Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers: Civil Rights Movement on Film

The New York Daily News, "Ernest C. Withers spent life putting black plight in focus," 17 October 2007 reported:

Ernest C. Withers spent more than 60 years telling America's story with the lens of his camera, which leaves one consolation from his death Monday night: We still have the story.

Specifically, one of modern America's great artists left a story few other cameras recorded. He photographed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Memphis balcony where King was killed. He shot the jury that freed the white men who killed Emmett Till, a black teenager who whistled at a white woman.

Withers, who was 85 when he died, didn't start out as a historian. On Saipan during World War II, he took snapshots for Marines to send home to their families.

After the war, like the famous Harlem team of Morgan and Marvin Smith, Withers opened a studio, making rent and grocery money from weddings and community events. He followed the people, which is how he came to create an incalculably valuable record of the twilight years in the Negro baseball leagues.

While shooting concerts produced by WDIA, America's first black-programmed radio station, he caught former WDIA deejay B.B. King chatting with a young white kid named Elvis Presley.

He knew some of this was history, he later said, but more important at the time, it was news, for which he could get paid. His photos ran in black papers like the Amsterdam News for years before mainstream outfits like The New York Times discovered him.

"None of these [black] newspapers received wire service of events that involved black people," he said. "In areas of racial trouble ... I was summoned to go and take pictures of the evidence or imagery that would make for newspaper pictures."

The pictures he took of Emmett Till's mutilated face, and his mother's reaction, were one of the forces that eventually made it impossible for America to ignore the evil side of its racial divide.

In some ways, military photographer Ernest C. Withers shot a bigger war after he came home.

But while Withers was admired by his peers for shooting first and asking questions later, he also said he understood the power of what he was doing. He declined an invitation to take pictures of Dr. King's body in the morgue, fearing how they might be used as years went by.

Wherever he drew the lines, he took the pictures that counted. From James Brown on his knees to striking sanitation workers on their feet, Ernest Withers left a record of how his people, and his country, got from there to here. (http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/arts/2007/10/17/2007-10-17_ernest_c_withers_spent_life_putting_blac.html)

Ernest C. Withers talks about his photojournalism career, which took him on travels with Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and other figures in the civil rights movement. As a freelance journalist for African American newspapers, he captured on film the momentous events of the 1950s and 60s as they unfolded. Withers shares his experiences and images of events that altered the course of American history in a memorable Martin Luther King Jr. Day presentation.

MALCOLM X: OUR HISTORY WAS DESTROYED BY SLAVERY

MALCOLM X: OUR HISTORY WAS DESTROYED BY SLAVERY

Assassination of Fred Hampton

Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. He was assassinated by the Chicago police on December 4, 1969.

Susan Rutberg's article "Nothing but a Northern Lynching: The Death of Fred Hampton Revisited", in the Huffington Post states, Forty years ago, on December 4, 1969, 21-year-old Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was murdered as he slept in his home on Chicago's West Side. Shortly before dawn, fourteen armed police officers, ostensibly serving a search warrant, shot nearly one hundred rounds of ammunition into his apartment, killing Hampton and twenty-two year old Mark Clark and wounding several other young members of the Black Panther Party. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, by Jeffrey Haas, tells the story of the 13 year legal battle that eventually uncovered a conspiracy between the FBI, the Illinois State's Attorney's office, and the police, to kill Fred Hampton and destroy the Black Panther Party.

Jeffrey Haas was one of the lead lawyers representing the Hampton and Clark families and those who survived. In a riveting memoir that reads like a docudrama, Haas introduces the reader to the politics of the late 1960s and to young Fred Hampton, a magnetic public speaker and community organizer. Haas then provides a play by play history of the tensions between the Black Panther Party and the police, and a guide through the labyrinthine twists and turns of the legal struggle waged to avenge Hampton's death.

The book tells an inspiring story of underpaid, indefatigable lawyers who eventually forced powerful government officials to admit a truth they had stonewalled for more than a decade.

His account is one of egregious abuse of power by state, local and federal law enforcement. Haas takes the reader through a series of attempts to whitewash the illegal conduct of the law enforcement officials who staged and carried out the raid. State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan charged the survivors of the raid with attempted murder of the police. An internal police department investigation exonerated the officers who shot Hampton and Clark; the Cook County Coroner ruled Hampton's death justifiable homicide. Later, a federal grand jury refused to indict the police or State's Attorney Hanrahan, even though it issued a report containing damning evidence that the police shooting was unprovoked by the Panthers.

The court dismissed Hanrahan's charges against the survivors in the face of the physical evidence. All but one of the 90 plus bullets came from police weapons and had been shot into the apartment, and Hampton had been shot at close range, with two bullets to the head. Yet, as Haas explains, the dismissals of criminal charges against them brought the surviving Panthers, and the Hampton and Clark families, no closer to justice.

Outraged civil rights leaders and community members demanded that those who killed Hampton and Clark should be held accountable. As one elderly woman put it after viewing the blood-soaked mattress where Hampton was slain, "this was nothing but a Northern lynching."

