Redwood Curtain CopWatch, based in the north coast of California, is part of a larger movement of self organized CopWatch groups throughout the US. Our local efforts seek to intervene in the drastic rise of the presence, militarization, and violence of the police, and build support networks based on self-determination, caring, and concrete needs.
martin luther king jr
Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as Informant
Submitted by copwatch on Sun, 09/26/2010 - 11:57amWritten by Robbie Brown
ATLANTA - That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying 'I Am a Man' signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King's room, on the night he was assassinated.
But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers,
one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer. On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders, including Dr. King.
Hunger Strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center
Submitted by copwatch on Sat, 01/23/2010 - 9:37amSouthwest Workers' Union FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 18, 2010
Indefinite Hunger Strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Bayview, TX:
Began On National Day of Action Against Sherriff Arpaio,
The Hunger Strike grows in Celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”- MLK, Jr.
