Car doors popped open. Boots shuffled across the sagging porch.
“Preacher!”
The voice outside cracked with rage and fury. It was the sort of voice—a white man’s voice—that sent chills through Wright, a wispy, graying African American sharecropper who doubled on Sundays as pastor of a hole-in-the-wall country church.
“Preacher!” the voice came again. “I want to talk to you and that boy!”
It was two in the morning.
As he opened the door, Wright made out the figures of two men.*1 One, large and imposing, held a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. A smaller man, the one who’d been shouting, identified himself as “Mr. Bryant”—Roy Bryant, who ran a small grocery up the road in Money, Mississippi. Now, Bryant let the big man do the talking.
“You have two boys here from Chicago?” asked J. W. Milam, Bryant’s half-brother.
“Yes, sir,” Wright answered compliantly.
Milam asked about two, but he and Bryant came for just one: Emmett Till, Wright’s fourteen-year-old great-nephew, who was visiting from Chicago. A couple days earlier, Till and some local teenagers had been at Bryant’s store in Money, a small, isolated crossroads in the heart of cotton country. It was said he’d made imprudent overtures toward Mrs. Bryant, Roy’s young wife; that he’d asked for a date and whistled at her as she ran him and his cohorts out of the store.
It was all play for the youthful Till.1
But this was 1955 in the Mississippi Delta. Till was black. Carolyn Bryant was white. There was no way her husband and his half-brother would write it off as simple adolescent indiscretion.
“I want that boy that done the talking down at Money,” Milam said coldly in the doorway.
Moses Wright already had heard about the incident at Bryant’s store. He figured trouble was coming. But he just couldn’t figure a way out of it. Standing six-foot-two and weighing over 230 pounds, the bald, muscled Milam dwarfed the diminutive Wright. He offered no resistance. The bulky white man ambled into the home, illuminated only by the flashlight he held.
He found Till in bed, got him dressed, and led him out of the house.
As he loaded the teen into his vehicle under the towering cedar and persimmon trees outside, Milam gave Wright a stern admonition.
“Preacher, do you know any of us here tonight?” he asked in the code of a white Mississippian speaking to a “colored” man.
“No, sir,” Wright answered. “I don’t know you.”
“How old are you?” Milam inquired.
“Sixty-four,” he answered.
“Well, if you know any of us here tonight, then you will never live to get to be sixty-five.”2
* * *
—
ERNEST WITHERS WAS thirty-three when Emmett Till was murdered. He’d been off the police force for four years. He worked as a full-time photographer now, self-employed. He had no regular salary. No pension. No benefits.
He struggled to find his niche.
He and his wife, Dorothy, had six children; a seventh was on the way. To make ends meet, the ex-cop hawked pictures of ballplayers at sprawling Martin Stadium, where the Negro Leagues’ Memphis Red Sox played. He shot pictures of babies and newlyweds at a makeshift studio he rented above a pool hall on Beale Street; at night he prowled its bawdy clubs, shooting photos of sweaty bluesmen and their patrons for cash.
Four years earlier, in 1951, he’d undertaken another venture. He went to work as a freelancer for the Sengstacke family, owners of the Chicago Defender.
In November that year, three months after Withers was fired from the Memphis Police Department, the Sengstackes started the Tri-State Defender, a Memphis-based weekly newspaper patterned after their Chicago flagship, specializing in news, issues, and commentary affecting African American readers in West Tennessee, East Arkansas, and North Mississippi. Ernest had a new calling card: he was a newsman.
Much of it was routine. In the weeks before the Emmett Till trial, the Tri-State Defender ran uninspired photos Withers shot of the hundred-member Jubilee Choir posing for their upcoming performance at the National Baptist Convention that Memphis was hosting; of dignitaries arriving for the convention on the train; of conventioneers milling about on the sidewalk outside a rambling church.3
But what Withers lacked in experience he more than made up for with preternatural timing.
