</a>. Notations on the report, along with other
corroborating details, indicate Withers shot the photos and handed them
over to agents. The report quotes the informant as saying Mahoney
"is a close friend'' of Invaders defense minister Melvin Smith and
notes that Mahoney and two other priests allowed the Invaders to use
church facilities.<br><br>
"The FBI was off base on the civil rights thing,'' one of those
priests, Charles Martin, said in a recent interview. An urban outreach
ministry brought St. Patrick in regular contact with the Invaders. And
when the priests there openly supported the sanitation strike, there was
a backlash, Martin said.<br><br>
"We were for the workers, the sanitation workers. And a lot of
people in the town didn't like us for that.''<br><br>
* * *<br><br>
The Rev. James M. Lawson came into the FBI's focus in early 1968 during
the height of the sanitation strike. It was Lawson, then pastor at
Centenary Methodist, who invited Dr. King to Memphis, where he spoke in
support of 1,100 sanitation workers who had walked off the job to protest
low pay and horrid working conditions that led to the deaths of two
men.<br><br>
"If one black person is down, we are all down!'' King told 15,000
cheering people at Mason Temple the night of March 18, 1968.<br><br>
Near the speaker's podium, the ubiquitous Withers snapped photos. Images
he shot that night would stand as timeless icons of the strike alongside
those he took of marching sanitation workers carrying "I Am A Man''
placards and National Guard troops policing Downtown streets.<br><br>
But the stout photographer with a chatty personality and quick smile had
another, nonpublic, appointment that day, a secret meeting in which the
topic was his friend, Rev. Lawson.<br><br>
Earlier that afternoon, Withers met with FBI agents Howell Lowe and
William H. Lawrence, who ran the bureau's Memphis domestic surveillance
program. A report summarizing the meeting indicates
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/strike-newsletter/#document/p1/a0">
informant ME 338-R handed over a newsletter</a> listing names and
photographs of community leaders behind the strike -- a virtual directory
of strike-support organizers -- and told agents who produced it.<br><br>
"Informant pointed out that the paper is printed or laid out by Rev.
Malcolm D. Blackburn ... pastor of Clayborn AME Temple ... The main
editorial work therein is done by Rev. James M. Lawson Jr.,'' the report
said.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/james-lawson/#document/p6/a1">
Withers had a lot to say about Lawson</a>, a veteran civil rights leader
and friend who marched during the strike alongside Withers' wife,
Dorothy, and his daughter, Rosalind.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/james-lawson/#document/p7/a0">
He portrayed Lawson as the type of left-leaning radical the government
had come to fear</a> -- active in the anti-war movement, involved with
the feared Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and someone who was
planning a trip to the East Bloc nation of Czechoslovakia.<br><br>
"I'm not surprised,'' Lawson, now 81, said this month when told of
Withers' informant work. Lawson said "the police and FBI were very
clever about entrapping'' blacks and making them informants.<br><br>
"Any activity in the black community, Ernie was going to be
around,'' Lawson said. "It was probably done innocently: 'You just
tell us what's going on and what you see and you get paid for it.'
