Key Black Civil Rights Worker Was an FBI Informant: Betrayal From Inside Common

Martin Luther King Jr. was ultimately betrayed by onalt

e of the closest people to him — a famed black photographer. Ernest Withers, called “the original civil rights photographer” who took the famous photo of Emmit Till’s murder and some of the best pictures of King during the Civil Rights movement, was one of the “most prolific” FBI informants, says a Memphis, Tenn., newspaper.

Commercial Appeal’s two-year investigation found that Withers was perhaps the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ most energetic and most talkative spy between 1968 and 1970. Withers shadowed King while he was in, and around the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the day before Dr. King’s conspiracy-riddled assassination, when the iconic civil rights leader worked on the sanitation strike. Withers reported to the FBI everything he knew about King’s activities.


Withers snapped countless photos of King during those fateful few days before his murder and told federal agents of King’s meeting with suspected black militants. He also:

— Took photos at King’s funeral;


— Told agents that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders directed staffers to resume the sanitation strike after King passed away to stir up more trouble, as the FBI saw it;

— Snapped and gave FBI photos of religious leaders who supported the sanitation strike workers;

— Monitored political candidates;

— Jotted down automobile tag numbers for agents.

In Withers, the FBI found a “super-informant” who was the “most conversant with all key activities in the Negro community,” the Commercial Appeal alleges. Withers died in 2007.

Key Black Civil Rights Worker Was an FBI Informant: Betrayal From Inside CommonAs many are aware by now, black stool pigeons and spies greatly aided the effectiveness of the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘Counter-intelligence Program’, or COINTELPRO, that worked to neutralize black leadership and pro-black organizations to prevent the “rise of a black messiah”.

One of the bodyguards in Malcolm X’s last days was an officer within the New York City police department’s intelligence division.

Some of the earliest members of the ultra-militant Black Panther Party were also spies with ties to the FBI and law enforcement in Oakland. –terry shropshirealt

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