Civil Rights – Lemuria Books

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Author Q & A with Jerry Mitchell

On February 2, 2020

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 2)

An assignment to cover the press premiere of a movie 30 years ago would bring a decades-old Mississippi murder case back into the nation’s spotlight–and change the life of not only court reporter Jerry Mitchell, but untold numbers of many who thought justice would never come.

A staff writer for The Clarion-Ledger in 1989 when he attended the press screening of the blockbuster Mississippi Burning film in Jackson, Mitchell inadvertently found himself sitting near two veteran FBI agents and a seasoned journalist who had all been involved with the 1964 murder investigations portrayed in the movie.

The conversations he held with his seatmates after the movie would be the springboard of a career dedicated to pursuing justice for some of the nation’s most infamous cold case murders of the civil rights movement.

Mitchell was stunned to find out that night that none of the 20 Ku Klux Klansmen involved in the deaths of three civil rights workers had been brought to trial. He soon decided to take on the task of investigating–and ultimately reopening–the case himself.

His career memoir, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era recounts nearly 20 years of investigations of four notorious cases that helped send four Klansmen and a serial killer to prison.

Jerry Mitchell

Mitchell’s work has earned him the title of “one of the most decorated investigative journalists in the country,” with more than 30 national awards to his credit. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Columbia’s John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, and many others.

After more than 30 years as an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting in Jackson in 2019, providing investigative reporting to news outlets and with a goal to “train up the next generation of investigative reporters.”

Below he shares some insights about his career, his new book, and his hopes for the future of investigative journalism.

As a young person, what influenced your interest in journalism, and, specifically, investigative reporting?

My mother had me reading three newspapers a day by the time I was 7. I had no choice! I first experienced journalism in high school and soon gravitated to investigative reporting. Reading All the President’s Men inspired me and made me want to expose wrongdoing and right wrongs. I guess I’ve been doing it ever since.

Tell me about the movie that spurred your interest in the decades-old cold cases of murderers who had never been brought to justice, and why that film prompted you to begin a journey that would take almost as long to right those wrongs.

Watching the film Mississippi Burning outraged me. How could more than 20 Klansmen kill three young men and never be tried for murder? It made no sense. In addition, I saw the movie with two FBI agents who investigated the case and a journalist who covered the case. Watching the film with them made all the difference because they gave me the full story of what happened. That really kickstarted my investigation into the Mississippi Burning case and those that followed.

The late Pulitzer Prize winning author/journalist David Halberstam once called your work “a reflection of what a reporter with a conscience can do,” and Race Against Time has been described as “a remarkable journalistic detective story and a vital piece of American history.” That said, who should read this book, and why?

I would hope anyone who likes to read true crime or true detective stories would enjoy the book. How these horrible killings came to trial decades later is a fascinating tale. Prosecutors, investigators, FBI agents and others all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for piecing these cases together against impossible odds. Most important, the book tells the story of these courageous people in the civil rights movement and their families, who never gave up hope, never stopped believing. They continue to inspire me.

Where do you think Mississippi–and our country–stand today in the journey to racial equality?

Our journey to racial equality in this nation seems to have always been one of a few steps forward and a few steps back. It seems lately we have been taking steps back with white supremacy and white nationalism on the rise. My hope is that we, as a nation, can begin to see what brings us together, rather than what tears us apart. We need each other. Now more than ever.

Please tell me about the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, the nonprofit that you started, and why investigative reporting is especially important in today’s world.

Newsrooms are vanishing across the nation and especially Mississippi. That’s why we started the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting in 2019. We provide newspapers and news outlets with investigative reporting they don’t have the money or manpower to do. We provide news outlets with stories that make a difference. For example, we reported on the powerful control of gangs in Mississippi prisons months before this gang war resulted in the killings of five and countless injuries.

We believe in shining a light into the darkness. We believe in exposing corruption. We believe in telling the truth because the truth still matters. We hope others will join us and help support this valuable mission. Our new offices are located on the Millsaps College campus, where we will begin working with college students in Mississippi. Our goal is to train up the next generation of investigative reporters.

Lemuria has selected Race Against Time its February 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Jerry Mitchell will be Lemuria on Tuesday, February 4, beginning at 4:00 p.m. to sign copies of Race Against Time.

Michell will return on Wednesday, March 18, to sign books at 4:30 p.m., before joining in a conversation at 5:00 p.m. with Rena Evers-Everette, daughter of the late civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Susan T. Falck’s ‘Remembering Dixie’ raises questions about historical memory

By Guest Author

On September 23, 2019

In Civil Rights, Civil War, Southern Culture, Southern History

By Jay Wiener. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

Reverberations remain from decades during which Southerners acted as if the Civil War was not concluded with the Confederacy losing. The narrative evolved through variations on a theme, but constant was diversion from discussion of a multiracial society.

Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi 1865-1941 offers opportunity to rethink the narrative. Author Susan T. Falck writes, “In crafting their historical consciousness whites emphasized the gentility of southern civilization, the valor of Confederate soldiers, and the courage of female and elderly male civilians who heroically protected the home front. The memory… was selective, with little room for black experiences told from a black perspective.”

