An intriguing new twist on history. Shaun Mullen writes:
The revelation that celebrated civil rights era photographer Ernest C. Withers was an FBI informant is being greeted with shock and disbelief. More informed heads like myself are less surprised because J. Edgar Hoover’s agency had hard-wired the entourages of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders with informants.
What makes Withers different is that he was a paid informant and was the only photojournalist in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, which was the room occupied by King on the night he was assassinated, and had tailed him for the FBI after he arrived in the Tennessee river city to support striking African-American sanitation workers.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.