Ernest Withers; documented black history
LOS ANGELES - Ernest C. Withers, a photographer who documented more than 60 years of black history by capturing images from the civil rights movement, Negro Leagues baseball, and blues and R&B performances on Beale Street in his native Memphis, has died. He was 85.
Mr. Withers died Oct. 15 at Memphis VA Medical Center from complications of a stroke he suffered in September, his son Andrew said.
Trained as a photographer by the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, Mr. Withers returned to Memphis and opened a commercial studio. He also worked as a freelance photojournalist for such local black newspapers as the Tri-State Defender and the now-defunct Memphis World.
In 1955, Mr. Withers traveled to Sumner, Miss., to cover the trial of two white men accused in the slaying of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago who allegedly had whistled at the wife of one of the defendants. An all-white jury acquitted the pair, who later admitted their guilt. Many blacks, including Mr. Withers, were outraged by the verdict, and he self-published a booklet with photographs from the trial.
The pamphlet, which he sold for $1 each, brought Mr. Withers to the attention of the national black media. He started getting assignments from the Chicago Defender, The Baltimore Afro-American, Jet and Ebony magazines, as well as mainstream outlets such as Time, Life, The
"Ernest was doing conventional studio work," said his agent, Tony Decaneas, owner of Panopticon Gallery in Boston, "but he loved history and he was aware of this social revolution that was taking place."
Over the next several years Mr. Withers became a witness to key moments in the civil rights movement in the South. He captured the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleague, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, riding a bus in Montgomery, Ala., on the first day the transit system was desegregated, in December 1956.
Mr. Withers chronicled the integration of Little Rock High School in Arkansas in 1957 and the enrollment of James Meredith as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962.
Mr. Withers's photos provided records of the funerals of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who was killed after working to register voters in 1963, and King, who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has in its permanent collection more than 100 of Mr. Withers's black-and-white images.
"There is a level of immediacy in those photos that's extraordinary," said Marina Pacini, the museum's chief curator.
Calling the images "powerful and potent," Pacini noted that Mr. Withers "was part of the community, which meant that he had an entrée to it and could get a much more intimate point of view."
Mr. Withers had the largest catalog of any individual photographer covering the civil rights movement in the South, said Decaneas.
"Not only did he document civil rights history," Decaneas said, "he was the epitome of a fine-art working journalist."
Mr. Withers had a sizable following in the Boston area, Decaneas told The Boston Globe.
In an interview with the Globe in 2001, Mr. Withers said, "I was just recording what I see. I was not really an activist. I was a news photographer."
Ernest Columbus Withers was born Aug. 7, 1922, to a Memphis postal worker and his wife. A teenage Withers made his first photograph with a Brownie camera he borrowed at a school event where the wife of boxer Joe Louis was speaking.
After his return from military service, Mr. Withers became one of nine black men to join the Memphis Police Department in 1948. He patrolled black neighborhoods and got to know judges, police officers, and other law enforcement figures.
He soon turned to photography full time and took all manner of jobs to make ends meet, shooting weddings, graduations, church socials, and civic meetings.
He toted his camera to Martin Stadium, where the Memphis Red Sox played in the Negro American League. Withers provided publicity shots for the team and photographed many of the greatest black baseball players who competed against one another before the major leagues were integrated. His pictures of Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, a teenage Willie Mays, and many others appeared in a 2005 book of his photos called "Negro League Baseball."
Mr. Withers also spent a lot of time on Beale Street, the center of the Memphis music scene, photographing B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Howlin' Wolf, Aretha Franklin, and countless other singers, both in studio portraits and in club shots. Many of these images were collected in book form in "Pictures Tell the Story" (2000) and "The Memphis Blues Again" (2001).
In addition to his son Andrew of Memphis, he leaves his wife of 65 years, Dorothy; sons Perry of Memphis and Joshua of Los Angeles; and a daughter, Rosalind of West Palm Beach, Fla.
Material from The New York Times was used in this obituary.