Experiences during enslavement of people of color of mixed blood and in the free black community, and hierarchies arising through differences, were overlooked by “… white Civil War memoirists who subscribed to the notion that the South was tragically victimized during the war and Reconstruction.” Fixation upon the Lost Cause crippled the South—and the country—because it begat orthodoxy as rigid as Stalinism, stopping expansive inquiries:

What other possibilities exist?
What options offer optimal outcome?
Why ignore them?

One-dimensional defense of the slavocracy—as a paradise lost—prohibited white Southerners from full appreciation of how emancipation felt for former slaves, the experience during Redemption, at which time freedoms were revoked, and the dehumanization which ensued. Remembering Dixie yields insights.

Chapter Four addresses lacunae through discussion of photography in Natchez. That examination alone justifies buying the book, in the manner that one purchases magazines without reading everything. Art History classes are likely to utilize it. Anyone interested in photography ought to consider it, given profound perspective into the “thousand words” that a picture is supposedly worth.

The author writes, “[Henry] Norman’s photographs empowered his black subjects to directly challenge the rampage of racist cartoons, jokes, articles, and pictures circulating in the pages of newspapers and consumer periodicals nationwide. As symbols of personal and collective empowerment, Norman’s portraits contested characterizations of blacks as innately inferior, simplistic, and unworthy of respect or civil rights.”

Chapter Five is no less essential. “The creators of the Pilgrimage repackaged the dramatization of a mix of decades-old southern racialized ideology and white historical memory initiated in the early postbellum period as a product for Depression-era consumption.” Slavocracy was sold as an idyll, superior to the dislocations of the Great Depression and industrialization. “Out of the more practical features of the North we may have obtained our economic status, but it is to the South that we turn for the music and romance of our yesteryears.”

Otherwise put, “… the Pilgrimage invited 1930s audiences to step inside the world of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler and experience vicariously a carefully reconstructed mythical past.”

The advertising slogan “Come to Natchez Where the Old South Still Lives” coined by “George Healy, Jr., formerly of Natchez and an Editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune…” encapsulates the anodyne delusion.

Interestingly the women spearheading the Pilgrimage exemplified anything other than Healy’s antediluvian approach: Although they inhabited traditional femininity, they were thoroughly modern, shrewd and calculating businesswomen.

Sound business judgment ultimately created “a profound civic commitment shared by many in the community—whites and blacks—to promote and tell a more inclusive and accurate historical narrative.”

As Natchez has done so, utilizing the Historic Natchez Foundation, the Natchez Courthouse Records Project, and the National Park Service, it has instructed communities, elsewhere, struggling through challenges: “… [T]hanks to the coupling of strong and wise external and homegrown influences the healing of Natchez’s past is well underway, resulting in a flurry of innovative heritage tourism developments that while not always embracing a critically accurate narrative are more racially inclusive and historically accurate than ever before.”

Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.

Susan T. Falck will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 25, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Remembering Dixie.

Author Q & A with James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens

By Guest Author

On April 28, 2019

In Civil Rights, Photography, Southern Culture, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 28)

It was the teamwork of Stanford professor James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens, the former head curator of photographs at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, that resulted in the publication of a significant photography collection that was almost swept aside by history.

Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars (University Press of Mississippi) showcases images taken in and around Neshoba County in the 1950s and ’60s by civil rights activist Florence Mars of Philadelphia, Miss., during a turbulent time in the state’s history. The volume is filled with stunning black and white photos and a comprehensive and informative introduction by Campbell.

Former governor William Winter, a friend of Mars, has said her pictures “spoke volumes,” and calls this book “an important volume in this period of our nation’s history.”

How did the idea of producing this book come about, and how did the two of you get together?

James Campbell and Elaine Owens, courtesy of the Greenwood Commonwealth

Campbell: I first learned about the photographs from Florence Mars herself. I was doing research related to the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and naturally found my way to Neshoba County and, soon enough, to Miss Mars. I had an opportunity to interview her several times before her passing in 2006, and in one of those conversations she told me about her photos, which she had deposited at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.

Owens: Prior to my retirement, I worked as head curator of photographs at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. That’s where I met Dr. Campbell. We agreed that Mars’s photographs should be shared with the public and a book was the best way to do that.

Tell me about Florence Mars, and the historical significance of the story behind her photographs.

Owens: The majority of the photographs were taken between 1954 and 1964. According to Mars herself, they were prompted by the landmark Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (in 1954), which signaled the end of legal segregation in the South. Her intent was to document a Jim Crow world that she knew was disappearing. She had no idea that she and her community would later be caught up in one of the most notorious events of the whole Civil Rights era.

Campbell: One thing I found interesting was that Mars made virtually no effort to publish or exhibit her photos. To the best of our knowledge, she never sold one for money. But she spent hours traveling around the countryside taking photographs, and hours more printing the images in the homemade darkroom she built in an upstairs hall of her house. They were her private devotion, her way of making sense of the world around her.

Explain why your book is titled Mississippi Witness.

Owens: Mississippi Witness is meant to echo the title of Ms. Mars’s own book, Witness in Philadelphia, which was published by LSU Press in 1977.

