Coming home to Memphis in 1946, Withers got a business loan through the G.I. Bill and opened his first photography studio in the shadow of the Firestone tire plant in North Memphis. But he soon found that people who took the trouble to dress in their Sunday best for family portraits and wedding and anniversary pictures preferred to go downtown. So, Withers moved his shop there, opening the first of a succession of studios he would own on Beale Street, the bustling hub of business and social life in black Memphis.
But the picture business was a tough one and Withers, who had a wife and eight children to feed, found that to survive he needed to be as much of a hustler as a photographer.
By day he shot studio photos and by night he meandered through the street’s rough-and-tumble juke joints, aiming his camera at bawdy bluesmen and their patrons and hawking the photos to anyone who would buy them. He did much the same out at Martin Park, home of Negro League baseball’s Memphis Red Sox, snapping photos of the players and selling them in the stands for twenty-five cents, fifty cents, or a dollar. Although he achieved international fame late in life, he found monetary success elusive and never strayed from the modest, three-bedroom house he bought in 1954 for $7,900, near an industrial area south of downtown Memphis.8
For a time, he pursued photography as a second job while working an ill-fated stint as a policeman. The city of Memphis hired Withers in 1948 along with eight other African Americans who comprised the Memphis Police Department’s first black recruit class. He walked a beat on Beale Street and the surrounding neighborhoods, forging bonds with citizens like Robert Lewis, who would let Withers into his morgue room years later to shoot pictures of Dr. King’s body. Withers didn’t last long in the job, however. He was fired in 1951 after an internal investigation found he’d consorted with a bootlegger in yet another venture to supplement his income. From that point, Withers focused on his photography.
Passing out business cards bearing his slogan, “Pictures Tell The Story,” Withers eked out a living while assembling one of the most unique and historically priceless portfolios in America: portraits of a fresh-faced Elvis and B.B. King embracing on Beale Street; Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby appearing in Memphis after cracking the color barrier as the first two African Americans to play in Major League Baseball; young Aretha Franklin relaxing at the Lorraine; a high-energy performance by then–little known Ike and Tina Turner; and thousands of others. Withers joked that he shot as many as 12 million pictures in his life; archivists say they can account for at least a million—many found on faded negatives or well-worn prints scattered like so many gold nuggets in boxes and drawers throughout Withers’s cluttered Beale Street studio.
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BUT NOTHING WITHERS shot stood out quite like his coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, Withers covered the murder of Emmett Till, a case that touched a nerve in black America as few had. A fourteen-year-old African American youth from Chicago, Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he reportedly made the mistake of whistling at a white woman. He was abducted from his bed that night, savagely beaten, shot, and his mutilated body dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His killers, two white half-brothers, were acquitted by an all-white jury. Months later, they admitted to the murder in a paid interview with Look magazine.
During the trial, Withers, then a trim and handsome thirty-two-year-old, ignored the judge’s order banning picture-taking and surreptitiously photographed Till’s wizened great-uncle, Moses Wright, on the witness stand. Withers depressed the shutter as Wright rose to his feet and pointed a bony, accusing finger at the two defendants. Even on high-profile assignments like this, Withers had to hustle. “They paid very sparingly,” he said. So he sold the photo of Moses Wright on the side. “A man walked up to me and he gave me $10 to give him that picture,” Withers said. At the time he got no credit for the picture. After the trial, Withers produced a booklet—selling it for a dollar a copy—that helped draw attention to the Till case and its gross injustice.9
Repeatedly, Withers would deploy such resourcefulness and timing.
Rising before sunrise on December 21, 1956, the day a U.S. Supreme Court order ended the Montgomery bus boycott, Withers took that famous picture of King and Abernathy, victoriously riding one of the city’s first integrated buses. Years later Withers would talk about the photo and laugh that King wasn’t really the first black man to ride Montgomery’s integrated buses—he was. Up by 4:00 a.m., Withers rode a bus all over the city until midmorning, when King and Abernathy finally showed up.10
As the movement spread, Withers found regular freelance work with the Sengstacke family, publishers of the Chicago Defender, and the Tri-State Defender in Memphis. His pictures ran all over the country, in news organs that catered to black readers, publications like The Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Cleveland Call & Post. His bosses dispatched him to every major civil rights event within striking distance of his home base in Memphis. He covered the Little Rock school crisis in 1957, the integration of Ole Miss in 1962, and the 1963 assassination of his friend, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People field secretary Medgar Evers.
Often there was danger. Getting the story could require venturing into rural, white Mississippi to cover voting struggles, oppression, and murder. Many a time Withers stood out as the sole black man among a sea of white faces. Police beat him in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, and yokels harassed him a year later in nearby Neshoba County following the murders of three civil rights workers.
“Somebody had to go forward and ask a question,” Withers would say years later with a shrug when asked about the courage required to do what he did. “And it was our duty to be forward as people of the press. The freedom of the press gives us that right, you know. I mean…there were hundreds of black men lynched and never anything ever done about it. There were never any stories, but whatever little picture story that ran in the paper, but it wasn’t nothing.”11
In the days before James Meredith was admitted as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in September 1962, Withers helped hide the courageous twenty-nine-year-old in Memphis. He followed Meredith’s federally guarded caravan down to Oxford, Mississippi, where white mobs tore apart the Ole Miss campus and shot several marshals before order was restored and Meredith was finally admitted.
