Compiled from the Panopticon Gallery [4] and an interview with Ernest Withers by Robert Franklin, director of KASU public radio at Arkansas State University.
Full Article:
Ernest Withers was an important chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement. Over the course of a long career, Withers documented the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the integration of Little Rock High School, the funeral of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the 1966 March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, and the assassination and funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ernest Withers' self-produced photographic pamphlet of the Emmett Till trial, was a remarkable document which encouraged prominent African Americans to become involved.
Four books of his photographs have been published: Let Us March
On, Pictures Tell The Story, The Memphis Blues Again,
and Negro League Baseball.
Ernest Withers describes how his photography career grew out of his time in the Army during World War II, and how he came to take some of the most influential photographs in US history:
"In a segregated Army, the white kids out on the island of Si Pan where we had no business merchants had a desire for pictures to send home, and I just started a rotating business of taking pictures of the soldiers. So I came out and decided between my brother and I that I should open up a photography studio in my neighborhood. We got the GI Bill of Rights and we bought a building. The career developed in the black newspapers and the transition and growth of American civil liberties and civil rights. I was asked to work and was trained as a news photographer by the people that ran the Tri-State Defender, Nat D. Williams, L. Alex Wilson and a number of men who were in the black publication at that time.
"Black newspapers across the country, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Cleveland Call Post, the Kansas City Call Post -- none of these newspapers received wire service of events that involved black people. So the Defender had myself linked with L. Alex Wilson, who was a great news editor and writer and so I was his companion and went into the areas of racial trouble. You know, starting with Mack Parker having been beat down in the jail, the Emmett Till trial, the missing civil rights workers… voter registration, and a number of lynchings that occurred. The black publications at that time dealt mainly with the rights of people. The Chicago Defender was the "defender" of African American or black rights. And anytime there was comprehensive or violent type criminal acts against Negroes in Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, I was summoned.
"…Pictures tell the story has been my slogan as a photographer for years. I mean, I was in Montgomery when the Supreme Court decision [5] came to Montgomery in 1956 [the decision that ruled against segregation in public transportation, thereby ending victoriously the Montgomery Bus Boycott]. Martin Luther King rode the first bus, and the New York Times and national and international publications used the picture I took because I was the only photographer on the bus when Martin Luther King rode the bus. He was with [Ralph Abernathy] and Dr. Smiley and the other members of the National Black Church Council. Mr. Wilson woke me up at four o'clock in the morning, "Come on boy." We went down and got on the first bus that came out of the Montgomery bus station and rode throughout Montgomery. And another hour, hour and half later Martin Luther King and the Delegation came to make the maiden ride, but we had been riding the bus for an hour and forty-five minutes before they arrived to make the maiden ride."