Withers, Ernest Columbus Sr.
1922-2007 · Contribution: 1948-2007
Photographed nearly every major event of the Southern civil rights movement over a 60-year career, including the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the “I Am a Man” Memphis sanitation strike, while also — as revealed decades after his death — secretly reporting information about the movement to the FBI
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
One of Memphis's first Black police officers before turning to photography full-time, Withers became the unofficial photographer of the civil rights movement, present at the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial (where he self-published an illustrated pamphlet on the case), the 1957 desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1956 ride on a newly desegregated Montgomery bus, and the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, where he personally helped create the iconic “I Am a Man” placards photographed a week before King's assassination in the same city. His archive, estimated at one million to five million images, also chronicles Memphis's Negro League baseball players and its Beale Street blues and soul scene, including early images of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, and Aretha Franklin. In 2010, three years after his death, investigative reporting and a 2013 FOIA release revealed Withers had served as a paid FBI informant supplying information on movement figures and organizations from the 1950s through the 1970s — a revelation that has complicated his legacy without erasing the historical value of the images themselves, which remain held by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Life & background
Born August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee, to postal worker Arthur Withers, Ernest Withers received his first camera as a teenager and trained further at the Army School of Photography while serving in the Pacific during World War II. He returned to Memphis to become one of the city's “original nine” Black police officers in 1948 before leaving the force to open Withers Photography Studio, working as a freelance photojournalist for the Tri-State Defender, Chicago Tribune, New York Amsterdam News, Jet, Ebony, and other outlets for the rest of his career, with several of his eight children apprenticing as photographers alongside him. He married high school sweetheart Dorothy Curry in 1942, received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art, and died from complications of a stroke in Memphis on October 15, 2007; the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery opened on Beale Street in 2011, and his work was featured in the National Gallery of Art's 2025 exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement.
Sources
- NPR; PBS NewsHour; Smithsonian American Art Museum
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