John P. George on Wikimedia

Ernest Withers took some of the most iconic photographs of the American civil rights movement. He was in the room, on the march, at the funeral. He photographed Martin Luther King Jr. so many times and with such access that his images became part of the visual vocabulary most Americans use when they think about that era. He was trusted, beloved, and woven into the fabric of the movement in Memphis and beyond. He was also, for years, feeding information about that movement to the FBI.

The revelation came in 2010, when journalist Marc Perrusquia of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, reviewing declassified FBI documents, found that Withers had been a paid informant for the bureau's Memphis field office. The documents showed that Withers, given the informant designation ME 338-R, had provided the FBI with photographs, license plate numbers, names, organizational details, and personal information about civil rights leaders, activists, and associates over a period that spanned at least from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. The story landed like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples haven't stopped.

The Access That Made Him Valuable

Withers built his career on proximity. He grew up in Memphis, served as one of the first Black police officers on the Memphis force before being dismissed, and eventually established himself as a photographer whose work appeared in Black newspapers including the Memphis World and Jet magazine. He documented the Emmett Till trial in 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the integration of Little Rock Central High School, and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike of 1968. His access wasn't incidental. It was the result of years of trust built within Black communities that had every reason to be cautious about outsiders.

That trust made him extraordinarily useful to the FBI at a time when the bureau, under J. Edgar Hoover, was running COINTELPRO, a systematic program designed to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt civil rights and leftist organizations. Declassified COINTELPRO documents have shown that the FBI considered King a radical threat and pursued strategies to undermine him personally and professionally. Withers, moving freely among King's inner circle, could provide what outside surveillance could not: granular detail about who was meeting whom, what was being planned, and what the internal dynamics of various organizations looked like.

Perrusquia's reporting, later expanded in his 2013 book "A Spy in Canaan," drew on hundreds of pages of FBI records to reconstruct Withers' informant activities. The records showed payments to Withers and detailed reports attributed to his observations. The picture that emerged was of someone who had made a calculated decision, for reasons that remain partially unclear, to share intimate knowledge of a movement he was simultaneously documenting and, by most accounts, genuinely supporting.

The Question of Motive Nobody Can Fully Answer

What makes the Withers case so genuinely difficult is that his motivations have never been cleanly established. He died in 2007, three years before the public revelation, and never had to answer directly for what the documents showed. His family disputed the characterization of his work as spying and suggested that any cooperation with federal authorities was more limited or ambiguous than the reporting implied. That defense has not fully held up against the documentary record, but it points to a real complexity in how we categorize people who operated in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances.

The FBI during COINTELPRO used pressure, coercion, financial incentive, and manufactured leverage to recruit informants within Black communities. Historian Kenneth O'Reilly, whose 1989 book "Racial Matters" remains a foundational text on the FBI's relationship with Black America, documented extensively how the bureau exploited economic vulnerability and legal exposure to develop sources. It is entirely possible that Withers' cooperation began or continued under circumstances that involved some form of pressure, though the available documents don't resolve that question.

What's also true is that the harm was real regardless of motive. Civil rights workers operated under constant threat of violence, legal persecution, and professional destruction. Providing their names, photographs, and organizational details to a federal agency that was actively trying to destroy their movement was not a neutral act. The human cost of FBI surveillance during this period included destroyed careers, fractured organizations, and in some cases violence facilitated by the intelligence the bureau gathered and sometimes shared with hostile third parties.

How the Legacy Gets Held Now

The Withers case doesn't resolve into a clean moral lesson, and attempts to force it into one tend to flatten what's actually interesting about it. He was a gifted photographer whose work created an irreplaceable historical record of one of the most important social movements in American history. He was also an informant who compromised the safety of people who trusted him. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the discomfort of holding them together is probably the most honest response available.

Museums and institutions that hold his work have had to reckon with this. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture includes Withers' photographs as part of its collection. The question of how to contextualize his legacy without either erasing his contributions or excusing the informant work has no perfect answer, and different institutions have landed in different places.

What the Withers story ultimately illuminates is something about the conditions the FBI created, conditions in which movement participants faced choices that no one should have to make, between safety, financial survival, loyalty, and conscience. The system that put Ernest Withers in that position deserves as much examination as the man himself. His story is a case study in how institutions corrupt individuals, and how the most intimate betrayals are often made possible by the largest structural forces.