Four years later, after Meredith was wounded by a sniper in 1966 while on a solitary “march against fear” down the spine of Mississippi, Withers again inserted himself into a tense scene. He took intimate portraits of King, who stepped in for Meredith to lead hundreds of marchers from Memphis down through the stifling, humid Mississippi Delta. During the march, Withers’s camera captured King conferring with Stokely Carmichael, the fiery young Black Power advocate, on the side of a country road.
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IT WAS AN ironic twist that Withers’s great resourcefulness and timing betrayed him two years later, when King was shot and killed at the Lorraine. Withers had been at the Lorraine less than two hours earlier but left to run errands. He missed the picture of the century. But he didn’t miss its aftermath. Hustling back to the Lorraine with his cameras swinging from his neck, he undertook what arguably might be one of the most prodigious nights in the history of American news photography. In addition to shooting the first pictures of King in his coffin, Withers, then forty-five, tapped his unmatched access to King’s staff to capture the evening’s raw emotion: King’s personal aide Bernard Lee, disheveled and his tie undone, venting his anger; Andrew Young raising his outstretched palm, trying to keep order; Benjamin Hooks and Harold Middlebrook gazing hollowly at King’s attaché case. Withers shot a close-up of the open case, a picture that documented the pain and shock of that night without showing a single human face—just a shaving kit, a change of clothing, and copy of King’s 1963 book, Strength to Love.
Out on the balcony, he photographed the pool of blood, dried now in a thick, flaky paste spla
shed across the concrete like a grisly, abstract painting. Withers even retrieved a pill bottle from King’s room and scraped up some of it for posterity. But as he would say years later, it rotted in his refrigerator and he had to toss it out.
Later that night, in his studio, a visitor overheard Withers on the phone. Was he talking to the FBI? Over time, others had had these sorts of encounters—odd moments that left them scratching their heads, curious about his motives.
“Anytime he’d see us, he’d start snapping,” said Charles Cabbage, a young Black Power activist, who took a room at the Lorraine the day King died and whose politics became the focus of an intensive FBI investigation. “C’mon man. We weren’t that interesting. Why would he take our pictures constantly?”12
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ON THE OTHER hand, why would Withers jeopardize his standing in the movement to work with the FBI as Jim claimed? It was truly puzzling. Jim said it was all about money. Withers did have eight children to feed. But I couldn’t push Jim to go deeper. He offered solid objections: fines, even criminal penalties, that could be brought for revealing the name of an informant.
“That can come back and hurt you in the end,” he said. So I was left to speculate. The more I thought about it over time, the more his urge to return to police work seemed like a sound explanation.
Despite getting fired from the Memphis Police Department in 1951, Withers continued to flirt with a career in law enforcement, tapping political connections decades later to land police jobs. In 1974, as the civil rights era waned, he was elected Shelby County constable, an unpaid position with little actual power. A year later, Withers won a patronage job as a gun-toting liquor agent for the state of Tennessee. And in 1977, after President Jimmy Carter took office, local Democrats put Withers on a shortlist for possible appointment as the U.S. Marshal in Memphis.
Withers’s return to law enforcement was a particularly touchy subject for Jim. It soon became clear why: just as Withers had lost his first police job at MPD amid corruption allegations, his next paid police position ended in disgrace. This time, Withers was sentenced to prison.
“He took a bribe once,” Jim said, holding up his hand to fend off further questions. As I would later learn, Jim’s dour response only hinted at something much bigger. When Withers pleaded guilty to extortion in 1979 as a corrupt state policeman, he played a pivotal role in exposing a massive conspiracy within Tennessee’s executive branch to sell inmate pardons and commutations. For as little as $10,000, murderers, robbers, and other serious offenders bought their way out of prison. The resulting investigation netted convictions of more than a dozen state officials and political insiders and led to the eventual imprisonment of Tennessee governor Ray Blanton.
I couldn’t help but marvel at Withers’s biography. He seemed wrapped up in one giant story after another. And I couldn’t help notice that Jim seemed just a bit too amused.
“Ernest should write a book,” he said with a big grin.
He did do a book—four of them, actually. Over the years, Withers would publish glossy, coffee-table-styled picture books that displayed his rare photos of Negro Leagues baseball, the Beale Street blues scene, and life in the segregated South. They were pretty and they were artful.
But they didn’t involve the adventures and intrigue Jim was talking about.
5.
“NO ANGEL”
JULY 1978
HE SLID INTO THE BACKSEAT of the limousine, sinking into the cushioned upholstery. As the Cadillac’s door clicked shut, Ernest Withers inhaled the sweet smell of success: Plush, grain leather. Finely aged Chivas Regal. The faint scent of Arabian horses from the moneyed countryside east of Memphis. He had never known anything like it.