His entry into the news business coincided with a great awakening in the American South. More and more, news interests focused on the injustices of Jim Crow—on lynching, on segregation, on oppression at the ballot box. The civil rights movement was dawning. And ex-cop Ernest Withers, hungry for a paycheck—with a wife and six kids to feed—was there on the front lines to chronicle it.
“They paid very sparingly,” Withers complained years later. “But it was still an opportunity to get your name in the paper and to draw a little money as well.”4
Withers covered his first big story in May 1955, three months before the Till murder. Rev. George Washington Lee, fifty-one, a civil rights pioneer who fought to register blacks to vote in Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot and killed from a passing convertible as he drove his Buick sedan down a dirt road. Days earlier, he’d been warned to remove his name from voting rolls. A shotgun blast nearly tore his face off. His car careened into a nearby house, caving it in.
The murder in the heart of the Delta received little attention in the white media, but it resonated in the black community, where the Tri-State Defender flexed its young, journalistic muscle.5
Under a banner front-page headline, “ ‘KKK’ Strikes; Minister Slain Gangland Style,” the paper cited “reliable sources” who said a carload of whites had ambushed the “prominent and militant” Reverend Lee. The newspaper’s analysis labeled the killing the “first grave act of violence in Mississippi since the formation of the White Citizens Councils,” organized a year earlier in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision legalizing integration of public schools.6
Withers’s contribution to the story was small. The Defender ran a photo he shot—a posed picture that showed the newspaper’s executives discussing the case with NAACP leaders—in follow-up coverage on page two.
But the experience gained him access to a new social world, and he thrived in it.
As the NAACP pressed for an FBI investigation,*2 the photographer mingled with many leaders of the budding civil rights movement, principally Medgar Evers, the handsome young field secretary who also would be horribly assassinated by a racist in 1963.7
Withers and Evers became fast friends. As the civil rights struggle deepened, Evers visited Withers at his Memphis studio, which often served as a gathering spot for activists.8
Withers wasn’t just learning the news trade. He was networking—employing his considerable people skills to interact with the movement’s luminaries, with its mid-level organizers, and its many foot soldiers.
* * *
—
STILL, WHEN THE Till story broke, Withers remained on the Defender’s “B” team. The initial crush of coverage following the teen’s August 28, 1955, disappearance involved little from the former policeman.
The Tri-State Defender ran photos of Moses Wright’s plain country home, the still-unmade bed from which Till was abducted, and the small-town grocery where the boy had allegedly whistled at Mrs. Bryant—pictures attributed to staff writer Moses J. Newson, later executive editor of the Baltimore Afro-American. On the front page, it ran an unattributed photo of Till’s mutilated face. Some recently have credited Withers with shooting one or more of the grotesquely iconic Till death photos that triggered worldwide outrage, sparking the civil rights movement.*3 Yet, barring any additional evidence, the claim appears shaky at best. Withers didn’t take credit for any of the Till photos in his book about his civil rights work, Pictures Tell The Story. And, at the time of Till’s much-publicized funeral in Chicago, where the death photos were shot, he was more than five hundred miles aw
ay, covering the Baptist convention in Memphis.9
As interest in the case exploded, however, Withers got an assignment.
A grand jury indicted Bryant and Milam for murder, and a speedy trial was set to begin September 19. More than seventy newsmen from across the country descended on Sumner, Mississippi, a town of about five hundred that ironically promoted itself as “A good place to raise a boy.” It was home to the courthouse in Tallahatchie County, where Till’s body had been fished from the coffee-brown waters of the Tallahatchie River. The Defender publications sent an eight-man coverage team, including its Memphis freelance photographer, Ernest Withers.10
The Delta’s double-faced charm and harshness pervaded from the start.
Held in the un-air-conditioned second floor of a graceful brick courthouse with arched windows and a clock tower and a stone statue of a Confederate soldier on the front lawn, the week-long trial grew oppressive and hot. Reporters were frisked for weapons. Clarence Strider, Tallahatchie County’s gruff, pot-bellied sheriff, made it clear: segregation was the law in Mississippi. It would be the law in his courtroom, too.
