Bluff City

October 8, 2018
Lauterbach (Beale Street Dynasty) illuminates the life of African-American photojournalist Ernest Withers (1922–2007), beginning with his childhood in the racially divided city of Memphis. Withers joined the Army after high school, where he honed his photography skills; afterward, he returned to Memphis and as a freelancer covered sports events, funerals, and politics for local papers. Withers shot some of his most memorable photos there, including shots of Elvis Presley laughing with B.B. King at an all-black function, and of Martin Luther King Jr. leading Memphis sanitation workers in a strike demonstration just a week before he was killed. Realizing that he couldn’t support his growing family solely as a photographer, Withers became an informant for the FBI and reported on the activities of various organizations, including the Invaders, an emerging Black Power group, and people, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lauterbach points out that in Withers’s community, “black leaders had long informed white leaders about African-American political activity” (church leaders might speak with, for example, elected town officials), and that Withers didn’t equate being a black photojournalist in a black world with promoting racial justice. His easy access, at least tacitly as a participant, enabled him to document the activities of these groups and to pass along pictures of them to the FBI in the late 1960s. Lauterbach tells a fantastic story of a brilliant and compromised artist living in challenging and divisive times.

Ernest Withers (1922-2007) documented the civil rights movement as a photographer, but another side to his seminal career is now coming to light; "he had spied on the civil rights movement for pay." Does his status as an FBI informant cast a different glow on some of the most influential images of the century, including those of Emmett Till and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Lauterbach (former visiting scholar, Rhodes Coll.; Beale Street Dynasty) posits an investigative biography to expose Withers's secret FBI history, but this bold assertion never comes to the forefront of the narrative. Withers's own story is weaved into the lives of the subjects behind his best-known photos, and Lauterbach shows that much may be attributed to his need to support ten children on a small salary that the FBI could supplement. Although the author succeeds in capturing the tensions of the era, the FBI plot fails to jell. VERDICT This fascinating glimpse behind the creation of iconic civil rights photos never quite flushes out the main thesis exploring Withers's FBI informant career. Marc Perrusquia's A Spy in Canaan offers a more thorough exploration.--Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH

Lauterbach (Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, 2015, etc.) examines the life of a noted African-American photographer who also worked as an informant for the FBI during the peak of the civil rights movement.Ernest Withers (1922-2007) documented black life in Bluff City--Memphis, Tennessee, that is--as thoroughly as Addison Scurlock did in Washington, D.C., and James Van Der Zee in Harlem. "He covered the 1960s," writes the author, "as Mathew Brady covered the 1860s." Brady was wider ranging, but there's no denying that Withers caught some signally important moments in the city's history, including Elvis Presley visiting a black nightclub in June 1954, "the last month of anonymity in Elvis Presley's existence." Self-taught and aware of the difficulties of making a living with his camera, having worked mostly the funeral circuit, Withers became a police officer in the late 1940s after returning from service in World War II to a Memphis that, sharply divided on color lines and run by a racist white known as "Boss Crump," was making tentative steps toward allowing black officers to work in black neighborhoods--in Withers' case, on Memphis' famed Beale Street. It was a time when the NAACP and other civil rights organizations worked to secretly register black voters, and some unknown person in the FBI's Memphis office "identified Withers as a potential informant on criminal cases." In the guise of working as a photographer, Withers recorded Martin Luther King Jr. on several occasions, including the sanitation workers' strike at the very end of King's life. Lauterbach is perhaps a touch forgiving of Withers' apparent motivation, his fears that young blacks would "get a distorted view of society and are engaging in and experiencing a socialist-oriented 'beatnik' type experience for which they are educationally, emotionally, and culturally ill-equipped to deal," as one white FBI agent put it.Will appeal to students of civil rights history and the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts.

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December 1, 2018
When it was reported in 2010 that famed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers was an FBI informant, friends and supporters still living may have thought the worst of him as a traitor whose information about the so-called agitators led to intimidation and far worse. By combining a wide-ranging context with narrative intensity, Lauterbach (Beale Street Dynasty, 2013) hopes to correct the record. Eschewing a clean biographical arc, he instead parses the sociopolitical circumstances that led to Withers' relationship with Agent William Lawrence, including a father entangled in the Memphis political machine who taught his son to obey the law and an extramarital affair leading to a daughter out of wedlock, making Withers' wife jealous. But the real reason may have been personal. In Lawrence, Withers found a companion to fill the vacuum left by L. Alex Wilson, his friend and mentor from the Chicago Defender. Furthermore, Red Scare politics implicating black citizens bonded the pair in their shared skepticism of interlopers. With previously unpublished photographs taken by Withers, Lauterbach provides a fresh, balanced, and provocative exploration of the photographer's life and controversial choices.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)