Ernest withers emmett till

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By Wiley Henry

MEMPHIS, TN – One of this country’s preeminent civil rights photographers is receiving widespread attention from Hollywood notables 15 years after his death this month in 2007.

Rosalind Withers, daughter of Ernest C. Withers Sr. and director and conservator of The Withers Collection Museum and Gallery in Memphis, said her father’s work is reaching a global audience.

In partnership with Orion Pictures (an MGM company) and United Artists Releasing, some of Withers’ iconic photographs are being exhibited with others in tandem with the Till movie.

“We (The Withers Collection) worked with the premiere release of the film,” said Rosalind Withers, who met the president of Orion Pictures, Alana Mayo, at a prior Withers exhibit.

According to Rosalind Withers, Mayo said, “We need to do something together on this film (Till) … and somehow incorporate the Withers collection into this film.”

The movie premiered at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on Oct. 8 to much fanfare and debuted in New York and Chicago as well. Till also premiered in London on Oct. 15.

Rosalind Withers attended the Beverly Hills screening of Till and the exhibit entitled “Till: Impact of Images,” featuring African American photographers and journalists from the Bl

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The Double Life of Civil Rights Photographer and FBI Informant Ernest Withers

The great civil rights photographer Ernest Withers was sitting in a Sumner, Mississippi, courtroom in September 1955 when Emmett Till’s uncle, Moses Wright, took the stand to testify against the two white men who had come to his house one night and taken away his 14-year-old nephew. As Wright defied an entire history that had kept black Americans “in their place” by pointing his index finger and identifying one of his nephew’s murderers, Withers defied the judge’s orders and snapped one of the first iconic images of the civil rights era.

That was just the beginning — both of a historic movement for racial justice in America and of Withers’s role as its documentarian — a story vividly told in Preston Lauterbach’s new book, “Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers.” But there was a hidden story behind Withers’s iconic photographs that emerged only after his death, when the Memphis Commercial Appeal revealed that Withers had all along worked as an FBI informant, reporting back to the agency about the same activists he photographed. With “Bluff City,” Lauterbach tells that story, in a book that is as much about Withers’s complicated relationship with the civil rights movement as

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