''<br><br>
Lawson's was one of many biographies the informant would flesh out for
agents.<br><br>
Reports linked to Withers show he was a font of information for the FBI
during the strike, handing over documents, providing details from
strategy meetings, connecting dots between pastors and suspected
militants.<br><br>
The informant told agents on March 6 that young militants -- Cabbage
among them -- passed out literature at a rally at Clayborn Temple with
instructions for making Molotov cocktail firebombs. Mainstream leaders
"did nothing'' to stop them, the report said.<br><br>
On April 3, the day before King's murder, the informant passed on
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-details-invaders-history-2/#document/p9/a0">
details about a high-level strategy session at the Lorraine between
Cabbage and King</a>, who begrudgingly decided to give the young
militants a role in the strike.<br><br>
Well into the summer, after the strike was settled, ME 338-R continued to
report on its impact. That July 26,
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/strike-finance-report/#document/p9/a2">
the informant gave FBI agents a financial report</a> showing the
strike-leadership group, Community on the Move for Equality, had spent
$2,600 of $347,000 raised for striking workers to pay attorney's fees and
expenses for members of the militant Black Organizing Project, an
umbrella group encompassing the Invaders.<br><br>
As Hoover cranked up his campaign against "black nationalist hate
groups,'' anyone giving aid -- money, jobs, political support -- could
fall into the crosshairs of COINTELPRO, the FBI's dirty tricks
campaign.<br><br>
The FBI had been spying on the civil rights movement for years, but in an
August 1967 memo, backed by a more thorough order the following March,
the bureau directed Memphis and other field offices to begin efforts to
"to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise
neutralize" a range of civil rights leaders and organizations, from
the separatist Nation of Islam to King's moderate SCLC.<br><br>
In May 1968 a similar initiative was launched against the so-called
"New Left,'' targeting Vietnam War protesters and socialists, among
others.<br><br>
A U.S. Senate investigation in 1975 found widespread abuse in the
program, which lacked statutory or executive approval. COINTELPRO
techniques ranged from contacting an employer to get a target fired to
mailing an anonymous letter to a spouse alleging infidelity, leaking
humiliating information to the press, encouraging street warfare between
violent groups and alerting state and local authorities to a target's
criminal law violations.<br><br>
Available records provide few details on specific COINTELPRO actions
taken in Memphis. Yet, records indicate Withers fed agents plenty of raw
material.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/informant-draws-links-between-invaders/#document/p5/a1">
A schoolteacher loaned militant Cabbage his car</a>, the informant said.
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/political-candidates/#document/p2/a0">
Mary L. Campbell, a supposed black-power sympathizer, was running for the
county Democratic Party's executive committee</a>. Real estate agent
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/pushing-jobs-for-invaders/#document/p4/a0">
O.W. Pickett, who'd brought food to the Invaders during the LeMoyne
takeover</a>, was thinking of running for Congress.
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/pushing-jobs-for-invaders/">
Pastor Malcolm Blackburn and activist Baxton Bryant</a> were trying to
find jobs for the Invaders.<br><br>
A May 13, 1968, report indicates
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/photos-of-civil-rights-worker/#document/p1/a0">
Withers gave the FBI two photos of Rosetta Miller, a field worker for the
U.S. Civil Rights Commission</a>, telling an agent she is "one who
will give aid and comfort to the black power groups." Following up
that fall, an agent typed a two-sentence report memorializing a rumor
that Miller had recently married, noting the marriage broke up after just
a week. The report was copied to Withers' informant file.<br><br>
Interviewed this spring, Miller, who now lives in Nashville, said her job
with the commission came into jeopardy in 1968 when supervisors
questioned her about ties to radicals.<br><br>
"I was never part of that crap," she said.<br><br>
Marquette's Theoharis, who worked with the Senate committee that exposed
many of the FBI's abuses, said employment sabotage was a particularly
insidious COINTELPRO tactic.<br><br>
"Once, (the FBI) got someone dismissed as a Girl Scout leader. It
was crazy," he said.<br><br>
Records reviewed by the newspaper offered few details of the secretive
COINTELPRO initiative. Yet, frustrated by continuing support for the
Invaders, the
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/invaders-and-cointelpro/#document/p3/a2">
FBI clearly was considering such actions in May 1969 against the African
Methodist Episcopal Church</a>.<br><br>
"All sources have been alerted to attempt to pinpoint any actual
proof that employees of the AME Church are giving financial support to
the Invaders," said a May 8, 1969, report to headquarters in
Washington.<br><br>
"...If such proof is forthcoming separate communication will be
written to the Bureau concerning any possible counterintelligence action
which might be instituted with certain AME high church officials in this
regard.''<br><br>
* * *<br><br>
Available files don't indicate how or when Withers first teamed with the
FBI.<br><br>
But it would have been hard for the bureau to have overlooked