Campbell: The title of Mars’s book is kind of a pun. On one hand, the book is her first-person account of the events of 1964, of the murders and their aftermath in her hometown. But she was also a witness in another sense, when she agreed to testify in a federal trial that exposed local law enforcement’s brutal treatment of black citizens. She paid a real price for that decision.

Owens: Our book, Mississippi Witness, shows Ms. Mars acting as a witness in yet another sense, as a photographer.

The pictures literally “speak for themselves,” as they are presented, just one per page, on 101 of the 134 pages in the book, with no text at all. The “List of Photographs” in the back reveals that many of the subjects are unidentified; and some photos have no date listed–not even the year. Why did you decide to present the photos in this dramatic way?

Owens: We were simply trying to honor the photographer’s intent, to let the images, as you say, speak for themselves.

Campbell: We included such identifying information as we had in an appendix at the back of the book, but we decided not to have any accompanying text with the pictures themselves, nothing to pull your eye away from the image. I think it was the right decision.

As for not knowing who some of the people in the images are or when particular photos were taken: I suppose that’s true, but by the standards of a lot of documentary photography collections–the Depression-era images of the Farm Security Administration photographers, for example–what’s striking about Mars’s photos is how much we do know. She noted where many of the photos were taken and she recorded the names of at least some of the people in them. She knew a lot of these people personally–Neshoba County is not a very big place–and she routinely shared prints of the images with her subjects, which is something too few photographers think to do.

Jim, please tell me what your primary role was in the production of this book, and why this project was important to you. The history you present in the introduction is very through!

Campbell: Thank you. Mars herself used to say that in order to understand someone you needed to “know the background.” So hopefully the introduction helps people to understand a bit about who she was and how the photographs came to be. But the real value of the book is to be found in the photos themselves. They are just haunting–beautiful and heart-rending all at the same time. They capture truths about our history–not just the history of Mississippi, but American history as a whole–that we need to face squarely.

Elaine, please tell me what your primary role was in the production of this book, and why this project was important to you. You must have searched out a great many details in collecting and curating these photos!

Owens: As curator of photographs at MDAH, I’ve looked at a lot of photographs of Mississippi, but few if any collections have the depth and scope of the images in the Mars collection. We spent many hours debating which images to include in the book. We wanted images that evoked particularities of time and place, but we also wanted to show Mars’s strengths as a documentary photographer, not only her unfailing eye but also her technical skill. I just felt that these images needed to be shared. I also wanted to honor the courage of one woman who stood up to powerful forces of evil at great personal risk.

Signed copies of Mississippi Witness are still available at Lemuria’s online store.

James Meredith’s ‘Three Years in Mississippi’ receives a much needed reprint

By Guest Author

On March 20, 2019

In Civil Rights, Southern History

By Gregg Mayer. Special to the Clarion Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

Few individuals in Mississippi’s modern history are as emboldened, important and inscrutable as James Meredith.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962, Meredith has been a challenging and criticizing voice in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi ever since. In some ways, Meredith started it all in his home state, and he documented that struggle in his first book Three Years in Mississippi (UPM, $30), a 336-page memoir that this year received a much-needed reprint by the University Press of Mississippi.

Originally published in 1966, Three Years in Mississippi takes readers back into Meredith’s own raw words shortly after he had returned to his home state in 1960 having spent ten years away.

“To understand the events that occurred during my three years in Mississippi, one must always remember that I returned to my home state to fight a war,” he writes. Throughout his first-person account, Meredith refers to himself as if a soldier in battle.

Meredith chronicles the events in diary-like fashion, using bold headings–such as Provoking the Attention of the Police, The All-Night Session, The Question of My Security–about what he saw, who was with him, and the attitudes and culture he was trying to change.

The centerpiece is Meredith’s denial of admission and eventual lawsuit against Ole Miss, a suit that was nearly ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which had ended public school segregation.
In leading up to the legal challenge, Meredith includes the complete texts of letters he wrote to Civil Rights leaders of the time, including to Thurgood Marshall, who would later sit on the U.S. Supreme Court:

“I have always been a ‘conscientious objector’ to my ‘oppressed status’ as long as I can remember,” Meredith wrote Marshall. “I am familiar with the probable difficulties involved in such a move as I am undertaking and I am fully prepared to pursue it all the way to a degree from the University of Mississippi.”

With the support of the NAACP, Meredith filed suit in federal court after his admission was denied. Long excerpts of court testimony are included in the book. The trial judge incredulously found that “[t]he evidence overwhelmingly showed that the Plaintiff was not denied admissions because of his race,” adding that race was not even considered by the University. Such hollow pronouncements were eventually reversed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Meredith was admitted to school.

On September 29, 1962, Meredith traveled to Oxford, but he writes he turned around amid reports of rioting. It wasn’t until two days later, with the smell of tear gas still in the air, that Meredith was on campus and learned the full extent of the rioting, including that two men were killed and several injured.

“Some newspapermen later asked me if I thought attending the university was worth all this death and destruction,” Meredith writes. “The question really annoyed me. Of course, I was sorry! I hadn’t wanted this to happen. I believe it could have been prevented by responsible political leadership in Mississippi.”

