Collaboration or Self-Preservation: Withers, Sampson, and the American Government

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-double-life-of-ernest-c-withers 

Given our recent reading from Eyes Off the Prize, I thought it might be interesting to comment on a very divisive subject: African American Collaborators with the government. In Eyes Off the Prize, the main guilty party was Edith Sampson, who spread propaganda about the good living conditions of African Americans in the United States. Due to her actions, Sampson lost all credibility as a leader within the African American community and proved to be useless to the State Department afterwards. Of course, there are more complicated cases than that of Sampson – as with all things, the experience of a “collaborator” is rarely so but and dry.

 A key example of this was Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers. Withers had very close ties to the activist movement in Memphis and the artfulness with which he captured the passion and intensity of moments such as the sanitation strike was profound – we have Withers to thank for very many of the pictures that are now associated with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. And yet, in recent years it has come to light that Ernest Withers was an informant on the Civil Rights movement to the FBI. As a photographer, he was in a perfect position be serve in such a role since he was constantly close to the leaders of the movement such as Martin Luther King Jr. However, it is rather apparent that Withers had very little choice but to comply with the government in the matter of informing on the Civil Rights Movement. The power that an organization such as the FBI may have had over Withers is supreme – by 1968, American intelligence organizations had pretty free reign to do as they wished, and Withers was undoubtedly subjected to threats or blackmail, just as MLK was. This raises an important question: what were the stakes for Edith Sampson if she refused to do the State Department’s bidding?