Famed Civil Rights Photographer Identified As FBI Informant

Ernest Withers, the late veteran freelancer for America’s black press and known as “the original civil rights photographer,” was secretly an FBI informant who passed information to the feds about the civil rights movement in Memphis.

Per the Commercial Appeal…

Withers 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.

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.

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