[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 42 (Tuesday, April 16, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E543]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                    TRIBUTE TO MR. ERNEST C. WITHERS

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. HAROLD E. FORD, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 16, 2002

  Mr. FORD. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to legendary 
photojournalist Mr. Ernest C. Withers. Born in Memphis, TN in 1922, Mr. 
Withers is renowned for his distinguished photographic record of the 
Civil Rights Movement in the South during the 1950's and 1960's. No 
other photographer created as complete a document of this movement as 
Withers did.
  An important catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, Withers helped 
to mobilize interest in the cause across the United States through his 
powerful images and writings. Withers often traveled with and 
photographed such legendary figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar 
Evers, Ralph Abernathy, and James Meredith. His unflinching visual 
records of these important individuals and critical events like the 
Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and the assassination of King provide an 
insightful portrait of these landmark moments in American history.
  During the struggle for civil rights, Mr. Withers photographed 
meetings, marches, sit-ins, and police crackdowns all across the South. 
As the movement erupted, Withers became fully engaged in capturing 
images which would appear in newspapers and magazines like Time and 
Newsweek, often uncredited. He noted, ``I had a single sense of having 
to record what was going on. I look for things of time and value. None 
of my images deal in violence--they deal in time.'' Though he generally 
photographed without incident, at the funeral of Medgar Evers, highway 
patrolmen knocked his camera from his hands, destroying the film.
  Because of his familiarity with the people and the geography of the 
segregated South, Mr. Withers was often the first or only photographer 
to capture momentous events as they unfolded long before the national 
press became interested.
  Mr. Withers has photographed every major civil rights activist since 
the 1950's and said he could do an entire book of his photographs of 
Dr. King. The Massachusetts College of Art mounted an exhibition of Mr. 
Wither's civil rights photographs entitled ``Let Us March On'' that has 
toured the United States since 1992. He has photographed Memphis soul 
figures like Al Green, Isaac Hayes and Elvis Presley. He has 
photographed nearly every president from John F. Kennedy to Bill 
Clinton. He has also captured the innocence of Sunday school teachers, 
Little Leaguers, and waitresses in his photographs.
  Furthermore, Mr. Withers has served his country and his community as 
an Army photographer in World War II and as one of the first nine 
African American police officers in Memphis.
  Ernest Withers once said, ``I was trained as a high school student in 
history, but I didn't know I would be recording the high multitude of 
imagery and history that I did record.''
  In 1998, Mr. Withers was inducted into the Black Press Hall of Fame. 
Please join me in honoring Mr. Withers as one of truly important and 
influential figures in our history.

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