ShareThisMEMPHIS, Tenn. - A federal judge ruled that FBI documents confirm the late Memphis photographer Ernest Withers served as an informant for the agency.
The ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in response to a lawsuit by The Commercial Appeal, marks the first time a federal official has affirmed what FBI records already state: Withers, a civil-rights insider, secretly worked as an informant during the heated struggle for equality in the 1960s.
Its historical impact aside, Jackson's ruling gives new life to the newspaper's suit seeking the release of Withers' informant file, a set of records expected to help gauge the full scope of his work for the FBI.
Jackson ordered the FBI to produce an index of any and all records in that file by March 16.
"With this commonsense ruling, the court has strongly encouraged the FBI to finally provide a clear picture of what our government was up to when it recruited citizens to monitor civil-rights leaders," said the Memphis newspaper's Washington attorney, Charles D. Tobin.
"We hope the government will listen to her and release the entire Withers file."
It's not clear if the government will appeal. Justice Department attorney Lesley R. Farber declined comment.
The newspaper sued the FBI in November 2010 following a two-year investigation that found Withers secretly worked as a paid informant from at least 1968 to 1970 under a code number, ME 338-R.
Known as "the original civil-rights photographer," Withers covered the movement from its dawn in 1955 with the murder of Emmett Till, shooting seminal pictures that included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. riding one of the first integrated buses in Montgomery, Ala., and striking garbage workers in Memphis carrying signs that declared, "I Am A Man."
Contesting the newspaper's lawsuit, the Justice Department refused to confirm or deny that Withers served as an informant. Government attorneys said FBI documents published by the newspaper identifying Withers by his informant number didn't necessarily mean he'd been an informant -- an argument rejected by Jackson.
"This argument is not worthy of serious consideration and it insults the common sense of anyone who reads the documents," Jackson wrote in her 24-page opinion.
Jackson was also not persuaded by government assertions that Withers' daughter, Rosalind Withers-Guzman, said the documents don't convince her that her father was an informant.
Following the newspaper's September 2010 stories, Withers-Guzman told reporters she didn't believe her father ever served as an informant.
She has since amended that, saying in a recent interview that her father sold photos to the FBI and "provided information (to protect) life and safety."
The newspaper's investigation uncovered a range of activity by Withers, finding he kept agents in the FBI's Memphis office informed on the activities of a feared militant group, the Invaders, and on the doings of King and his staff when they visited Memphis.
Available records are silent on when Withers started working for the FBI, but documents note an affiliation as early as the 1950s with agent William H. Lawrence, who ran the FBI's communist and militant investigations in Memphis.
Withers died in 2007 at age 85.
(Contact Marc Perrusquia of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., at perrusquia(at)commercialappeal.com.)