him.<br><br>
Withers served as a city police officer, hired in 1948 along with eight
other African Americans who composed MPD's first black recruit class. He
didn't last long. He was fired in 1951 for taking kickbacks from a
bootlegger.<br><br>
By the early 1950s, Withers was making a name for himself on Beale
Street, where he had operated since the mid-40s, chronicling the teeming
night life and the everyday life of black Memphis. By night, he hung with
bluesmen like B.B. King, Bobby "Blue'' Bland, Junior Parker and
Rufus Thomas and, by day, he shot family portraits, weddings, church
socials, political gatherings and sporting events, assembling one of the
great Negro League baseball portfolios.<br><br>
"He knew everybody," recalled Coby Smith, a political activist
who founded the Invaders with Cabbage and who would come to form his own
suspicions.<br><br>
Across the street from Withers' studio, attorney H.T. Lockard ran a law
office. When Lockard became president of the Memphis branch of the NAACP
in 1955, a visitor started coming by -- Bill Lawrence of the
FBI.<br><br>
In an interview for this story, Lockard, now a 90-year-old retired judge,
spoke for the first time about his three-year association with Lawrence,
a bespectacled G-man who came to Memphis in 1945 and ran the bureau's
local domestic intelligence operations in the 1950s and '60s. In the
'50s, as the Red scare was at its peak, the FBI kept close watch on the
NAACP and other civil rights organizations believed susceptible to
communist infiltration.<br><br>
"Because of the nature of the work I was doing, there was a
suspicious feeling that I was either a communist or a communist
sympathizer," Lockard said.<br><br>
Like so many others recruited by the FBI, Lockard said agent Lawrence
showed up uninvited and made regular unannounced visits to his law office
with no evident purpose. "One stock question was how was I getting
along,'' he said.<br><br>
Over a period, the agent asked if a certain suspected communist had
joined the local NAACP. Eventually, the man named by Lawrence applied for
membership. Lockard said he declined to enroll him.<br><br>
It's unclear if the FBI considered Lockard an informant. He said he was
never paid. The FBI visits stopped in 1957, when Lockard left the NAACP
helm, yet he said he developed "an amiable camaraderie'' with
Lawrence that included exchanging Christmas cards for years after the
agent retired in 1970. Lawrence died in 1990.<br><br>
Around the time Lawrence began calling on Lockard, Withers began his long
and remarkable career chronicling the civil rights movement.<br><br>
In 1955, Withers covered the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African
American who was beaten, shot and tossed in a river in Money, Miss., for
whistling at a white woman.<br><br>
The injustice of the crime -- the defendants, both white, were acquitted
by an all-white jury yet later confessed in a paid magazine interview --
built the foundation of Withers' fame. Defying a judge's order that
banned picture-taking during the trial, Withers captured the moment
Till's great-uncle Mose Wright stood up at the witness stand and pointed
an accusing finger at the killers.<br><br>
The Till case helped galvanize the movement, and Withers soon had a wide
array of assignments covering civil rights.<br><br>
As a freelancer for the Sengstacke family, publishers of the Chicago
Defender and the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Withers covered many of
the seminal events of the era. He was beaten by police covering Medgar
Evers' 1963 funeral and harassed in small-town Mississippi following the
1964 murders of three Freedom Summer activists in Neshoba County. He
snapped pictures of King and Abernathy riding the first integrated bus in
Montgomery in 1956 and photographed King in 1966 casually reclining in
his room at the Lorraine where he would die two years later.<br><br>
Trained in photography in the Army during World War II and equipped with
a bulky twin reflex camera, Withers lacked technical skill yet managed to
take profoundly powerful images, largely through his resourcefulness and
unusual access.<br><br>
Locally, Withers chronicled all the significant events, the Tent City
voter registration drive in Fayette County, the desegregation of Memphis
City Schools and the Downtown sit-ins of 1960.<br><br>
It was around then that the FBI's Lawrence began showing up at the NAACP
offices, recalls Maxine Smith, the organization's longtime executive
director in Memphis.<br><br>
"We thought it was for our protection. We had nothing to hide,''
Smith said. "Somewhere along the line we began to suspect''
differently, she said.<br><br>
What Smith and others didn't know was that by 1963 the FBI had begun
wiretapping King, initially because of the civil rights leader's ties to
adviser Stanley Levison, a suspected communist. The FBI tapped King's
phones, bugged his hotel rooms and, in one infamous episode, mailed
surreptitious audio recordings including a taped sexual liaison to his
Atlanta home along with a letter suggesting he commit suicide.<br><br>
By 1967, as more-militant wings spun out of the movement, the FBI
launched a "ghetto informant program'' recruiting "listening
posts'' within the black community, many of them white shopkeepers and
businessmen. Increasingly, headquarters pushed agents like Lawrence to
develop information from black leaders.<br><br>
"He used to come out here a whole lot, right here,'' Smith said in
the living room of her South Parkway home. Smith told how Lawrence, a
music lover, fostered a relationship through her late husband Vasco
Smith's expansive jazz collection.