Enduring harassment as a daily routine, Meredith earned his political science degree from Ole Miss on August 18, 1963. Since that transformative time, Meredith has made his way down many unexpected paths, and over the years, “squandered his reputation through odd political choices, business failings, and quirky behavior,” writes University of Memphis Professor Aram Goudsouzian in a brilliantly illuminating introduction to the book that puts this touchstone event in Civil Rights history into contextual focus.

But despite whatever Meredith chose to do after his time in Oxford, the import of Three Years in Mississippi is how it powerfully records the fervent narrative of a young man who lived within a system that considered him inferior, and he pushed back against it.

Gregg Mayer is a lawyer and writer who serves as Chief Operating Officer at Mississippi Public Broadcasting. He graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Mississippi Law Journal.

James Meredith will be at Lemuria on Saturday, April 13, in conversation with Cara Meredith and Jamar Tisby, at 2:00 p.m.

Haunting Mississippi images in Florence Mars’ ‘Mississippi Witness’

By Guest Author

On February 25, 2019

In African-American, Civil Rights, Photography, Southern History

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 24)

Many recall Florence Mars from her groundbreaking book Witness in Philadelphia, her personal account of the upheaval that surrounded her native Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the wake of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964.

But perhaps little known until now with the publication of Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars, it’s revealed that Mars was a talented photographer, as well.

James T. Campbell, a Stanford University professor, writes in an excellent introduction to the photos that Mars only started photographing her surroundings after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing separate but equal schools. Mars writes that she recognized that the world in which she was living was soon to be a thing of the past and wanted to capture it on film.

The photos, curated by Elaine Owens, recently retired from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, were mostly taken from 1954 to 1964.

Mars was not a professional photographer, though she exhibits mastery of the form in her work. Rather, she was born into relative wealth in Neshoba County, her family owning thousands of acres of land, a livestock auction, and a mercantile business in the county seat.

Like Eudora Welty, a writer who also picked up a camera and chronicled the people, places and things around her during the Depression two decades before, she applied her own knowledge and interests to her work. And, like Welty, the photos were published in definitive form only years after they were taken.

As Campbell writes, the “similarities in their circumstances and sensibilities are obvious. Single white women, they lived at once inside and outside the confines of the conservative, racist, patriarchal society. Solitary by nature, both understood the yearning for connection. Acutely observant, both saw the wonder in ordinary life, the aching beauty that survived the ugliness.”

Many of the photos are simply haunting. While most are portraits without name, background or explanation, they are environmental in that the elements of the photos tell a great deal—perhaps more than simple words can tell.

For example, one shows a young black girl facing the camera in a cotton field where the stalks tower over her. At her feet, dragged behind, is a cavernous cotton sack filled to near bursting by the bolls she has picked, perhaps weighing as much as herself. The expression on her face is at once sad and defiant, resigned, proud and beaten. It is the face of a child living the life of a hardworking adult, too young to be careworn, too old to be that of a child.

In another, a young black woman is washing clothes in a galvanized tub, her hands gnarled by the work, her face a portrait in stoicism, scrubbing out dirt.

Others include:

White jurors taking a break in the Emmett Till trial, which Mars attended. Their casual, exasperated looks don’t exactly telegraph a fair hearing.
A white performer in grinning black face entertaining lounging white farmers in overalls at the stockyard at Philadelphia.
A young black woman washing naked white children on a porch at the Neshoba County Fair, 1955. In the notes section at the end of the book, the authors relate that Mars had penciled a caption on the back of the print: “Certain things are taken to be self-evident.”

Mars, Campbell writes, stopped taking photos after the civil rights workers were killed, as “the tense atmosphere made photography difficult.” In its stead, Mars confided “writing took over from the photography in the middle of my life.”

Her Witness in Philadelphia was published in 1977. She died in 2006.

Mars’ photographs are as she intended, an enduring testament to a time in Mississippi long gone. Printed on heavy stock in a large format, they are a rare treasure.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, February 27, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of and discuss Mississippi Witness.

‘Just Trying to Have School’ records how students, teachers, administrators experienced desegregation

By Guest Author

On February 18, 2019

In Civil Rights, Southern History

By Steve Yates. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 17)

“You realize you are digging up some old bones,” Leon Johnson, one of the first black students to integrate DeKalb High School in Kemper County, told author James H. Adams.

Both James and his coauthor Natalie G. Adams could identify with this sentiment firsthand. They, too, had experienced desegregation 45 years before Johnson closed a phone call with those fitting words. James and Natalie kept digging, and the result is the sweeping history Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi.

After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, no state fought longer or harder to preserve segregated schools than Mississippi.

“We’ll go on as always.” “It won’t affect us.” “Let them enforce it.” The authors glean these quotes that rolled in defiance from the tongues of superintendents that year in Mississippi.

This massive resistance came to a crashing halt in October 1969 when the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Holmes Board of Education that “the obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.”

Over seven years the authors interviewed more than one hundred parents, teachers, students, principals, superintendents, and school board members who did the heavy lifting in what the authors call “one of the most significant social and educational changes in the twentieth century.”

Thirty of the thirty-three Mississippi districts named in the 1969 case were ordered to open as desegregated schools after Christmas break. With little guidance from state officials and no formal training or experience in effective school desegregation processes, ordinary people were thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Before this book, their stories were largely ignored in desegregation literature.

