I remember Ernest Withers of Memphis as a distinguished civil rights photographer, whose message to journalism students at Emory and Northwestern Universities, when I invited him to speak, was more spiritual than shutter-speed, f-stop practical.

Shortly before he died, Withers told a Northwestern class on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day that the most important quality of a photographer’s work was its honesty: “Is it true? Does it hurt? What good does it do?”

Withers’ work—he shot more than a million photos—rose at times to that level where a picture becomes a defining icon of an era, an image that so repulses or engages us that it brings some slight change in us. Most great photographers are remembered, at best, for one such image.

Withers shot several—his photo of massed “I Am A Man” marchers, of Dr. King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy sitting in the front of the bus, and of the beaten face of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago tortured and murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Photographer Carl Mydans once said, “Behind the camera there must be a man’s eye, and a soul.” A soul. I feel that Withers’ photos showed his soul. So I was especially troubled when—three years after Withers’ death in 2007 at age 85—a report by Marc Perrusquia in The Commercial Appeal, Wither’s hometown paper, concluded that he had doubled as FBI informant to spy on the civil rights movement.

While in Memphis, I wanted to talk with Perrusquia and Withers’ daughter, Rosalind, president of the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery. What about Ernest Withers, FBI spy?

In our interview, Rosalind stresses her father’s efforts to help the civil rights cause, saying he was “very, very much a part of the movement.” And the movement, she says, echoing Andrew Young, pursued a policy of being transparent about its activities, especially with FBI agents, who, unlike local police, were seen as protectors of the movement.

She acknowledges her father’s role as FBI informant. But she recalls his career in law enforcement—as one of Memphis’s first black police officers, Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent and county constable: “Once a policeman is always a policeman.” He felt he was providing information for life and safety, she says, helping the FBI, for example, derail the Invaders, a black militant group feared by city leaders.

If the FBI paid her father, Rosalind says, it was for the photos that the agency requested of him. She feels certain he would never have used his photos to hurt the civil rights movement, its leaders or their reputations.

She recalls that, following Dr. King’s assassination, her father was the only photographer invited into the hospital to shoot the blood-stained corpse. The photos could have made Withers a lot of money. But he told a King funeral organizer, Rosalind recalls, “I’m not going to take a picture of him that way. When you suit him up I’ll release that picture to the nation.”

Perrusquia of The Commercial Appeal agrees that Winters was “a kind-hearted guy” who possibly saw his work for the FBI informing on Black Panther-style militants as a “vital function for law and order.” But Withers also “was a very complicated guy, let’s put it that way,” Perrusquia adds.

Withers was paid little for his photography and struggled financially to raise eight children. Perrusquia quotes a federal source who said Withers was driven by a need for money. That need, Perrusquia suggests, led Withers to participate in a corrupt system. In various law enforcement roles, Perrusquia says, Withers was not immune from kickbacks—“cash for pardons” and “cash for bribes.”

Perrusquia’s pursuit of Wither’s sealed FBI informant file continues, part of a Commercial Appeal investigation that thus far has cost the paper $80,000 in legal fees. The investigation could reveal the length of Withers’ service to the FBI, what the service entailed and how much he was paid for it.

Whatever the investigation reveals, I will remember forever Withers and his courageous coverage of the civil rights movement. As Perrusquia, in fairness, wrote in his article: Withers defied a judge’s order that banned picture-taking during the Emmett Till murder trial and “captured the moment Till’s great-uncle Mose Wright stood up at the witness stand and pointed an accusing finger at the killers.”

Withers, as Perrusquia also wrote, endured harassment in Mississippi following the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers and a police beating covering Medgar Evers’ 1963 funeral. I like to believe that the soul of Withers lives on in the honest photos he so bravely shot.

Loren Ghiglione

Our conversation with Smith, which focuses on the Defender’s past as well as present and future, reminds me of two interesting tidbits of journalism history. First, the Defender is part of a strong Memphis-Chicago journalism connection. Ida B. Wells, the feisty editor and part-owner of Memphis’s Free Speech and Highlight and a crusader against lynching, continued her crusade in Chicago, as author and editor of the African-American Conservator. The Tri-State Defender was founded by John Sengstacke, publisher of the flagship Chicago Defender.

Second, the Tri-State Defender reported key events in the early history of the U.S. civil rights movement, despite risk to its reporters. The Defender’s Alex Wilson covered the Mississippi murder of Emmett Till, a Chicago 14-year-old, in 1955, and the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Wilson was knocked to the ground at Central High, hit on the head with a brick, and kicked as he knelt. Attackers shouted, “Run, nigger, run,” but he refused to run. He said later, “They would have had to kill me before I would have run.”

