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 believe 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 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. Ernest Withers, often called “the original civil rights photographer,” died in 2007 at age 85. His crisp black-and-white pictures chronicled such seminal events in the civil rights struggle as 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. He marched with King, and was beaten by police while covering slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers' 1963 funeral. Relatives tell how white bystanders would hurl insults or spit at him as he covered civil rights marches.