The tasks the authors described proved arduous and complex. How were bus routes determined? Who lost their position as principal? Who was assigned—students and teachers—to what classes?

Without losing sight of the important larger forces in precipitating social change, the authors shift attention to how the daily work of “just trying to have school” helped shape the contours of desegregation in communities still living with the decisions made fifty years ago.

Natalie G. Adams is director of New College and professor of social and cultural studies in education at the University of Alabama. She is co-author of Cheerleader! An American Icon and co-editor of Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between. James H. Adams is professor of instructional systems and workforce development at Mississippi State University. He has published articles in the Journal of Career and Technical Education, the International Journal of Instructional Media, the Journal of Interactive Learning Research, and the Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies.

The thorough authors provide chapters that cover almost every aspect of public-school life. There are chapters on black parents, superintendents, principals and local enforcement, teachers, sports, and extracurricular life such as dances, or the lack thereof. The authors include two telling chapters on resistance and protest and on what they call resistance through exodus in the flight of white families to private academies.

And there is an invaluable and necessary chapter on lessons learned. Was it a success? The authors hear from multiple authorities that that measure is relative to the metrics applied and the context of the narrative demanded. But this book, reliant above all on oral history, that great, leavening counternarrative, yields unforgettable quotes.

The authors cite Joy Tyner, principal at Clinton’s Northside elementary: “I love the fact that I can walk down the hall and look into any class and it looks like Mississippi.”

Steve Yates lives in Flowood and is the author of the novels The Legend of the Albino Farm, Morkan’s Quarry, and The Teeth of the Souls.

Natalie Adams will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “A Spotlight on Mississippi Civil Rights” panel at 12:00 p.m. at the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Author Q & A with Preston Lauterbach

By Guest Author

On January 13, 2019

In Civil Rights, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 13)

Former Memphis resident and popular historian Preston Lauterbach puts a new focus on that city’s Civil Rights-era story–including that of critical events that led to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.–in his newest book, Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers.

Although Withers’ story has been relatively little-known since he made his mark on photojournalism covering some significant events of that time, the bigger picture of his life included his secret undercover work for the FBI at the same time.

While describing the emotions and culture of Memphis during the 1950s and 60s, Lauterbach explains the complicated life that Withers led, and why his dual roles as journalist and spy were not necessarily a betrayal of his beliefs at the time.
Lauterbach’s narrative brings both questions and answers to the ways in which everyday citizens navigated the reality of a new era–sometimes through divergent and challenging paths.

Preston Lauterbach

A former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Humanities Fellow, Lauterbach earned an MFA in Southern Studies from the University at Mississippi in 2003. He calls his time at Ole Miss “by far the most important educational experience to building my career, figuring out what I’m interested in, and learning how to listen, find sources, and tell a story.”

Lauterbach’s previous books include The Chitlin’ Circuit, a Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe book of the year; and Beale Street Dynasty. Today he calls the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia home.

I’ll start with asking the same question you began with on the flap of your book Bluff City: The Secret Life of Ernest Withers: Who was Ernest Withers?

He’s best known as a photojournalist of the civil rights movement. He worked freelance for the largest African-American newspapers, chiefly the Chicago Defender. He ended up covering the major stories in the South from the Emmett Till murder trial and Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s, through the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.

One of the major episodes of Withers’ career took place in Jackson. He covered the funeral of Medgar Evers in 1963. During the disturbance that broke out on Farish Street, after the funeral, Withers was beaten and arrested. He had been taking pictures of the clash between police and mourners. A police officer confiscated his film and destroyed it. He pursued a First Amendment case against the Jackson police, seemingly with tacit encouragement from the Kennedy White house, but the FBI seems to have quashed it.

How did Withers and his story come to your attention, and why did you decide to write a book about it?

I was working on a book about the history of Beale Street in Memphis when the news came out about Withers having worked for the FBI during his years covering the (civil rights) movement. The Withers studio was located on Beale during the 1950s and ’60s, and he’d been a cop on the Beale Street beat in the ’40s. He’d seen everyone from Elvis to Dr. King come through Beale, and so he emerged as the most compelling character to tell the story through.

Every book I’ve done starts off one way and ends up going in all sorts of different directions once I get going, so this one isn’t strictly about Beale, but I can’t ask for a more colorful setting or more compelling cast of characters.

What are some events or themes that Withers’ body of photojournalistic work is best known for?

His work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and the National Civil Rights Museum. Withers boarded one of the first integrated city buses in Montgomery and photographed a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to make King an icon.

Withers also took some tremendous photographs of Elvis Presley. There’s still some debate about whether Elvis was racist. Withers said, emphatically, no. Withers tailed Elvis on Beale Street during the singer’s earliest days and observed how Elvis interacted with African-American people. Withers came away impressed with the respect and humility Presley carried himself with. This character trait really shows up in Withers’ pictures of Elvis with B.B. King. And by the way, it was a highly risky PR move for Elvis to pose with an African-American man on equal terms in 1956, when challenges to segregation were causing major turmoil in this country.

