Ernest C. Withers (August 7, 1922 – October 15, 2007) was an African-American photojournalist. He documented over 60 years of African-American history in the segregated Southern United States, with iconic images of the Montgomery bus boycott, Emmett Till, Memphis sanitation strike, Negro league baseball, and musicians including those related to Memphis blues and Memphis soul. In 2010, it was revealed that Withers was recruited and paid by the FBI's COINTELPRO program to inform on the US Civil rights movement for nearly two decades, beginning shortly after his first photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.