Ernest C. Withers, known as the “original civil rights photographer,” was “unmasked as an informer for [the] FBI” this week according to a major story in The New York Times based on an investigation by the Memphis-based Commercial Appeal. Withers, an intimate of Martin Luther King’s in the heroic days of the civil rights movement, died in 2007, and thus cannot confirm, deny, or explain the story.

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If it is true, then Withers wantonly breached the trust of people who regarded him as a friend. But did he do any harm to the movement? That is very unlikely. And we might temper our judgment of Withers’s betrayal with reflections on the moral complexity of the situation, a story that is little known and often distorted.

Why was the FBI spying on King and his associates? No doubt there was plenty of racism in the bureau’s ranks, and the radical upheaval engendered by the civil rights “revolution” offended the deeply ingrained conservatism of J. Edgar Hoover and his boys. But their mission was not to suppress the movement; rather they were keeping tabs on its penetration by Communists who wanted to use it for their own purposes.

Bayard Rustin, my old comrade in the Socialist Party and the civil rights movement’s leading strategist, used to say that he had joined the Socialists because they cared about civil rights for its own sake, not merely as a wedge for the advancement of ideology. He contrasted this with his earlier experience as a member of the Young Communist League.

In America as everywhere, the Communist Party served only the interests of Moscow and could champion a cause one day, then turn against it the next. For example, during the Stalin-Hitler pact, Communists were ultra militant within the labor movement. Their orders were to disrupt American life and industry as much as possible in order to make it harder for the US to aid the victims of Hitler, Stalin’s ally. When Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, these same Communists did an about-face, using their positions to promote labor peace, advocating a “no strike pledge.”

I learned early that many of the whites who took part in the civil rights movement were Communists. During the summer of 1964, I joined an all-night vigil outside the federal building in lower Manhattan to demand that the Justice Department find the three missing young civil rights workers in Neshoba, Mississippi. When we sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” I heard a verse I had never heard before: “Race-haters and red-baiters ain’t a-gonna turn me ’round.” Red-baiters? What did that have to do with it? This was an issue raised mostly by . . . reds. Since I seemed to be the only one unfamiliar with those words, it hit me that most of my fellow (white) protestors were probably Communists.

Were Communists who fought for civil rights acting from motives wholly ulterior? I doubt it. By the time of the civil rights movement, the Communist Party had been decimated, in part by the postwar Red Scare but most devastatingly by Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev, who revealed in 1956 that what the anti-Communists had been saying about Stalin had been right all along. Probably most of the Communists, fellow-travelers, and recently-fallen-away Communists active in civil rights were motivated by idealism. Whatever the reason, it cannot be denied that they made a contribution to a sacred cause.

Sadly, a few years later, the party and its penumbra helped destroy the movement. A pathological element arose among black activists in the form of the Black Panthers and the radicalized “Snick” (which had morphed, some wit observed, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into the Nonstudent Violent Coordinating Committee). Many activists were aghast at this desecration of all that King, Rustin, and others had fought for, but the Communists at once became cheerleaders for this new militancy, seeing in it something they could exploit.

In hindsight it is clear that the government’s fears of Communists within the civil rights movement were misplaced, not because the Communists weren’t there but because they were unable to use this position to harm the country. On the contrary, the civil rights movement did America infinite good—and the Communists, on balance, were mostly along for the ride.

Can American officials be faulted for misgauging the dimensions of the danger? I doubt it. The Communists were indeed a fifth column whose principal goal was to weaken America in the face of its deadly enemy to whom they paid allegiance.

And what of Ernest Withers? If he did as alleged, then he deceived his friends, which is shameful. But did he do it for money? Perhaps he was merely being patriotic. We may never find out, but this stain on his memory does not blot out the honor due him for his part in one of America’s greatest moments.