For more on the Defender’s role in history, see an excerpt from Dan Tham’s video of our interview with Smith, the paper’s publisher.

For more on the Defender, see an excerpt from Dan Tham’s video of our interview of Smith, the paper’s publisher.

Loren Ghiglione

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Graceland

Graceland

Graceland

Graceland’s basement

Graceland’s basement

Graceland’s billiard room

The jungle room

Graceland

The Graceland cemetary

Elvis’ headstone: TCB for Taking Care of Business

Blame it on the music madness of Memphis—see Dan Tham’s videos of the marching-to-music ducks at the Peabody Hotel below—but a visit to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion, has me thinking that Mark Twain and Elvis the Pelvis were, at minimum, soul brothers.

The homes of Twain and Presley, who both came from the small-town South, feature rooms devoted to pool tables. Both Twain and Presley loved Hawaii; Elvis’s “jungle room” celebrates the waterfalls and other wonders of Hawaii.

Of course Presley is famous for his hip movement, but take a close look at the only film of Twain. You’ll see he also knew how to move that thing. And both loved spirituals and other music a lot more risqué than gospels.

Right after he was married and traveling with his new wife from Elmira to Buffalo, Twain spent much of the trip belting out these lyrics: “There was an old woman in our town, In our town did well, She loved her husband clearly, But another man twice as well…”

Both Twain and Presley were their era’s superstars. They dressed the part, with heads of hair and tailored suits that commanded awe and imitation. So, remember, you heard it here first, don’t be surprised when DNA testing proves that Twain and Presley were blood brothers.

Loren Ghiglione

Dwania Kyles stands in front of a photo of herself on the first day of school. Kyles is one of the Memphis 13, a group of students who integrated the Memphis public schools.

A half-century has passed since Dwania Kyles, a wellness consultant in New York, made history as one of the Memphis 13, first-graders who desegregated the all-white public schools of Memphis.

She has returned to Memphis for the first showing of a documentary about the Memphis 13 by University of Memphis law professor Daniel Kiel. We are interviewing her in a Beale Street museum and gallery dedicated to the photography of Ernest Withers, who captured the tinderbox of tension that engulfed segregated Memphis in Kyles’s era, the 1950s and 1960s.

Withers photographed a 1950s bumper sticker: “Don’t buy gas where you can’t use the rest room.” In another of his photos, white protestors carry a sign at city hall in 1960: “Segregation or War.”

In that environment the NAACP searched before the 1961 school year for black families willing to subject their young children to the strain of being school-desegregation firsts. Most families declined. But Dwania’s parents, who had moved from Chicago two years earlier to be part of the civil rights movement, said yes.

Dwania’s father, Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, could hardly say no. He chaired the NAACP’s education committee. Pastor of Monumental Baptist Church (a position he still holds), Kyles was on the Lorraine Motel balcony with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Dwania Kyles, with two other black children, Michael Willis and Harry Williams, desegregated the first grade of Bruce Elementary School. Each of the Memphis 13 was the only black child in an otherwise all-white classroom.

The strain of the isolation and abuse—the Memphis 13 were repeatedly called nigger—took its toll. But Kyles said that they learned how to protect themselves psychologically “so we weren’t destroyed by it as a five year old and six year old. That was hard, very hard. I really lived in my head a lot.”

At least one student, possibly two, did not stay the year, Kyles says. Many of the Memphis 13 did not last through sixth grade.

Kyles recalls that she was the only one of the Memphis 13 to go straight through the city’s public schools, graduating from Bellevue Middle School and then Central High School. But she announced to her parents in her junior year that she, unlike her siblings, would be going to a black college or university. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C.

She looks back on her Memphis school days almost with nostalgia. At a reunion last month of Memphis 13 survivors, “nobody was really bitter,” she says. They recognized they were part of a “life-changing experience, not just for us but for the whole city as well.”

The closest her daughter’s generation has been able to get to that kind of experience, she says, was Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency: “He did reignite that fire that was viciously put out in the ‘60s with the assassination of so many forward-thinking leaders who were so young.” She expresses concern that her daughter’s generation will fall back, not move forward, not push for necessary change.

She defines that change—in a world of animal cloning, fracking and food processing—as a push for a sustainable planet and nutritional foods. “Will there be any real food to eat?” she asks.

In this video excerpt, Dan Tham’s captures portions of our interview with Kyles where she talks about change in her generation and in her daughter’s generation.

Loren Ghiglione