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/other-informants/#document/p2/a0">
When a 1981 book revealed the couple's relationship to the FBI, the
Smiths sued -- and lost</a>. Still passionate about the issue, Smith
argues she and her husband were never paid.<br><br>
"Nobody has ever offered Vasco or me one penny. No one dare say
that,'' she said.<br><br>
Benjamin Hooks, the former national NAACP director, agreed with her
assessment.<br><br>
"I don't know if anyone is trying to say they were snitches. If
that's what they're saying that is a lie," Hooks said in January, 11
weeks before he died. "You couldn't stop the FBI from coming and
talking to you. If you did, they'd make it up anyway. They were talking
to Maxine and Vasco and Hooks all the time.''<br><br>
When details of the FBI's domestic spy program later leaked in
congressional hearings, officials said there were just five paid racial
informants working in Memphis in 1968. Officials have never disclosed the
identities of those informants; it's unknown if Withers was included in
that group.<br><br>
"I'd like to know who those devils are," Smith said.<br><br>
* * *<br><br>
Perhaps the last man with firsthand knowledge of Withers' covert life,
retired FBI agent Howell Lowe, opted to take his secrets to the
grave.<br><br>
"I won't have my name connected with this," Lowe told a
reporter last year, rejecting an interview for this story. He died Jan. 1
at age 83. Although Withers had died two years earlier, Lowe said he
feared that discussing the photographer's informant work might harm his
survivors.<b> <br><br>
</b>"Some of the things we did were sleazy. We were fighting what we
thought was the possibility of uprising in this country,'' Lowe
said.<br><br>
Lost, too, to history are Withers' motives. A federal source who first
told a reporter about the photographer's secret life several years ago
said Withers, who raised eight children and struggled financially, had a
primary motive -- money.<br><br>
That same source said Withers' secret informant status came dangerously
close to exposure in 1978 when Congress re-examined the FBI's
investigation of King's assassination. At the time, revelations about
COINTELPRO and the FBI's treatment of King caused many Americans to
wonder if Hoover's hatred of the civil rights leader somehow morphed into
an assassination plot. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations
eventually found the FBI had nothing to do with the murder.<br><br>
Yet, with the FBI's Memphis office on trial, Lowe's partner, agent
Lawrence, testified before the committee on Nov. 21, 1978, speaking of a
valued informant who "provided information on racial matters
generally and the Invaders in particular." The informant, paid up to
$200 a month, helped track King in the days before his murder.<br><br>
Lawrence said he frequently gave his informant instructions ahead of
time, giving him names and topics to look out for and conferring almost
daily with him during the sanitation strike.<br><br>
"I would call him if I had occasion to alert him to something,''
Lawrence testified. "Otherwise, I would hope that he would call me,
which he frequently did. Then periodically we would meet in person under
what we hoped were safe conditions to personally exchange information, go
over descriptions, any photographs, things of that nature.''<br><br>
Was Lawrence discussing Withers? The congressional record is unclear.
Nonetheless, as an FBI informant with a symbol number and a large volume
of assignments, Withers would have been handled in a similar fashion,
experts said.<br><br>
"These are individuals who are going to be directed and paid... They
saw you as a valuable source and a continuing source,'' said Theoharis,
the retired Marquette professor.<br><br>
Researchers who study the government informant system say patriotism,
desire to do police work, thrill-seeking and money often are motivating
factors. Withers had served in the Army in World War II. In addition to
serving briefly as a police officer, he ran successfully for Shelby
County constable in 1974 and later was appointed a gun-carrying agent of
the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverages Commission.<br><br>
Withers' legal troubles also can't be discounted as a possible motive.
