Eyes for the FBI
The black-and-white photo from 1969 speaks volumes: With camera dangling from his neck, Ernest Withers strides along a Mississippi back road flanked by Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and the Rev. James Lawson. Withers had the trust of the era’s civil rights leaders, allowing him extraordinary access that made him perhaps the most prolific and influential photographer of the movement.
But the image is silent about his darker side. For many years, Withers was a paid FBI informant who secretly supplied J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau with hundreds of intelligence reports and photos of the very activists he’d befriended, from student volunteers to striking Memphis sanitation workers to leaders like King.
We know this thanks to reporter Marc Perrusquia of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, whose dogged investigation and fierce fight under the Freedom of Information Act revealed in 2010 that Withers had been an informant, a shocking disclosure that sparked angry denials from his supporters. Perrusquia has now written a vivid book that more fully examines Withers’ clandestine double duty.
“A Spy in Canaan” is a reporter’s account filled with dramatic scenes, sharply etched characters and insights into FBI political surveillance, the civil rights movement and the journalistic process. And it is timely, given current protest movements on both the left and the right.
As Perrusquia tells it, he first heard that Withers was an FBI informant in 1997 while interviewing a retired agent for another story. He was intrigued, for Withers had long been a civil rights legend.
Over the course of six decades, Withers compiled a massive and intimate portfolio of black life in the South. Working from his hometown of Memphis, he claimed to have shot some 12 million photos.
Withers was a descendant of slaves. He was born in 1922, one of six children of a cleaning woman and a postal worker. As a youth, he fell in love with the camera, and while assigned to an Army photography unit during World War II learned the art. After returning to Memphis in 1946, he opened a studio on Beale Street, the center of the city’s black life. He was briefly a Memphis cop but was fired for consorting with a bootlegger, and was soon a full-time photographer.
With a quick smile and good timing, Withers cruised Memphis’ blues clubs and Negro League Red Sox games, getting to know everyone as he hustled photos. He shot the young Elvis Presley hugging B.B. King on Beale Street, Jackie Robinson after he broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, a not-yetfamous Ike and Tina Turner and other musicians who made Memphis a stop on the chitlin circuit.
Withers was there from the early days of the civil rights movement, capturing iconic images as he traversed the South on assignment for Jet magazine and the local black newspaper, the Tri-State Defender, sometimes braving hostile white mobs.
It was Withers who photographed Emmett Till’s shriveled great-uncle on the witness stand in 1955 as he leveled an accusatory finger at the men who had murdered the teenager for reportedly whistling at a white woman; King riding at the front of one of the first integrated buses in Montgomery after the boycott in 1956; King’s body in the Memphis morgue hours after his assassination at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.
Perrusquia could not confirm his off-the-record tip. But after Withers’ death in 2007, he filed a FOIA request and — thanks to a FBI processing error — he found proof. His newspaper then filed a costly lawsuit under the FOIA and compelled the FBI to release additional information showing that Withers had been paid informant number ME 338-R.
According to Perrusquia, the charismatic photographer slipped the FBI more than 1,400 photos and intelligence reports on a broad range of local and national activists and organizations between 1958 and 1976. He became a member of the local Black Panther Party while continuing to report on them.
Perrusquia writes that though much of the data Withers hoovered up was pedestrian, it was intrusive — photos he took at weddings, unpublished phone numbers, sexual rumors, comments shared in confidence, thoughts and plans.
Some of it may have helped the FBI better assess fastmoving events, and in one instance Withers reported that he had heard a subject say nothing disloyal. But the FBI engaged in vast overreach and used the information to build dossiers on people who posed no real threat, the author writes. And while Withers may not have known, he adds, the FBI apparently used his information to harm people.
Perrusquia recounts a range of reactions to his revelations. Withers’ family have fervently defended his legacy and at one point threatened to sue for defamation. Andrew Young, one of several activists dismissive of Withers’ informing, said he considered him family and praised him for publicizing the cause. However, some of Withers’ targets felt personally betrayed.
(I encountered similar responses when I disclosed in 2012 that the late Bay Area activist Richard Aoki had been a paid FBI informant.)
Although Perrusquia did not have the opportunity to question Withers about his findings, he does explore his possible motives and weighs whether Withers helped or hurt the movement. The photographer not only photographed James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, but also helped hide him along the way.
The author also puts Withers’ story in historical context, noting that it was the height of the Cold War, and the American Communist Party was widely seen as a threat. King’s confrontational, if nonviolent, tactics, moreover, were disturbing to many people, regardless of race.
At one end of Beale Street now stands the Withers Collection Museum & Gallery that showcases his photography. Yet his role as an informant remains out of the spotlight. As “A Spy in Canaan” adeptly shows, history is not always so clear-cut. The book also makes a convincing case that the FOIA should be strengthened to help the public access records necessary to better understand this complex and pivotal period.