Winter 2018
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
…what Lauterbach…is going for is a loose, rangy history of the civil rights movement in Memphis, using Withers and his camera as the (literal) lens. He's done the work, tracking the complex, intertwined dances of the radicals and the centrists, the local ministers and visiting heavyweights like King.
The New York Times Book Review - Christopher Bonanos
10/08/2018Beale 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. (Jan.)
"[M]eticulous and engrossing."
Atlantic Journal-Constitution
"Lauterbach’s vibrant study of Withers, a black photographer in Memphis who documented the civil rights era while also serving as an informant for the F.B.I., doubles as a love letter to Withers’s hometown."
New York Times Book Review 9 New Books We Recommend This Weeks' Choice
"Meticulous and engrossing."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Anjali Enjeti
"A story vividly told."
"Lauterbach’s riveting recounting of the sanitation strike, and the stranger-than-fiction role Withers may have played in the riot that threw it into chaos, would be enough to make Bluff City an indispensable work."
New York Journal of Books - Steve Nathans-Kelly
"Through intimate reporting and effortless storytelling, Bluff City captures both the tragic ironies of FBI espionage and the fertile contradictions of Memphis, Tennessee. The photographs of Ernest Withers—spy, artist, race man, and cagey black conservative—have never looked more meaningful."
"Bluff City does a masterful job of telling the story of civil rights in Memphis in the 1960s, framing it with Withers’ biography, and culminating with the sanitation workers’ strike that would bring King to town—and to his death. Not only is it a great narrative, it’s also a reminder, in these polarised times, that moral complexity is baked into human affairs, and that sometimes people do the wrong thing for what they perceive is the right reason."
Financial Times - Ed Ward
"[Preston] Lauterbach… provides a better feel for life in Memphis… [and] a thoughtful analysis of Withers’s talent as a photographer."
Wall Street Journal - Clifford Thompson
"[A] vibrant study of Withers… [and] a love letter to Withers’s hometown."
Editors’ Choice New York Times Book Review
"A loose, rangy history of the civil rights movement in Memphis, using Withers and his camera as the (literal) lens. [Lauterbach’s] done the work, tracking the complex, intertwined dances of the radicals and the centrists, the local ministers and visiting heavyweights like King."
"Lauterbach provides a fresh, balanced, and provocative exploration of the photographer’s life and controversial choices."
"Lauterbach’s vibrant study of Withers, a black photographer in Memphis who documented the civil rights era while also serving as an informant for the F.B.I., doubles as a love letter to Withers’s hometown."
Editors' Choice, New York Times Book Review - 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
2019-01-21
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.