Do you believe Withers felt “compromised” working in his dual roles as a photojournalist and an informant for the FBI? His was a complicated situation.

I don’t believe that he felt compromised. One of the challenges of this story is seeing past the shocking headline that this civil rights icon secretly worked for the hated J. Edgar Hoover, and reading the facts.

Many of Withers’ case files have become available, thanks to Memphis reporter Marc Perrusquia, who broke the story and had the documents declassified. To me, it becomes clear that Withers had a rapport with his FBI handler, and through their relationship, Withers acted as a mediator or translator, in many cases, for the Beale Street community. He explained to the Bureau what groups like the Nation of Islam–a target of Hoover–were really up to, and successfully kept the heat off. Withers was an NAACP lifetime member and came from a long line of military veterans, and so he was against the presence of Communists in the movement, which aligned with the FBI reasons for investigating civil rights groups.

He acted also as a threat gauge, judging the likelihood of groups to engage in violence. But, you can’t get involved with the Hoover FBI without getting wrapped up in some fishy stuff, and Withers certainly did.

Explain Withers’ role in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and demonstration in spring 1968, and how that day’s activities compelled Martin Luther King, Jr., to return to Memphis a week later, where he was assassinated.

Withers took one of his most famous pictures on March 28, 1968, the I AM A MAN photo, that shows the striking sanitation workers displaying signs with that iconic slogan. He helped make those signs, by providing the lumber for signposts. Those posts became weapons during the march that King led that day in Memphis, in the hands of a lot of younger demonstrators.

King had never led a march that turned violent from within. He vowed to change his schedule and return to Memphis to prove that a peaceful demonstration could be held there. He needed this both for the strike and his own reputation. No one at the time knew that Withers was on the Bureau payroll, and so his involvement with the photo props that became riot weapons has eluded attention until now.

Ultimately, how do you look back on Withers’ life and career, and why do you call him a “flawed hero’?

He had a talent for getting himself into very sticky situations. Both his time as a police officer and a state liquor board member were scandal-shortened. He’s got cojones. That makes him a highly interesting figure, but also prone to trouble. His heroism is a bigger part of his life, having braved the South in the 1950s and ’60s, to show America what was happening down here. He was beaten, arrested, and threatened with death for doing his job, and he did it anyway.

What can we all learn from the tangled and intriguing story of this African American man who had a birds-eye view of some of the nation’s biggest news stories, and who some apparently viewed as a traitor on both sides?

If we’re to really get something out of history, and I think this applies to the present as well, we can’t oversimplify our understandings of each other and say, well he’s black, therefore he can only be pro-civil rights in this one acceptable manner or else he’s a scoundrel. There are good, important people who are torn between opposing forces, or, in courageously attempting to bring those forces nearer together, they risk their livelihoods, reputations, and lives. And, we can’t judge a person’s role in history entirely on what we know now.

You have authored two previous books (Beale Street Dynasty and The Chitlin’ Circuit) that are also in the narrative or historic journalism genre. What drew you to this type of writing, and do you have another book project on the horizon at this time?

I love research most of all, but research itself doesn’t pay, so writing narrative history emerged as the best way to fund my research habit. It’s still costly, but I have something to show for it.

My next project is either top secret, or I haven’t figured out yet what to do. I have a Withers figure in my life, alluded to in the introduction to Bluff City. My grandfather was involved with intelligence. He was the person I admire most and pattern myself after, and yet he’s also the biggest mystery in my life. I’ve reached a point where I need to and want to answer my questions about his role in history, and I have some ideas about where to look.

Preston Lauterbach will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 16, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Bluff City. Bluff City is Lemuria’s January 2019 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

‘A Spy in Canaan’ is a deep slice of civil rights era surveillance

By Guest Author

On August 28, 2018

In African-American, Civil Rights

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 26)

If you know of someone who still harbors any doubt that the FBI spied on leaders of the civil rights movement, just hand over a copy of investigative reporter Marc Perrusquia’s book A Spy in Canaan.

As a reporter for The Commercial Appeal, Perrusquia caught wind of a tantalizing story: that one of Memphis’ most well-known and respected Beale Street residents who had rubbed shoulders with the highest leaders of the movement was for nearly 20 years an FBI informant.

In Spy, subtitled “How The FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement,” Perrusquia offers exhaustive research, including the FBI’s own secret informant files, to detail the government’s surveillance.

As Perrusquia chronicles, to most Beale Street residents, Ernest Withers was the local photographer who took photos of wedding engagements, family portraits, school and military achievements.

To leaders of the civil rights movement, Withers was equally embedded. Carrying press credentials for prominent black-oriented newspapers and magazines, he was a fixture who was there in the very beginning.

He sneaked a photo in the courtroom during the trial of Emmett Till. He covered integration riots in Little Rock and Ole Miss. He covered the assassination of Medgar Evers, whom he considered a friend. He was such a fixture that he counted among his photos candid scenes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—and was so well regarded, he was allowed into the autopsy room to take death photos after King’s assassination.

Although little heralded in his life, Withers could arguably be called one of the great photographers of the 20th century, Perrusquia reports. He shot as many as one million photos over 60 years documenting black life in the South.

