Today we honor the memory of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this photo, taken by Ernest Withers, King is confronted at the funeral of Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist and World War II veteran assassinated in June 1963.
Ernest Withers was an African-American photojournalist who was born and worked in Memphis. He documented the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1960s. His self-published pamphlet of photographs on the Emmit Till murder helped spur the equal rights movement.
Withers described his first-hand involvement with the movement: “I’ve never been so scared in my life as I was in some of those places. You’d go into town with one of those big four-by-five press cameras…you couldn’t hide it anyplace. That camera was the first thing people would go for.”
Withers forged a close personal relationship with King, Evers, and James Meredith. His visual records of events like the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and King’s assassination were often the first - and sometimes the only - photographs to document these events as they unfolded. Often this happened before the national press took up the stories. Withers reminds us that in the 1950s and early 1960s, the black papers were not part of the national wire services.
Image:
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922–2007)
Dr. Martin Luther King Is Confronted: Dr. King is stopped by police at Medgar Evers’ funeral, Jackson, Mississippi, June 1963
From the portfolio I am a Man, 1963
Gelatin silver print
Oberlin Friends of Art Fund
AMAM 2004.6.6