Iconic Civil Rights Photographer's Double Life as an FBI Informant

Guest: Marc Perrusquia, Investigative Journalist at the "Commercial Appeal" in Memphis, Author of "A Spy in Canaan" We’ve known for a long time that the FBI was spying on key figures in the civil rights movement. But when an investigative journalist at the "Commercial Appeal" newspaper in Memphis revealed that a black photographer named Ernest Withers had been an FBI informant, most people found it hard to believe. Withers’ photos were iconic. He’s been called “the original photographer of the civil rights movement.” Martin Luther King, Junior knew and liked him. Withers was so trusted that he went places no white person – and few black journalists, for that matter - could have gone. All the while, he was reporting back to the FBI on what he’d seen and heard. It’s a stunning story that took years for journalist Marc Perrusquia to unravel. He’s written it all down now in a new book called “A Spy in Canaan.”