Yet, as Perrusquia conclusively details, Withers also led a double life, working for the FBI for cash, funneling photos of civil rights leaders and suspected “agitators” from 1958 to 1976. He passed on tips, car tag numbers, juicy gossip, funneling a flood of rumors, facts and falsehoods that could (and did) ruin people’s lives.

Perrusquia chronicles Withers’ activities in painstaking, deep detail, revealing a disturbing portrait of a quintessential mole in the movement.

Spy is a monumental work of investigative journalism, drawing not only from his newspaper reporting, but also with fresh facts that add a troubling perspective to the headlines of today, raising questions about the depth, longevity and resilience of the government’s focus on watching its citizens.

Not only does Perrusquia describe the FBI surveillance of the period, but examines the federal and local police programs in place that operated beyond the law, including:

COINTELPRO — A federal domestic spying program that surveilled citizens and often employed dirty tricks and misinformation to discredit citizens the FBI deemed suspect.
DETCOM — The nation’s secret program to identify and round up dissidents or people identified with suspected organizations in the event of an emergency.

It’s frightening that even with the enormous amount of data the FBI obtained just from Withers and those working with him at the time, that’s only a slice of the surveillance of U.S. citizens then and, most certainly with digital methods, now.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

Marc Perrusquia will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Photography and Culture” panel at 2:45 p.m. at the Galloway Foundery.

Ed Scott’s story in Julian Rankin’s ‘Catfish Dream’ is essential and hopeful reading

By Guest Author

On August 7, 2018

In Civil Rights, Southern Culture

By Ellis Purdie. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 5)

In our divisive times, we must recall those moments when the worst of the American experiment was overcome. Though prejudice in America remains, it has not had the final say in every situation.

Too often it takes years, but right can triumph over wrong. In Catfish Dream, Julian Rankin delivers one such story, covering the life of Ed Scott Jr. and his struggle to farm in the face of systemic racism in the Mississippi Delta.

Scott and the black community, in nearly every facet of their existence, were burdened by the obstacle of white supremacy, even into the post-civil rights era. The author focuses particularly on how blacks were held back in their attempt to create businesses in which whites held monopoly. Thus, the book is a fine source for understanding how racism endures even when laws are abolished or changed on paper.

The book begs the question of how someone manages to make a life for themselves when their context has always been against them. Scott proves inspiring for his unparalleled work ethic and refusal to quit.

For every period in Scott’s life, barriers were set up to keep him and his community from the success whites enjoyed. As a boy, Scott is thrown into an educational system bereft of adequate funding. In the military, he and his commanding officers are denied the same treatment as white soldiers. As a farmer, he is forbidden success.

However, Scott uses these opportunities to stand up to authority, finding leverage in peaceful resistance from the moral high ground. Rankin’s coverage of Scott’s life, from childhood to war and beyond, is accessible and often thrilling.

Some of the book’s most powerful moments come when Scott’s previous experiences transfer in a later fight for justice and equality. When finished fighting for both democracy and his own civil rights in Europe, Scott brings the battle back home. The dangers of World War II amply prepare Scott for situations such as the march against hate in Selma, Alabama.

In one of the most powerful sections of Catfish Dream, Scott takes his skills as a quartermaster to those putting their bodies on the line in Selma. When the marchers get hungry, Scott serves them with food by driving a truck of water and sandwiches, feeding as many as possible from his truck bed.

In such passages, food and Scott’s cause intersect beautifully, reminding us of the goodness and hope that exists even in our darkest days. They drive home the truth that food and the human spirit work together, a truth Scott embodies in every page of Rankin’s work.

Catfish Dream centers around Scott’s becoming the first nonwhite operator of a catfish plant in America. As a black man, Scott was treated differently than whites in his attempt to establish a livelihood. White fear of Scott’s success leads to a full-scale assault on his ambitions.

When whites drive Scott out of rice farming, he goes into catfish. This decision brings about its own problems, however, when white agribusiness calls in Scott’s loans, taking away his entire operation. Rankin reveals how this move is based strictly on race, as white farmers also in debt continue in their work.

Rankin keeps the narrative moving in prose that reaches the heights of excellent creative nonfiction: a must when covering the ground of history, politics, and biography all at once.

Catfish Dream leaves the reader wishing they had known Scott. Fortunately, Scott’s words and person are rendered with clarity and charm in this fine book. As Rankin proclaims, “…he didn’t live by the expectations of others. . . .He spoke truth to power.” We would do well follow him.

Ellis Purdie is a graduate of The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his family in Marshall, Texas.

Julian Rankin will be at Lemuria on Thursday, August 9, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta.

Rankin will also appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Delta Dawn and Dusk” panel at 4:00 p.m. at State Capitol Room 113.

Author Q & A with Isabelle Armand

By Guest Author

On July 16, 2018

In Civil Rights, Photography

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 15)

New York City photographer Isabelle Armand said she was “instantly inspired” to tell the stories of the wrongful convictions, incarcerations, and eventual exonerations of two rural Mississippi men when she first read about their cases more than five years ago.

