From the editor: Stuck at home? Time to catch up on some reading. We'll continue sharing information with you about the present moment, but also sharing stories with you that are about things other than COVID-19. We find it soothing in these troubled times to keep our perspectives broad and our minds curious.
The prom at Manassas High School in 1961. Withers graduated from Manassas High in 1941. Other notable alumni include Isaac Hayes and jazz musicians George Coleman, Frank Strozier, and Harold Mabern.
The pictures tell the story.” Those words were painted on the window of photographer Ernest C. Withers’ studio on Beale Street, and, if any phrase sums up his life, there’s no better one.
Withers was a man of Memphis, where he was born, lived for most of his life, and died in 2007 at age 85. As a photographer, Beale Street was his primary beat, and the landmarks of his life are names familiar to any Memphian — Manassas High School, the Gospel Temple Baptist Church. But his photographs — and the stories they tell — are known the world over. He photographed the three kings of Memphis — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., B.B. King, and Elvis Presley, the king of rock-and-roll.
And that famous photo of the striking sanitation workers carrying “I Am A Man” placards? Withers captured a moment of history when he took that picture. In fact, Withers is considered by many to be the photographer of the civil rights movement, and his portraits of Memphis musicians and Negro League Baseball players are almost as well-known. His work documenting the civil rights movement and the music and sporting events of the Mid-South is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Ernest Withers didn’t think of himself as an artist. He was a historian.” — Connor Scanlon, with the Withers Collection
A new book collecting dozens of rare and never-before-seen photos, Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest C. Withers (CityFiles Press) edited by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, makes plain just how prolific Withers was — and how powerful even his portraits of everyday people can be. Cahan and Williams began work on the project in 2014. They spent hours in the archives of the Withers Collection, overseen by Withers’ daughter, Rosalind. There, the Chicago-based authors studied the approximately 1.8 million negatives Withers left behind. When they saw the file cabinets full of negatives stored in envelopes with Withers’ sparse notes scribbled on them, the two authors must have felt giddy at the access to so much history, but struck with sober reflection at the enormity of the task ahead.
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The Phineas Newborn Family Orchestra helped set the trajectory of jazz in Memphis — and was a regular act at the Flamingo Club. Tuff Green often joined the band on bass, but Ernest Withers identified this acrobatic bassist as Kenneth Banks.
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Drummer and vibraphone player Lionel Hampton performed in the 1950s at the Hippodrome, a converted ice rink on Beale Street.
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B.B. King with Bill Harvey’s Band. “I thought my Bermuda shorts were Esquire-ish,” King wrote. Evelyn “the Whip” Young is on sax.
Two cabinets are devoted to civil rights, music, politics, and sports. Lifestyle, by far the largest category, takes up four filing cabinets, each twice the size of the others. And that gives some idea of Withers’ undeniable work ethic. Developed over a lifetime, it spurred Withers to preserve a section of Memphis life that, otherwise, went largely undocumented. From blues to baseball, high school proms and football games to funerals and marches, and moments both mundane and historic, Withers was there, camera in hand. The confidence and skill he developed in the juke joints of Beale Street and on assignment for newspapers served him well when history happened. He was fearless in the face of intimidation, risking life and limb to get the shot.
“Withers didn’t think of himself as an artist,” says Connor Scanlon with the Withers Collection. “He was a historian.”
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Memphis’ radio station WDIA was reborn in the late 1940s as America’s first station with all-black programming. In February 2020, WDIA was added to the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. Withers was the station’s photographer.
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The choir of the Church of God in Christ, with Debra Mason Patterson at the piano and (from left) Ann Marie “Tootsie” Fletcher, Ida Madie Flagg Porter, Mattie Wiggley, Gwendolyn Poindexter, Bernice McClellan, and Jessie Jimerson.
Withers’ career as a photographer began when Marva Trotter Louis, the wife of heavyweight champ Joe Lewis, visited his school. On a bet with a classmate, Withers took a picture of Mrs. Louis with his Brownie camera. Not content to win the bet with a poorly framed photo, he sought a close-up of the glamorous celebrity. The other students laughed when Withers, then in the eighth grade, strode toward the stage. He learned lifelong lessons that day, about the power of a good composition, about fearlessness in the face of a disapproving audience, and how a camera could take him anywhere.
“Just imagine him being in a cramped club. It’s dark. You’ve got people all around you; it’s difficult to navigate. It’s loud. And to be able, in the middle of that chaos, sometimes literally even to go on the stage or stand on the edge of the stage and jump in there, and take a picture while an artist is performing.” — Michael Williams
In 1941, the year the United States entered World War II, Withers graduated from Manassas High. He married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Mae Curry, and registered for the draft. He was inducted into the Army at Camp Forrest in Tullahoma, Tennessee, a year later. Withers persuaded his commander to transfer him to the photo school at Camp Sutton in North Carolina, where Withers soaked up the particulars of how to use a camera and do darkroom work. There, he shot photos for the base newspaper Carry All.
After being deployed to Saipan in the Pacific, he documented the construction of airstrips used for island-hopping. That’s not all he did, though. “He would trade his rations, his cigarettes and beer, for more photo supplies,” Scanlon says. Withers would take photos of other enlisted men for them to send home to their families and their sweethearts. He sent money home to his family in film canisters. Photography could be a lucrative business.
Ernest C. Withers poses in front of his 1941 Ford Woody. About his methods, Withers said, “I’ve never been a super telephoto photographer.”