Fred Hampton Murder Scene

Haas and his colleagues at the People's Law Office filed a federal civil rights suit on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the raid's survivors. The judge threw their case out of court. While that decision was on appeal, continuing pressure from the community and the press prompted the Chief Criminal Court Judge to appoint a special prosecutor, respected Chicago attorney Barnabas Sears. Haas writes that when Sears sought indictments against the State's Attorney and the police, the judge who had hired him ordered the indictments sealed and cut off his funds. Only after an appellate court intervened were these indictments unsealed. Three years after Hampton and Clark's deaths, the independent prosecutor indicted the police and State's Attorney Hanrahan, albeit for "obstruction of justice" rather than murder.

As Haas tells it, throughout this ordeal of justice delayed and denied, he and his law partners took heart from one of Fred Hampton's speeches: "If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle, then damn it, you don't deserve to win."

And struggle they did. Just when the reader begins to hope that the bad guys will finally get their due, Haas shows us how difficult it was for the truth to emerge in the face of persistent government denials. In the criminal trial against the police and State's Attorney Hanrahan, lawyers for the indicted officials focused almost entirely on the purported violence and anti-police rhetoric of the Black Panther Party, rather than on the evidence against their clients. Ruling that the prosecution had provided "insufficient evidence" of a conspiracy, the judge found all the law enforcement defendants not guilty. The acquittals came just a few days before an election in which State's Attorney Hanrahan was trying to keep his job. The only solace the Panther families and their lawyers could take from this turn of events was that Chicago voters threw Hanrahan out of office.

Back in court on a civil rights complaint reinstated by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Haas and the team of largely unpaid lawyers and students faced an uphill battle. The defendants were represented by high-priced lawyers paid at public expense and the judge was openly hostile to the plaintiffs.

After several more years, another dismissal and another appeal, Haas and his colleagues finally gained access to the evidence that the FBI had buried for so long. The judge granted a hotly contested discovery motion for material about the FBI's covert intelligence program and the FBI eventually turned over more than five hundred boxes of documents in response.

Painstaking review of the discovered documents turned up proof that the FBI had planted an informant in the Black Panther Party and had concealed that information from all the previous investigations and trials. The FBI's informant, William O'Neal, was Hampton's trusted friend and bodyguard, and ironically, the person in charge of security for the Panthers on the night of the killings.The connecting link between the FBI and the police who carried out the raid was a blueprint of Fred Hampton's apartment which the FBI had provided to the Chicago police. The blueprint had been drawn by O'Neal for the FBI. The location of Hampton's bed was clearly marked. The conspiracy was proven.

Fred Hampton

The lawyers had uncovered an explicit FBI plot to destroy the Black Panther Party and to bring down its leaders. It was this evidence that ultimately led to a victory, of sorts. In 1983, Haas and his colleagues at the People's Law Office achieved some justice for their clients, a $1.85 million settlement, paid out in equal part by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

Haas' story is also an indictment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for its covert attempts to, in words taken from COINTELPRO documents, "neutralize" the Black Panther Party and prevent the rise of an "electrifying leader." Fred Hampton, as portrayed by Haas, was just such an electrifying leader. Haas shows us the impact Hampton and the Chicago Panthers had on their community: they initiated free breakfast programs for children, organized against police brutality and worked to create cross-racial coalitions. He quotes a mother's lament, from Iberia Hampton: "People should not forget that State's Attorney Hanrahan, the Chicago police, and the FBI murdered my son . . . .Who knows what he may have become, if they hadn't killed him?"

The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, by Jeffery Haas

Haas spent four and a half years researching and writing this book. He read thousands of pages of transcripts and interviewed dozens of the major players in this saga. The result is a story that helps us see the complex history of the Black Panther Party and the police in a new light. The Black Panthers talked about self-determination and carried guns. Law enforcement officers reacted negatively. The Assassination of Fred Hampton is a cautionary tale of what can happen when government officials forget that no one is above the law and there is no working system of checks and balances.

Although it took more than a decade for those who murdered Fred Hampton to be held accountable, it is perhaps some additional measure of justice that the American people recently elected another brilliant community organizer from Chicago, Barack Obama, as the first black president of the United States.

(source: Huffington Post, by Professor Susan Rutberg, Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco. In 1975 she volunteered with the People's Law Office to work on the Hampton civil rights suit. posted 4 Dec. 2009.)

Fred Hampton Documentary: Death of a Black Panther Party Leader

COINTELPRO VIDEO

COINTELPRO: FBI's War On Black America

COINTELPRO is an acronym for a series of FBI counterintelligence programs designed to neutralize political dissidents. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO's of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against radical political organizations. In the early 1950s, the Communist Party was illegal in the United States. The Senate and House of Representatives each set up investigating committees to prosecute communists and publicly expose them. (The House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy). When a series of Supreme Court rulings in 1956 and 1957 challenged these committees and questioned the constitutionality of Smith Act prosecutions and Subversive Activities Control Board hearings, the FBI's response was COINTELPRO, a program designed to "neutralize" those who could no longer be prosecuted. Over the years, similar programs were created to neutralize civil rights, anti-war, and many other groups, many of which were said to be "communist front organizations." As J. Edgar Hoover, longtime Director of the FBI, put it

The forces which are most anxious to weaken our internal security are not always easy to identify. Communists have been trained in deceit and secretly work toward the day when they hope to replace our American way of life with a Communist dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged movements, such as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their sinister purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify, the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement of Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important to learn to know the enemies of the American way of life.

The FBI conducted more than 2000 COINTELPRO operations before the the programs were officially discontinued in April of 1971, after public exposure, in order to "afford additional security to [their] sensitive techniques and operations." Click here for more information.