“Pictures Don’t Lie.” CNN, Black in America special report on the Ernest Withers informant revelation. February 2011.
“Real People With Bill Waters.” Interview with Ernest Withers. WKNO-TV, Channel 10, the Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Memphis, 2006.
Southern Poverty Law Center website, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/nation-islam.
Wall, Wendy. “Anti-Communism in the 1950s.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/fifties/essays/anti-communism-1950s.
Withers, Ernest. Speech before the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. WGBH Educational Foundation’s Forum Network (January 19, 2004), Civil Rights Movement Series. http://forum-network.org/lectures/civil-rights-movement-on-film/.
Interview of Rome and Billy Withers. Aired by WMC-TV, Channel 5, Memphis, July 15, 2012.
Interview of Rosalind Withers by Kontji Anthony. WMC-TV, Channel 5, Memphis, September 13, 2010.
Ernest Withers: His Brother’s Keeper. Video biography produced by WKNO-TV, Channel 10, the Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Memphis, 1995.
Books
Abernathy, Ralph. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. First Harper Perennial edition. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Beifuss, Joan Turner. At the River I Stand. Memphis: St. Lukes Press, 1990.
Berger, Maurice. For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
Beito, David T., and Linda Royster Beito. Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Urbana, Ill., and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Biles, Roger. Memphis in the Great Depression. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
Booker, Simeon, with Carol McCabe Booker. Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68. First Simon & Schuster paperback ed. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007.
——— Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1988.
Burrough, Bryan. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.
Clegg III, Claude Andrew. An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Colaiaco, James A. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Davis, James Kirkpatrick. Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement. Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Publishers, 1997.
Dowd, Douglas, and Mary Nichols, eds. Step by Step: Evolution and Operation of the Cornell Students’ Civil-Rights Project, Summer, 1964. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965.
Dowdy, G. Wayne. Crusades for Freedom: Memphis and the Political Transformation of the American South. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
——— Mayor Crump Don’t Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Eagles, Charles W. The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2000.
Frank, Gerold. An American Death: The True Story of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Greatest Manhunt of Our Time. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972.
Friedman, Mickey. A Red Family: Junius, Gladys & Barbara Scales. Urbana, Ill., and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Fry, Joseph A. The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest and Agony in Dixie. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. First Perennial Classics ed. New York: Perennial Classics, 2004.
——— The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981.
Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Green, Laurie B. Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Gritter, Elizabeth. River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865–1954. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.
Halberstam, David. The Children. New York: Random House, 1998.
Haynie, Aeron and Timothy S. Miller, eds. A Memoir of the New Left: The Political Autobiography of Charles A. Haynie. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2009.
Hershberger, Mary. Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998.
Hillin, Hank. FBI Codename TennPar: Tennesssee’s Ray Blanton Years. Nashville, Tenn.: Pine Hall Press, 1985.
Honey, Michael K. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Urbana, Ill., and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Joseph, Peniel E., ed. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. New York: Routledge-Taylor & Francis Group, 2006.
Kinchen, Shirletta J. Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2016.
Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh I. Firsov. The Secret World of American Communism. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
Maas, Peter. Marie: A True Story. New York: Random House, 1983.
McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
McKnight, Gerald D. The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.
Miller, William D. Mr. Crump of Memphis. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.
O’Reilly, Kenneth. Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972. New York: The Free Press, 1991.
Roberts, Gene, and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.
Rosenfeld, Seth. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Picador, 2013.
Scales, Junius, and Richard Nickson. Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers. Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2005.
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978.
Sigafoos, Robert A. Cotton Row to Beale Street: A Business History of Memphis. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1979.
Theoharis, Athan. Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978.
Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
Weiner, Tim. Enemies: A History of the FBI. New York: Random House, 2013.
Wexler, Stuart and Larry Hancock. The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King. Berkeley, Ca.: Counterpoint Press, 2012.
Whitfield, Stephen J. A Death in the Delta: The Stor
y of Emmett Till. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Withers, Ernest C. (photos), with Ronald W. Bailey and Michele Furst (eds). Let Us March On! Selected Civil Rights Photographs of Ernest C. Withers, 1955–1968. Boston: Massachusetts College of Art and Northeastern University, 1992.