Withers would claim late in life he was set up in the 1951 kickback
incident while working for MPD, yet his police personnel file contains
transcripts that reveal admissions by Withers and detailed witness
accounts supporting the allegations. He was fired but never charged
criminally.<br><br>
Years later, in 1979, he faced similar charges, this time in federal
criminal court. Then-ABC agent Withers pleaded guilty to extorting
kickbacks from a nightclub owner.<br><br>
Regardless of his motives, the revelation of Withers' FBI work doesn't
harm his memory for some who knew him.<br><br>
"It does not alter who he was a person,'' said ex-Invader Coby
Smith. "He did so many more things. That wasn't a fulltime thing to
be an informant for them.''<br><br>
Rev. Lawson agreed. "It won't tarnish his memory for his family and
friends.''<br><br>
<i>-- Marc Perrusquia: 529-2545<br>
******************************************************<br>
</i></font><h1><b>Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as
Informer</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/14photographer.html?_r=3&hp" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/14photographer.html?_r=3&hp<br>
</a></font><h6><b>By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/robbie_brown/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
ROBBIE BROWN</a></b></h6><font size=3>ATLANTA That photo of the Rev.
Dr.
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/martin_luther_jr_king/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Martin Luther King</a>, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in
Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation
workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only
photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett
Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s
room, on the night he was assassinated.<br><br>
But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C.
Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights
era: He was a paid
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
F.B.I.</a> informer.<br><br>
On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withers-fbi-informant/">
published</a> the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr.
Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two
F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It
was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the
Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been
the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders,
including Dr. King.<br><br>
“It is an amazing betrayal,” said Athan Theoharis, a historian at
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/marquette_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Marquette University</a> who has written books about the F.B.I. “It
really speaks to the degree that the F.B.I. was able to engage
individuals within the civil rights movement. This man was so well
trusted.”<br><br>
From at least 1968 to 1970, Mr. Withers, who was black, provided
photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to two
F.B.I. agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program,
Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, according to numerous reports
summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper
under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site.<br><br>
A clerical error appears to have allowed for Mr. Withers’s identity to be
divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Mr. Withers and his
informer number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several
locations, the F.B.I. appears to have forgotten to hide them. The F.B.I.
said Monday that it was not clear what had caused the lapse in privacy
and was looking into the incident.<br><br>
Civil rights leaders have responded to the revelation with a mixture of
dismay, sadness and disbelief. “If this is true, then Ernie abused our
friendship,” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a retired minister who
organized civil rights rallies throughout the South in the
1960s.<br><br>
Others were more forgiving. “It’s not surprising,” said Andrew Young, a
civil rights organizer who later became mayor of Atlanta. “We knew that
everything we did was bugged, although we didn’t suspect Withers
individually.”<br><br>
Many details of Mr. Withers’s relationship with the F.B.I. remain
unknown. The bureau keeps files on all informers, but has declined
repeated requests to release Mr. Withers’s, which would presumably
explain how much he was paid by the F.B.I., how he was recruited and how
long he served as an informer.<br><br>
At the time of his death, Mr. Withers had the largest catalog of any
individual photographer covering the civil rights movement in the South,
said Tony Decaneas, the owner of the Panopticon Gallery in Boston, the
exclusive agent for Mr. Withers. His photographs have been collected in
four books, and his family was planning to open a museum, named after
him.<br><br>
His work shows remarkable intimacy with and access to top civil rights
leaders. Friends used to say he had a knack for being in the right place
at the right time. But while he was growing close to top civil rights
leaders, Mr. Withers was also meeting regularly with the F.B.I. agents,
disclosing details about plans for marches and political beliefs of the
leaders, even personal information like the leaders’ car tag
numbers.<br><br>
David J. Garrow, a
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/pulitzer_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">
Pulitzer Prize</a>-winning historian who has written biographies of Dr.
King, said many civil rights workers gave confidential interviews to the
F.B.I. and
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
C.I.A.</a>, and were automatically classified as “informants.” The
difference, Mr. Garrow said, is the evidence that Mr. Withers was being
paid.<br><br>
Although Mr. Withers’s motivation is not known, Mr. Garrow said informers
were rarely motivated by the financial compensation, which “wasn’t enough
money to live on.” But Marc Perrusquia, who wrote the article for The
Commercial Appeal, noted that Mr. Withers had eight children and might
have struggled to support them.<br><br>
The children of Mr. Withers did not respond to requests for comment. But
one daughter, Rosalind Withers, told local news organizations that she
did not find the report conclusive.<br><br>
“This is the first time I’ve heard of this in my life,” Ms. Withers told
The Commercial Appeal. “My father’s not here to defend himself. That is a
very, very strong, strong accusation.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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