The Double Life of a Civil Rights Icon
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Some of the most enduring photos of the civil rights movement were taken by Ernest Withers. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Withers earned the trust of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. But as it turns out, he was secretly taking photos for the federal government as well. This week, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery brings us the story of Withers in an adaptation of the podcast “Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret,” from Scripps News and Stitcher.
Lowery starts by explaining how Withers earned his reputation as a chronicler of the civil rights movement. We tour a museum of Withers’ photographs with his daughter Roz, who deconstructs his famous “I Am a Man” photo of striking sanitation workers. Civil rights leader Andrew Young explains that without Withers’ photographs, they wouldn’t have had a movement.
We then learn that after Withers’ death, a Memphis reporter named Marc Perrusquia followed up on an old lead about the photographer: that he was secretly working for the FBI. Perrusquia gained access to thousands of reports and photos taken for the FBI by Withers. We hear excerpts from several reports and meet the daughter of the agent who recruited Withers. During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the bureau recruited thousands of informants as part of a covert program originally created to monitor communists in America but ended up targeting the civil rights movement, as well as other individuals and groups.Â
We close with reflections on Withers by people who knew him. While some believe Withers betrayed the cause of civil rights, others are more forgiving. They say his actions were part of a larger narrative about the U.S. government’s unchecked power to spy on its own citizens and extinguish ideas and movements it felt were a threat.Â
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Transcript
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| 1:25.8 | Several thousand Negro demonstrators are participating in this largest civil rights demonstration ever in Memphis, Tennessee. |
| 1:30.3 | It's March 28th, 1968. Later today as the march moves up toward City Hall, Dr. Martin Luther King will speak to the striking workers and |
| 1:34.9 | their sympathizers. 1300 black sanitation workers have been striking for just over six weeks. |
| 1:41.7 | They complained of horrible working conditions, abuse, racism, and neglect |
| 1:46.7 | that it led to the deaths of two of their own. And today, Martin Luther King, Jr. is flying |
| 1:53.1 | in from New York to lead a march and support. You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation |
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