“We don’t mix down here,” the sheriff told a gathering of newsmen. “And we don’t intend to start now.”
Strider seated twenty-two white reporters inside the bar below the witness stand and more still behind them in the middle of the courtroom. He placed black reporters, then known as the “Negro press,” at a card table in a far corner. Each day, Strider, who took the most unusual step of testifying for the defense and who blamed the NAACP for the negative publicity surrounding the trial, greeted the African American newsmen with a cheerful, “Good morning, niggers.” He placed Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, at the “Jim Crow table,” too, along with Congressman Charles Diggs, who’d come down from Detroit to observe the proceedings.11
Yet for all his humiliations, Strider unwittingly created an opportunity for Withers to take one of the most powerful photographs of the twentieth century.
Judge Curtis Swango had forbidden news photographers from taking pictures during testimony. But pushed to the side as he was, away from the center of the action, the Defender’s freelance photographer sensed an advantage.
When he thought no one was looking, Withers seized the moment as diminutive country preacher Moses Wright took the stand to testify about his great-nephew’s abduction.
Few expected him to actually testify. The tiny sharecropper had been too terrified that night to stand up to Milam and Bryant. Days after the murder, his wife, Elizabeth, fled. She was in hiding. For good reason, too.
Deputies had summoned Wright that day Emmett’s body was pulled from the river; it was left to the preacher to identify the boy. Wright looked in horror as Till lay in a boat with the barbed wire the killers used to tether him to the river bottom still wrapped around his neck. He’d been beaten almost beyond recognition. His right cheek was caved in. Teeth were knocked out. Before big J. W. Milam finished the boy with a bullet to his temple as the Sunday morning sun rose over the muddy Tallahatchie, he glared at young Till and told him coldly, “You still as good as I am?”*4
Now, in the courtroom, Milam glared at Wright. Dressed in his Sunday best—a white button-down shirt, suspenders, and a skinny blue necktie—Wright fidgeted before three hundred mostly white spectators and news representatives who would broadcast his words to the world.
“What did you see when you opened the door?” the stern-faced district attorney Gerald Chatham asked as he quizzed Wright about the abduction.
Ceiling fans whirred overhead, flitting impotently at the 95-degree heat. Spectators sipped bottles of Coca-Cola or dragged on cigarettes. Now, they froze.
All eyes were on the preacher.
“Well,” Wright answered, “Mr. Milam was standing there at the door with a pistol in his right hand. And he had a flashlight in his left.”
“Now stop there a minute, Uncle Mose,” Chatham said. Though the prosecutor willingly took the unpopular role of accusing whites of murdering a black person, he didn’t betray his paternal Delta etiquette.*5 Chatham was white. Wright was black. The prosecutor didn’t address his witness with a courtesy title. Throughout the examination he was simply, “Uncle Mose.”
“I want you to point out Mr. Milam,” the prosecutor prompted Wright.
Then it happened.
The small man stood from the elevated witness chair and, on his tiptoes, thrust his right arm forward, pointing a long, bony finger down at the
smoldering Milam. Some Northern reporters heard Wright say in his thick sharecropper accent, “Thar he,” or “Dar he.”
The trial transcript records it simply as, “There he is.”
Far to Wright’s left, Withers stood with his camera. There wasn’t room to sit at the Negro press table, crowded as it was with big-name journalists of the day like Simeon Booker of Jet magazine and Withers’s boss, L. Alex Wilson, legendary news writer for the Tri-State and Chicago Defenders. So he stood along the edge. A camera hung from his neck.
Before testimony got underway, Judge Swango had let the many photographers roam the courtroom to take pictures. They climbed on benches and elbowed through the throng. Withers joined in. His fellow African American journalists were amazed by his ease—and his nerve. When a white man coldly told him not to take his picture, Withers kept his cool.
“Don’t worry,” he answered wryly. “I’m only taking important people today.”
He put his fellow black journalists on edge.
“Man, you’ll get us lynched down here,” Booker said. Withers was unfazed.12
When Wright stood to point out Milam, Withers confidently took aim.