Back in the States after the war, Withers had to earn a living. Persuaded by his father, a postal worker, to take the civil service exam, he passed it and became one of the first 14 African-American police candidates in Memphis, and one of the first nine officers to make it through training. Withers spent three years as a police officer, but never slowed down in his career as a photographer.
Withers was the official photographer for WDIA-AM, the first radio station in America geared to African Americans. He worked for the Memphis World and, later, the Tri-State Defender. He also covered proms, baseball games, family reunions, and funerals, taking portraits. It was this work that made Withers such a well-known figure within the community.
“You’ve got to get the picture,” Williams says, trying to put Withers’ efforts into context that may be hard to grasp for a contemporary audience. Withers didn’t carry a high-powered supercomputer in his pocket, as almost anyone does today. “Just imagine him being in a cramped club,” says Williams. “It’s dark. You’ve got people all around you; it’s difficult to navigate. It’s loud. And to be able, in the middle of that chaos, sometimes literally even to go on the stage or stand on the edge of the stage and jump in there, and take a picture while an artist is performing.”
“I think they’re shockingly simple and beautiful and important,” Cahan says of Withers’ early work as a portrait artist — essentially as a chronicler of his community.
Withers photographed the 1955 Emmett Till trial and the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, and by then his decades of experience behind the lens lent him the understanding of composition and timing necessary to imbue a frame with all the drama of the world around it. “The civil rights movement wasn’t just Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and the leaders,” Cahan says. “It was day after day footpower by average people that made it happen.”
“If you want to know what it [the fight for civil rights] felt like, if you want to know what it looked like, just look at Ernest Withers’ photographs.” — Andrew Young
Withers understood that; he knew those average people making changes with the power of dogged determination. He was one of them. He had documented their graduations and celebrations, and his work gives context to figures who, a generation removed, seem larger than life. Withers’ photos make plain the daily reality of segregation and the fight for civil rights.
“I love that quote that Andrew Young has,” Williams says. “He says, ‘If you want to know what it felt like, if you want to know what it looked like, just look at Ernest Withers’ photographs.’” In the foreword to Revolution in Black and White, Young writes, “Withers helped us get the message out. It didn’t make sense to march if nobody saw us marching. Ernest had a way of getting our images into black communities all across the country — via Jet and Ebony and the black newspapers. And support from the black community was essential to our effort.”
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In 1961, thirteen black first-graders were the first to desegrate Memphis public schools. Michael Willis, Harry Williams, and Dwanie Kyle (from left) were three of those students who made a historic ride to school that day.
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After activist James Meredith was shot while marching, civil rights leaders — including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael (second from right) — met in the Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis and decided to take up Meredith’s march.
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“He [Ernest Withers] showed the day to day — the good, the bad, the very ugly — that went into this era of civil rights,” says Richard Cahan. Withers documented civil rights activists’ efforts to open stores and public recreational facilities to African Americans.
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Reecie Hunter Malone displays her voter registration card in Fayette County.
In 2010, Marc Perrusquia, a reporter for The Commercial Appeal, broke the story that Withers had worked as a paid informant for the FBI. Reactions from academics, historians, and those who knew Withers were mixed. Some were shocked and dismayed, though many others defended Withers. Dr. Manning Marable, a professor of African-American studies at Columbia University, said in a September 15, 2010, New Yorker article “The Double Life of Ernest C. Withers,” “It’s important to remember the time within which he lived, and the inordinate pressure to inform. The best thing we can say about Withers is that he played a dual role, as an informant who undoubtedly disrupted the movement, but also as a photographer who used his talents on behalf of advocacy, social justice, and equality.”
In his 2019 book Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest C. Withers, author Preston Lauterbach notes, “He was there, he was risking himself. He was arrested in Memphis doing his job at a Walgreens sit-in in 1961; he was beaten and arrested in Jackson, doing his job as a photographer at Medgar Evers’ funeral in 1963; and he continued to put himself in risky situations.”
Withers died in 2007 at age 85 and was survived by his wife and five of his nine children. He had by then received honorary doctorates from three universities, and in 1988 he was inducted into the Black Press Hall of Fame. His work has been featured in exhibitions by the Massachusetts Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art and in the books The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs and Negro League Baseball. To this day, his pictures tell the story of Memphis and the South, of segregation and perseverance, of sportsmanship, community, and resilience.
Withers Collection Museum & Gallery, 333 Beale Street, (901) 523-2344. thewitherscollection.com
Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest C. Withers (CityFiles Press, 2019) Edited by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams
About this series: Memphis has played muse over the years to artists across the spectrum, from the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Al Green, and the collective at Stax Records, to the prose of Peter Taylor, Shelby Foote, and John Grisham. But what about visually? The look of Memphis has been described equally as gritty, dirty, active, eerie, beautiful, and captivating.
In this series, “The Mind’s Eye” takes a closer look at some of this city’s most prominent photographers.
Although Ernest Withers passed away in 2007, his work lives on, with the Withers Collection Museum & Gallery on Beale Street. In 2019, many of his photographs — culled from almost 2 million negatives — were showcased in a new book, Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest C. Withers.
The work of other “Mind’s Eye” photographers — Bob Williams, Murray Riss, Saj Crone, Karen Pulfer Focht, Willy Bearden, Jamie Harmon, Brandon Dill, and Ziggy Mack — is showcased on our online archives.
