The Gritty Life of Memphis from the 1950s Through the Lens of Ernest C Withers

A prominent African-American photographer during the civil rights era, Ernest C. Withers documented some of the most critical chapters in the history of the United States, including the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

He attended the Army School of Photography during World War II. Withers became one of Memphis’ first African-American police officers after the war. During the late 1940s, Memphis’s radio station WDIA, with its all-black programming, hired Withers to be its photographer. He was the official photographer for Stax Records. He worked for Time Magazine. In addition, he was a paid FBI informant, providing information about the civil rights activists he photographed.

Photography is a collection of memories. One who is trained in photography knows that. Instinctively, people who have an occupation know what they ought to do. You call the fireman to put out the fire; you call the police to solve a police problem; and people who are news people and journalists are collectors and recorders of present evidence, which after a given length of time becomes history.

Withers photographed the life of Memphis in the mid-20th century. He captured proms, funerals, people at work and play, and street life during the Civil rights Movement.

#1 The WDIA Twins, c 1948

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#2 Junienne Briscoe, 16 years old, joined the picket lines along Main Street.

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#4 William Edwin Jones pushes daughter Renee Andrewnetta Jones (8 months old) during protest, Main Street, Memphis, Tennessee, 1950s

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#5 A Memphis record store in the summer, 1954

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#6 Student volunteer working to register voters, 1964-65

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#7 An assembly at Booker T Washington high school, no date

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#8 BB King on stage at the Hippodrome, Beale Street in Memphis, TN, with Bill Harvey.

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#9 Ernest Withers’ Beale Street studio, no date

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#10 Michael Willis, Harry Williams and Dwania Kyles sit in the back of a car during the first day of Memphis school integration, 1961

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#11 Made by Ernest C. Withers. Photograph of Aretha Franklin in a white jacket with feathery cuffs, sings into a microphone – Smithsonian

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#12 James Brown, Mid-South Coliseum, Memphis, TN

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#13 I Am a Man sanitation workers strike, Memphis, TN, 1968

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#14 Portrait in a Cotton Field, no date Ernest C Withers

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#15 Martin Luther King Jr waiting to be introduced at the Alabama Capitol after leading the 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965

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#16 A mule train, part of Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign, leaves Marks, Mississippi for Washington DC, 1968

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#17 Double exposure of a nighttime march.

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