Rhodes Students Preserving the Work of Memphis Photographer Ernest Withers
By Chris McCoy ’93
Funding for the initial phase of the Ernest Withers project was provided through the Mellon Faculty Innovation Fellowship Program.
When photographer Ernest Withers passed away on Oct. 15, 2007, he left behind an unprecedented legacy. Not only was he a key figure in recording the civil rights movement, but, for most of his 60-year career, he was one of only a handful of photographers documenting everyday African American life in Memphis and the Mid-South. And now, thanks to initial funding by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a group of Rhodes students is working to make sure that pictorial history stays alive.
“I had always seen his pictures, growing up in Memphis,” says Tiegst Ameha ’16. “But I didn’t really know who took them.” The English major was working in Rhodes’ Memphis Center last year when she was contacted by Assistant Professor of Art Elizabeth Daggett. “She said she had a project for me, and it turned out to be this enormous thing.”
Daggett had met and interviewed Withers when she was an undergraduate at the University of Memphis. As a filmmaker, she thought his long and colorful life would be the perfect subject for a documentary. That was not in the cards, but when she later took some students from the Midtown North Emerging Artists Camp, funded by the Rhodes Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts program, to the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery on Beale Street, she had a fateful meeting with Withers’ daughter, Rosalind (Roz).
“Roz was doing well in Florida; she had her own life,” Daggett says. “Then when her father passed, she felt compelled to come back here to save his work, to save these images. She’s someone who is trying to do right by her family, and she uproots, asks her son and his wife to move here, and they are just grinding it out every day. To me, that’s a really compelling story. She’s an extraordinary person.”
Rosalind Withers showed Daggett the full extent of the archive. “I was just really blown away,” Daggett says. “I found out that the archive had about a million pieces—photographs, notes, papers—that had not been digitized. There’s this huge mass of material.”
Rosalind knew the materials needed to be organized but was still seeking team members, labor, and the funds to do it. Daggett assembled a small team that included Ameha; Sophia Mason ’16, another Memphis native; Dominique DeFreece ’18; and Rosie Meindl, visual resources curator in the Rhodes Department of Art. “We went into the archives and did a general sweep,” says Ameha. “We would just pull open a drawer to see what was in it. This one has black-and-white negatives, this one has color negatives, this one has 8 X 10 pan developed . . . whatever happened to be there, we would write it down. We could have gone through the process faster, but we kept stopping to say, ‘Oh! Who is this?’ Roz Withers would come up and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s so and so.’ She would tell us whole family histories, and we would be like, ‘Let me write this down!’ ”
Every drawer pulled revealed treasures. “It’s unbelievable,” says Daggett. “There are images of Martin Luther King, Jr., we’ve never seen. We’ve seen images [Withers] took during the Sanitation Worker’s Strike that are amazing. You literally have a play-by-play of what’s happening. You can see the disappointment on Martin Luther King’s face when the march got violent. You can see these images of the looting of a clothing store, and the cop who’s trying to stop it is kind of out of shape. He starts running after the one guy who actually stole something, but he can’t catch him, so just starts beating on somebody else.”
One image of Dr. King stood out for Ameha. “It was from a day that we already had a picture of, one that’s hanging in the gallery,” she says. “He had a straw hat and white shirt. He was standing in the middle of a crowd of 200-300 people. He’s all the way across the crowd, and he’s looking straight at Withers. They have this connection. It’s this spooky moment that was captured on film. He’s in this mess of people, and Withers captured this one perfect moment. Hey, here’s Martin Luther King standing in the middle of a crowd making direct eye contact with you the viewer. It gives me chills when I look at it.”
But there is more to the archive than just civil rights history, Daggett says. “There are beautiful images of weddings and office parties—any kind of gathering. Ernest Withers worked. He took so many images. He was of value to people in a lot of different ways. There wasn’t an aspect of living that he didn’t touch upon.”
After three weeks of preliminary work, the team paused to determine the best course of action. “There are a lot of players,” says Ameha. “We just wanted to make sure we were doing it the right way and taking everyone’s best interests into account. We spent a lot of time figuring out who does what and how it’s supposed to be done. After countless meetings—big meetings with 10-15 people at the table—we decided to start taking histories of people who were in the photographs.”
Daggett led the team in filming interviews with the Withers subjects who came forward. “The students are amazed, because in the middle of an interview, people will say ‘Oh, we had dinner with Martin this one night,’ and they would be like, ‘Martin Luther King?’ King was a real person. He was just a piece of this really complex fabric of the community.”
Ameha says, “This is why we’re doing these oral histories. People might think they’re run of the mill, but they’re really not.” As the summer goes on, the team is meticulously cataloging the items, preparing for the digitization phase that lies ahead. “It’s nice to know you’re doing work that is meant to last,” says Ameha. “A whole lot of things won’t last. But this thing—its whole purpose is to last.”