He couldn’t have known then that he’d just taken one of the most powerful images of the civil rights struggle: a black man defying centuries of custom, publicly accusing a white man of a most horrific injustice.
The photo is a bit blurry, slightly out of focus. Clearly, Withers fired off a rapid shot. In the foreground in the uncropped version, a white man is facing Withers. He appears to be reprimanding him, trying to block the shot.13
The photo was nearly lost to history. Though it appeared that week in various newspapers across the country, including The Pittsburgh Courier, Withers never got credit for it. As he would recount years later, he sold his film on the spot when a man from a wire service approached him.*6 The cash-starved photographer gladly took the money—between ten and thirty dollars, by his accounts—as he’d received just $35 pay from the Defender publications for a week’s work covering the trial.14
* * *
—
WHEN HE WASN’T freelancing news photos, Withers hustled a living with his camera in other ways. As a patrolman, he’d doubled as photographer on Beale and found unusual access to its clubs. As he later told an interviewer, he sensed a connection between “good times and money.” He discovered there were dollars to be earned taking portraits of patrons out having fun. “You’re always out to make money,” he said. “I used to make forty, fifty, sixty dollars a night, maybe a hundred.”15
While still a policeman, Withers rented a studio with a partner at 322½ Beale above a rough section of the street that included a pool hall and a liquor store. Between shooting pictures of babies and ballplayers, to whom he often paid a small commission, he found he could clear another $50 to $75 a month—as much as $686 in today’s money. A really good month might bring in $125.*7 He wasn’t getting rich. But it supplemented his police income—and it paid the bills after he was dismissed from the force.16
In a particularly rough stretch, the photographer ran his business out of his cramped North Memphis home. His darkroom was the bathroom. Back then, he used a large “4-by-5” camera, a bulky contraption that collapsed and expanded on an accordion-like slide. He developed and washed his film in the bathtub. He’d produce 4-by-5- or 5-by-7-inch prints of ballplayers that his wife Dorothy dried on ferrotype plates in the kitchen oven.
“Every one that I would dry, I’m thinking that we gon
na get some money,” Dorothy once recalled. “A dollar, a dollar and a half, and I’m planning my budget from those pictures. But sometimes he’d come back, he wouldn’t have but thirty dollars or something like that because he couldn’t sell them all.”17
Withers started shooting Negro Leagues games in 1946 when he came home from the war. In the waning days of baseball segregation, before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, the Memphis Red Sox regularly drew seven thousand or more fans to old Martin Stadium, where a parade of stars flowed through: Robinson, Willie Mays, pitching phenom Satchel Paige. He assembled a large collection of rare and historically valuable photographs: a teenage Mays celebrating under the Martin Stadium grandstands with his Birmingham Baron teammates after winning the 1948 Negro American League Championship; Paige posing with the photographer’s sons in the stadium’s infield; future National League MVP Roy Campanella enjoying a night out at a diner off Beale Street.18
Withers did much the same at night on Beale, selling patrons photos of themselves as keepsakes as well as pictures of the stars they came to see: nationally known performers like William James “Count” Basie and Lionel Hampton, who toured Memphis on the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit”; local bluesmen like honey-voiced Junior Parker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and the legendary B.B. King.
By 1954, his fortunes were looking up. He and Dorothy had enough money to build a modest, three-bedroom home with a big yard and more room for his growing family in a developing neighborhood south of the massive Johnston Rail Yards along the industrial river port.19
* * *
—
PICTURES OF BASEBALL and the blues put food on the table, but it was his news photos that earned him an intangible yet just as valuable reward: public trust.
The Till trial helped secure a promotion to the Defender’s “A” team. More and more, he got choice assignments covering politics and crime. When the black community threw its support behind progressive white mayoral candidate Edmund Orgill in a wide-open campaign following the death of Boss Crump, Withers was there with his camera. When a civic leader was found robbed and murdered in a lounge at the Elks Club on Beale Street, Withers shot the gruesome crime scene.20
A Spy in Canaan Page 14