Withers, Ernest C., with F. Jack Hurley, Brooks Johnson, and Daniel J. Wolff. Pictures Tell The Story: Ernest C. Withers, Reflections in History. Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2000.
Withers, Ernest C., and Daniel Wolff. The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs. New York: Viking Studio, 2001.
Withers, Ernest C. (photos), and Daniel Wolff (essay). Negro League Baseball. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2004.
Young, Andrew. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
Deputy Ben Selby frisks Ernest Withers as he enters the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in September 1955 for the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, accused of murdering fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. Though both later confessed in a paid magazine article, the two half-brothers were acquitted by an all-white jury. Credit: The Commercial Appeal.
Withers (front with camera) walks with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Mississippi on June 7, 1966, in the March Against Fear following the sniper wounding there of James Meredith. Among those in the photo are Floyd McKissick (in back, second from left), head of the Congress of Racial Equality; King (left center); Rev. James Lawson (sunglasses and clerical collar); and Stokely Carmichael (head bowed). Credit: Fred Griffith, The Commercial Appeal.
Ernest Withers (far right) and musician Ben Branch chat with a shotgun-wielding lawman at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot by a sniper there. Branch was speaking with King from the parking lot below the balcony seconds before King was shot. Credit: Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis—Press Scimitar collection. By William Leaptrott.
This passage from a 1977 FBI report opened the door to revealing Withers’s secret life as an informant. The document, released in 2009 through the Freedom of Information Act, was written when Withers was under investigation in a corruption probe. The report references Withers’ previous life in the 1960s as racial informant ME 338-R. Credit: FBI files.
William H. Lawrence, left, poses with fellow FBI agent E. Hugo Winterrowd in 1965. Lawrence ran the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations in Memphis over two decades and controlled informant Ernest Withers. Credit: Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis—Press Scimitar collection. By William Leaptrott.
Withers, right, is pushed back by police in riot gear on March 28, 1968, as violence disrupts a demonstration led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in downtown Memphis. Credit: Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis—Press Scimitar collection.
Special agent William H. Lawrence relaxes at home with his basset hound, Bertha. Credit: Courtesy of Betty Lawrence.
Starting in 1961, Withers helped monitor the Nation of Islam, a religious sect viewed by the FBI as a national security threat. He gave an agent this handbill (right) in 1964, advertising a rally at a Memphis mosque. An evidence slip (left) shows the photographer was operating then as a Confidential Source in Racial Matters, an FBI program which kept suspicious watch over black America. Credit: FBI files.
Demonstrators defy the National Guard occupation in Memphis following the March 28, 1968, melee that erupted during King’s march. Credit: Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis—Press Scimitar collection. By Ken Ross.
Rev. James Lawson marches in downtown Memphis surrounded by militant activists. To his right is Invaders leader John B. Smith. Over Lawson’s left shoulder, Memphis Police Department Detective Ed Redditt follows. Credit: Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis—Press Scimitar collection. By William Leaptrott.
In January 1969 Withers gave the FBI a spiral-bound notebook maintained by the Invaders that detailed the militant organization’s financial information as well as names and phone numbers of its sympathizers and associates. Domestic intelligence agents often funneled phone numbers to telephone company sources to search toll charges in hopes of ascertaining a subject’s associates. Credit: FBI files.
William H. Lawrence’s handwritten notes from November 1978. The then-retired agent had spoken with Withers—referenced here as 338 R—as he was heading to testify in closed session to a congressional committee re-examining Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination in Memphis. Lawrence writes that he warned the photographer not to mislead the committee about his informing.
Lawrence’s handwritten notes reveal his subtle witness coaching. He suggested that Withers tell the committee that his cooperation with the FBI was “based on…the peaceful and effective preservation of the civil rights movement.” Credt: Courtesy of Betty Lawrence.
Former Black Power militant Lance “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson, now known as Suhkara Yahweh, in his home in 2010. On the wall behind him is a portrait of Withers, whom Yahweh affectionately called, “My daddy.” Credit: Karen Focht, The Commercial Appeal.
Rudy Williams plays “Precious Lord” on his trumpet as he leads Withers’s funeral procession down Beale Street following the photographer’s death in October 2007. Credit: Jeff McAdory, The Commercial Appeal.
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