“I Don't Deal in Relaxation Music. I Deal in News”: Civil Rights and the Blues Photography of Ernest C. Withers

This paper examines closely the photography of Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis, Tennessee photographer who became one of the most prolific documentarians of the Civil Rights Movement. While his photographs of protest action spanning from the 1955 Emmet Till murder trial through the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike remain iconic I am more interested in Withers’ photographs of segregated leisure spaces in the African American community. Withers made an explicit commitment to capture the social life of Black Memphis and amassed a significant catalog of local and national Rhythm and Blues musicians touring through the city. Occasionally, Withers snapped musicians appearing with civil rights leaders, but more often he captured performers at work and the audience at play inside the blues clubs on and off of legendary Beale Street.
Moving outward from Withers’ life and work, this paper illustrates that the sentiments cultivated by the singers, players, dancers, and drinkers in the Blues venues of mid-century Memphis – and thus captured in the spaces and faces of Withers’s photographs - are part of the same stream of political subjectivity that made the Civil Rights Movement possible. This paper considers how the creative impulses of popular cultures and leisure time articulate memories of racial violence, solidify enthusiasm for the possibility of burgeoning activism, reinforce Black social networks, and become part of the same imperative to make otherwise hidden transcripts public that Withers’ photographic practice represents. This paper is part of a larger multi-disciplinary project that will explore how music, image, text, and live bodies overlapped in creative space and functioned as integral elements in the maintenance of political sensibilities that we now recognize as the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement.