He was a formidable witness to the history of civil rights and his camera captured some of the most momentous moments on the journey of social change. He was beaten up and jailed in Jackson, Mississippi, after a sit-in where civil rights students tried to break the segregated soda fountain stalls at Woolworths. Beaten, insulted and smeared in ketchup, the non-violent protest led to mass arrests. He documented the trial of the murderers of Emmett Till, an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi after reportedly flirting with a white woman. His body was dumped in the town of Sumner, where a murder trial lasted for five claustrophobic days in a tiny courtroom.
Withers was witness to the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign in the fifties, when African-Americans refused to ride city buses to protest segregated seating, and he was an approved photographer at the funeral of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist who was murdered by a segregationist in June 1963. Withers’ photographs had a candour that stemmed from his use of a normal-focus lens and from his confidence with the events he was witness to: he was in every respect an insider within a movement that had every reason to be suspicious of the white-owned national media. The photographs he took of the integration of Little Rock High School, a set-piece dispute over desegregated schooling, were taken not from the vantage of the armed Arkansas National Guardsmen but from the hopeful perspective of a group of black teenage girls arriving at the school gates in their bobby socks and dirndl skirts. Proximity to the movement also brought him close to Martin Luther King, who he frequently photographed in private moments, off-stage and away from the glare of the news media. It was his relationship with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff in Atlanta that made him both useful and vulnerable to the FBI. At some stage in 1958, in the aftermath of the desegregation of Little Rock High School, Withers was approached by an agent of the FBI. It was casual at first, and then in 1961 William H. Lawrence, a thin-faced spook who wore elegant black half-framed spectacles and who ran the Bureau’s Memphis field office, requested that Withers be recruited as a PCI (FBI-speak for a Potential Confidential Informant). Initially, Withers received a poor recommendation from the MPD, which he had left in strained circumstances. According to the police, he had taken an irregular payment from a city bootlegger, but Withers always claimed it was a means to an end, to pursue his dream of owning and operating a photography studio aimed at the African-American community. As the heat of desegregation intensified and the civil rights movement challenged discrimination in housing, education and the workplace, Withers’ insider knowledge became ever more valuable. From 1964 the FBI held a ‘170’ file on the photographer (‘170’ was the classification for a contact who could provide information on organisations and individuals holding ‘extreme political views’). The events of 1967 turned the screws on Withers. Martin Luther King’s now famous speech, ‘A time to break the silence’, at the Riverside Church in New York City encouraged the civil rights movement to oppose the war in Vietnam, and summer riots besieged Newark and Detroit. It was then that the FBI published its COINTELPRO communiqué, committing its network of agents to infiltrate black militant organisations. In early 1968, FBI agents visited Withers’ studio on Beale Street. According to his critics, the meeting dragged the photographer deeper into betrayal; according to his family, he was threatened, damage was done to his workplace, and the agents demanded information about photographs he had taken over the years. Many featured Martin Luther King and his staff, but many more, stored in boxes, stacked on shelves and hung as negative strips from kitchen pegs, documented the rich history of Memphis music, a treasure trove from the infancy of rock ’n’ roll to the height of southern soul.
There was a still of the stick-thin Elvis Presley posing with R&B crooner Brook Benton resplendent in a plaid dinner jacket at the WDIA Goodwill Revue at the Ellis Auditorium, on the corner of Poplar and Front Street. There was a bizarre photograph of Rufus Thomas dressed in an eccentric Native American headdress posing with a coolly bewildered Elvis, a photograph that crystallises the different and co-existing music scenes in the city. There was a print of Howlin’ Wolf standing in a fruit market with his aching electric guitar surrounded by prunes, watermelons and canned vegetables in Arkansas, circa 1950. There was a photograph of Ike and Tina Turner at Club Paradise, Memphis, in 1962; Tina’s in a gold lamé dress, aggressive at the microphone, as her razor-sharp husband prowls jealously behind her. It is a photograph latent with the spousal abuse that was to surface in years to come. There was a box containing prints of Big Ella at Club Paradise, bursting out of her shimmering party frock as she screams into a hand-held microphone. And there was a now iconic photograph of James Brown at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1965, kneeling on stage and clutching a collapsed microphone stand, his skin shimmering with sweat and his eyes on the verge of stage tears.
For much of the fifties, Withers had been the unofficial photographer in residence at the Hippodrome on Beale Street. It was there that he photographed B.B. King, implausibly dressed in spats and summer shorts, playing to an overspill audience. It was there that he shot the stunningly glamorous R&B queen Ruth Brown, her glossy dress billowing above golden high heels and her diamante earring decorously framing a perfect period kiss curl. A young and flamboyantly dressed crowd look up at her with awe. And it was there that he captured a hectic and fired-up Lionel Hampton, in a crumpled zoot suit, with his drumsticks in mid-flight banging out a beat for a delirious audience. Stacked on his desk were proofs of the soul singer Johnnie Taylor, a stunning vocalist from across the Mississippi River in West Memphis, Arkansas, who in the aftermath of Otis Redding’s death was becoming Stax’s most formidable male singer. His new single ‘I Ain’t Particular’ had just hit the stores and his stellar worldwide hit ‘Who’s Making Love’ was about to be recorded at East McLemore. Withers had just completed another Stax commission, portraits of a white teenager called Johnny Daye, whom Otis Redding had discovered in Pittsburgh while on tour. Redding’s recommendation had brought Daye to Memphis but his mentor’s death resulted in a stillborn career. Daye was recording the ballad ‘Stay Baby Stay’ at Stax when King was killed and, despite a short period as a backing singer for the R&B giant Bobby Bland, returned home to Pittsburgh bitter and penniless.
Withers had been the creative eyes of civil rights and the Memphis music scene until the FBI came knocking. Sometime in 1967, after King’s denouncement of the war in Vietnam, Withers’ studio was visited by agents. They turned over his darkroom, demanded to see photographs, and forced Withers to give information on some of the people photographed with King at rallies across the southern states. The interrogation lasted over an hour and the FBI took a batch of photos away with them, including some wholly innocent pictures of young singers from the Stax studios. From 1967 to 1970 Withers provided more photographs, basic biographical information and scheduling details of King’s itinerary to agents Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, both of whom had been trained in domestic surveillance. Many of the photos he provided fell under the COINTELPRO programme, images taken within the Memphis mosques of the Nation of Islam and the broader Muslim community and many more of Martin Luther King and the non-violent campaign he had pioneered. Withers provided information on a wide range of prominent Memphis figures, from street-corner militants to those on educational campuses, including the irrepressible Lance ‘Sweet Willie Wine’ Watson, a member of the Memphis Invaders. He had photographed the ministers who had supported the Sanitation Workers Strike, including Bishop G.E. Patterson and the Afrocentric Professor David Acey of the University of Memphis. According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the daily newspaper The Commercial Appeal, in a landmark ruling, Withers’ reports to the FBI increased in regularity during the Sanitation Workers Strike. It was a time when King’s reputation was also undergoing a profound change. According to Professor Michael Eric Dyson, King was becoming too powerful for some. ‘The more he protested poverty, denounced the Vietnam War and lamented the unconscious rac
ism of many whites, the more he lost favor and footing in white America,’ he wrote in his book I May Not Get There with You. King had become a figure of near-obsessive focus and increasingly bitter resentment. ‘In many ways King was socially and politically dead before he was killed. Martyrdom saved him from becoming a pariah to the white mainstream.’
Over time he compromised others, handing over photographs of a group of local Catholic priests who supported the strike, and implicated a US Civil Rights Commission worker, claiming he was a supporter of Black Power groups and someone close to the Invaders. Prior to his death, before the full extent of his role as an FBI informer was exposed, Withers offered a partial defence. Throughout 1968 until King’s assassination, Withers had FBI agents ‘regularly looking over his shoulder and questioning him’. Clearly compromised by the pressure he had come under, he made the decision to avoid any of the private or inner-circle meetings he had always had access to. ‘I never tried to learn any high-powered secrets,’ Withers said. ‘It would have just been trouble . . . [The FBI] was pampering me to catch whatever leaks I dropped,’ he told a gathering at an exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia. ‘So I stayed out of meetings where decisions were being made.’ He also conceded that there was another reason: meetings meant poor and unmemorable photographs.
King’s assassination had triggered an intense photographic reaction. Withers was there with his cameras draped like a ring of onions round his neck. An FBI surveillance squad with long-distance lenses was surveying the car park outside the Lorraine Motel from a nearby high building and a young black South African documentary film-maker called Joseph Louw was working there on a documentary film on civil rights. He hoped to use the film to raise awareness of non-violent resistance in America as a way of provoking opposition to the apartheid regime back home in Johannesburg. Louw was relaxing in Room 309, a few doors along the corridor from King, when he heard the shot ring out. He grabbed his stills camera and began frantically to take shots of the scene. Unable to develop them in his room, he talked Withers into opening up his studio. The two photographers rushed a few blocks to Beale Street past an eerily quiet John Brown’s Pool Room, where hustlers usually hung out in doorways or shared bets round the tables. Inside the darkroom they patiently watched the shallow rippling tray. One of the images that came to life was to become one of the most iconic photographs of all time. It showed a group of men, mostly colleagues of Martin Luther King, standing over his dying body and pointing in the presumed direction of the assassin’s vantage point. Their arms are raised in unison. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson had instinctively pointed to the rear of a decrepit rooming house on South Main. The next day the image led front pages around the world, but what few, if any, noticed at the time was another man bent over King’s body – Marrell McCollough, the undercover operative known as Agent 500.
When Withers returned to the crime scene from his studio, he climbed the outside stairway at the motel and knelt down to scrape the congealed blood. Only he can know what his motive was. Unknown to even his closest friends, he was the informer codenamed ‘ME 338-R(Ghetto)’, who since the start of 1968 had received regular pay cheques from the FBI. But he was also a hugely creative man with deep roots in civil rights and a great love of the music of his hometown. For those who are unforgiving about his betrayal, Ernest Withers’ small vial of blood was a final and degrading insult, and for those who can imagine a troubled man caught up in the intimidation and deceit of the era, it was a desperate attempt to stay close to a man who had shaped history: to see him still as a dear friend.
Who’s Making Love? A studio shot of Stax recording artist Johnnie Taylor.
© Granamour Weems Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
JOHNNIE TAYLOR’S SEXUAL DILEMMA
April
Johnnie Taylor had never considered sex a dilemma. Chasing women was never his priority in life and when anyone, especially a visiting journalist, asked about his love life he talked warmly of his girlfriend, and how happy they were together. Ironically, Taylor hated the song that made him famous – ‘Who’s Making Love’ – and from the outset struggled even to mention it by name, calling it ‘that song’ or ‘the boogity boogity song’. He would confess his doubts to Bettye Crutcher, one of the songwriters, and she would reassure him, touching him warmly on the knee in a motherly kind of way.
Taylor had heard on the tangled and unreliable Stax grapevine that there were concerns about the song: it was too racy, potentially career damaging, and risked being banned by radio stations. Mable John, the Detroit singer whom Taylor looked up to as an authority, told him it was doubtful that Berry Gordy of the Motown Corporation would ever green-light such a song, that it was too frank and too feisty. Gordy, the morally conservative boss of Motown, was then of the belief that romance sold records but sex did not. He warned his own singers that overt sexuality was holding back black music, confining it to late-night ghetto bars and chasing away the mainstream.
The theologian Michael Eric Dyson, when writing about the late Martin Luther King, described the underlying feelings in the song as something like a ‘civil war inside’, a clash of values that nags away in the minds of southern men. It was a tension so powerful it had helped to shape the rise of R&B music and eaten away at the soul of almost all of black music’s greatest male singers: Sam Cooke, Solomon King, Marvin Gaye and, eventually, Al Green. Religious men captivated by sex and love. Now the ‘civil war inside’ had begun to infect Taylor – how could he possibly sing this song and remain faithful to the traditional values he had grown up with?
Johnnie Taylor was conflicted. He knew it was a great song – that much was obvious to anyone who had ears – but a nagging doubt was to stay with him for months to come, and it touched on areas of life best left alone. According to Rob Bowman, in his authoritative history of Stax, producer Don Davis had to bully Taylor through the recording process. ‘Johnnie really bitched about doing the song,’ Davis claimed, and to spur the singer into action, he threatened to give it to other vocalists. ‘I just kept harassing him, really. “I’m just going to give the song to Sam and Dave, you can forget it.” That was a big challenge to his ego.’ The song had a uniqueness that Taylor had not heard before, even if its controversial storyline still worried him, so, with a heavy heart, he went into the Stax studios one sultry spring night and belted out ‘Who’s Making Love’ with all his formidable talent. And so it passed that a song about betrayal and illicit sex, with its choral refrain ‘Who’s making love with your old lady? While you are out making love’, became Johnnie Taylor’s biggest hit, and possibly the best song he would ever sing. It raced to number five in the Billboard Hot 100, dominated the R&B charts for months, and sold over a million copies in the tense summer of 1968. It was Stax’s biggest-selling record of the year and gave the studio self-belief that Otis Redding’s death could finally be laid to rest.
Johnnie Taylor had been a child genius on the gospel circuit in his native Arkansas. Although he had long since crossed over to secular music he still had lingering doubts about turning away from the church. Not everyone in his family had agreed with his move from gospel to soul music and they never would. Then there was the legacy thing. He had been a member of some of the finest gospel groups – first, the Highway Q.C.s, who had sung at the Reverend King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and included Lou Rawls and Sam Cooke as members. Then Johnnie had been hand-picked to replace the late Sam Cooke in gospel giants the Soul Stirrers. There were no greater accolades in gospel and no tougher spiritual standards to live up to. At the age of seventeen, Johnnie Taylor was already on a gilded stairway to heaven, signed to Cooke’s indie label SAR Records where he recorded a charming love song about fortitude and tolerance, ‘Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day’ (1962). It had a simple message and one that was in every sense compatible with Christian teachings. But after Sam Cooke’s mysterious and unseemly death – he was shot dead during a late-night dispute with a female hotel manager in Los Angeles – SAR folded
and Taylor moved to Memphis to join Stax Records, refashioning his image not through the cadences of gospel but as ‘The Philosopher of Soul’, a name that played on his thoughtful and reflective personality. In an industry known for its sexual misadventures and promiscuity, Taylor was remarkably loyal. He married his girlfriend Gerlean Rockett in 1970 and remained married to her until his death in 2000. Even in death, he remained faithful; he was buried next to the only other woman in his life, his mother Ida Mae Taylor, in a cemetery in Kansas.
Memphis 68 Page 14