He was fifty-five years old, graying at the temples. If he stopped to reflect, he could look back at his life’s trek and marvel. Raised in the Great Depression, in the shadow of the smoke-belching Firestone tire plant in dreary North Memphis, he had navigated through the bustle of Beale Street, through the many long, lazy summers of baseball at Martin Park, through the turbulence of his brief police career, the great civil rights struggle, the mesmerizing moments spent alongside Dr. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Jackie Robinson, and so many others. Now, on this steamy July night in 1978, life had deposited him into this chauffeured limo, into the companionship of one of Memphis’s most powerful men.
Most powerful—and most corrupt.
His host in the backseat, Art Baldwin, ran a chain of topless strip joints in Memphis called the Playgirl Clubs. An Arkansas native who grew up in the Delta cotton country across the river, Baldwin first came to Memphis to work as a stock clerk in the city’s then-thriving music recording business. He became entwined with unsavory characters. No one is sure exactly how Baldwin got involved in organized crime. But he moved to Seattle, where he learned the topless dance trade while working for the Colacurcio crime family. He introduced his newfound livelihood to the “Bluff City” when he returned in 1974. His operations became the business model mimicked in Memphis for years: Nude or semi-nude “Go-Go” dancers—some who wore no top; others who wore nothing at all—performing on a raised stage to swirling lights and pounding rhythms. For a fee, they gave private “table” dances on the side. There were drugs and sex for sale.
Opening and maintaining such an operation in the heart of the Bible Belt required certain, flagitious, skills. And Baldwin, a pale man with scraggly blond hair, a scruffy beard, and icy blue eyes, proved more than adept.
Convicted of assault, attempted bribery, income tax evasion, and cocaine distribution, he paid off the police with cash, girls, and booze and took care of the politicians with large, off-the-books campaign donations. Suspicion swirled around him. Just this month, his former business partner and current rival, David McNamee, had been found murdered. More than a few people in Memphis thought Baldwin might have had a hand in it.
And more than a few of the city’s elite could have cared less whether he did it or not.
Baldwin had money, the ticket to inclusion in class-conscious Memphis. He kept his own stable of purebred Arabian horses on the farm of a respected local businessman, and sipped bourbon with a circle of police and public officials.
“Anything that you want to do can be done for a price,” he was fond of saying.
Now, as his chauffeur navigated the urban decay of the Memphis backstreets, Baldwin focused his attention on his backseat guest, his latest friend on the public payroll: Ernest Withers, state liquor agent.
A decade after the civil rights era waned, Withers was a cop again. Sporting a business suit, a badge, and a gun, he worked as an agent for the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission—the state liquor board—regulating nightclubs selling liquor by the drink. Baldwin had plied Withers for months with small inducements—drinks and cash—to keep the board off his back. The pair often met in seedy motel rooms or at Baldwin’s Brooks Road club amid the industrial sprawl near the airport. But today their discussion veered from the picayune into the heart of venality.
Withers had a hand in something far more nefarious than petty protection money, something much bigger than simply ignoring liquor violations. He served as a foot soldier in a rogue unit of state government that sold pardons and commutations to inmates. A cabal of officials inside the administration of Gov. Ray Blanton had put the state’s justice system up for sale. For as little as $10,000 and as much as $80,000 or more, murderers, robbers, and other serious offenders could buy their way out of prison. Withers’s role was small but vital: he found leads on the street and passed them up to confederates in the State Capitol in Nashville who had the power to convert them into profit.
Now, Baldwin had such a lead.
In the backseat of the Cadillac, the scruffy nightclub owner tantalized Withers with an offer certain to whet his bosses’ appetites. He said he had an affluent friend who was willing to pay good money to free his son from jail. The family desperately wanted him out. No problem, Withers answered. But it wi
ll come with a price—$15,000. As the two men negotiated, Withers sensed he was about to land a big score.
But there was a problem—a huge problem that not only would spell legal trouble for Withers but would shake Tennessee’s political landscape for years to come.
The Cadillac wasn’t really Baldwin’s. It belonged to the FBI. The chauffeur was an undercover agent. And Baldwin, who had recently been convicted of drug offenses that threatened to put him in prison for the next eighteen years, had a secret: he was working with the FBI as an informant. As the two men discussed their pending deal, a hidden FBI tape recorder captured the conversation.
“That’s a lot of money,” Baldwin balked.
“Not if you want the man out bad enough,” Withers responded.
“What happens if the deal goes bad?”
“The deal ain’t going bad. If the money’s right, the man’s as good as free.”1
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AS I RESEARCHED Tennessee’s 1975–1979 pardons scandal, known to many as the “Clemency for Cash” case, I began to sense the reasons for Jim’s discomfort. If Withers indeed had been a paid civil rights–era informant as Jim claimed, his involvement in this no doubt would have ignited some severe heartburn within the FBI.
Still, it was rather confusing.
An informant setting up an informant? Just how does that work? Jim wouldn’t talk about it. There were people around Memphis who knew the details, he said. But it was a hollow gesture. Jim wasn’t going to put himself out there to help on this. My options for information were limited: a couple of books written on the case and the “morgue” files of old news accounts housed in the newsroom library at The Commercial Appeal, the daily paper where I work. These were the days before the Internet took off. Background research was done by hand, and it often went slowly.
A Spy in Canaan Page 6