In her new book, Levon and Kennedy: Mississippi Innocence Project (PowerHouse Books), Armand has visually documented the everyday lives of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer over a five-year period after their release from the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. The black and white images of the men and their families, captured in and around their homes in the small rural Mississippi town of Brooksville, includes quotations that convey their thoughts and feelings of regret and joy about the miscarriage of justice and the eventual outcome of their cases.

The men had been charged in separate murder cases committed 18 months apart in the early 1990s. Brooks was sentenced to life and was imprisoned 18 years; Brewer received a death sentence and served 15 years.

It was through the diligent work of The Innocence Project, along with DNA testing, that Brewere and Brooks were cleared of all charges and freed in 2008.

Armand’s book includes text by Tucker Carrington, director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi School of Law, who, with Washington Post reporter Radley Balko, co-authored the book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, also related to the cases of Brewer and Brooks.

Armand acknowledges the support of artist Olivier Renaud-Clement, the Shoen Foundation, PowerHouse Books, and Meridian Printing for the production of her book.

Her distinctive photography works can be found in private and museum collections, and have been exhibited in the United States. They have also been featured in national and international publications.

Tell me about your background, and how you became interested in photography.

I was born and raised in Paris. My mother was a Vogue editor and worked with amazing photographers such as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. We had many photography books of the masters. I was always around photography and got the best possible education. I was especially drawn to the works of Walker Evans, Dorthea Lange, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Roy DeCarava, Edward Curtis, who documented people and places. They were storytellers of life. But at first, I followed in my mother’s steps and worked as a stylist there, and here.

I left France at 20 to come to New York, which I still love some 30 years later.

Do you have family or other connections to Mississippi?

A lifelong inspiration would be my only connection to Mississippi. I grew up fascinated with the U.S.; at first, it was through cinema. The West, New York, and the South seemed mythical places.

In Paris, I was around Blues musicians, and our idols were Robert Johnson, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, and the like. Mississippi captured my imagination, a fundamental American culture was born there, and I find the place incredibly rich and deeply textured.

How did you hear about the cases of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer? When and why did you decide to become involved in them?

I came across an article about the cases’ forensics in 2012. It was a troubling account of a flawed and corrupt process, when reality goes beyond fiction. It triggered many questions; how, why, and where could this happen? I was instantly inspired to tell their story in photographs. I waited for several months, but the story stayed with me. Finally, I contacted Tucker Carrington, and suggested a photographic documentary around Levon’s and Kennedy’s experiences.

When did you begin photographing the images in this book, and how long did it take?

I began to photograph Levon and Kennedy and their families in June 2013. The last images and interviews were done in July 2017. I would go each year to spend time with them, take pictures, and collect interviews. With printing, editing both the images and the interviews, it took five years.

What were your goals (artistic and otherwise) for this project, as far as what you wanted to capture, how you envisioned the large photo collection would be organized, etc.?

The goal was to create a compelling visual essay to raise awareness about wrongful conviction. It’s a reality, which mostly remains abstract until we see it with our own eyes. I felt an intimate photo essay would bring the story of Levon and Kennedy to the forefront. We’d get to know them and their families like our own, and realize that the system can crush anyone.

I envisioned this essay pretty much like it is now. I started with retracing Levon’s and Kennedy’s childhoods, and visiting places which were meaningful to them, then and now. I’d document everyday life; family members, families’ gatherings, birthdays, July 4th, as well as their rural environment. With time, the project took a life of its own.

I love black and white film. It mutes unnecessary noise, and it sets off the essence of the subjects for me. Also, light on film is magic.

I edited as I went along, for each family, until editing for the book, when I had to look at the images in a new light. I eliminated a few photographs and created a new visual narrative. Damien Saatdjian, the graphic designer, gave it great breathing space and rhythm.

Both men and their families seem to have very forgiving spirits about their ordeals. Did that surprise you?

I knew a little about them prior to meeting them, so I wasn’t surprised. They were very angry when it happened. But spending 18 years in prison, or 10 on death row, they had to deal with it in a certain way, or it would destroy them. They had to make some peace with their situation, so they could endure and still be the men they wanted to be. Levon was thrown into a dangerous general population and chose to become a good influence. He saved lives and he was respected. Kennedy, isolated in his cell 24/7 while facing death, chose to educate himself, read, wrote, and prayed. Thinking of his ordeal every day was not an option, like he says in the book, “You’d go crazy.” Yet, he thought about it because he was trying to save himself, which he did by writing to the Innocence Project.

Besides where, how, and why this happened, my question was, “How does one and one’s family cope with wrongful conviction?” Both men and their families stick to a strong philosophy of life.

Levon and Kennedy have large families who supported them during their incarcerations, and you got to know them during the course of this project. What can you tell me about them–their thoughts on their loved ones’ false imprisonment, their attitudes about living in their rural Mississippi communities, their hopes for their own futures and that of their children and grandchildren? (It’s notable that, although many of them mentioned racial prejudice as an everyday event, most prefer to stay because of close family ties and the “peace and quiet” they enjoy.)

I interviewed everyone for the quotes you see in the book, and it depends on the individual. Most feel that the criminal justice system needs major changes. They lived through the most tragic consequences of this system, and their community still does in many ways. Levon and Kennedy’s wrongful incarceration is something they all want to put behind them, even though they have strong opinions about it.

These families have been there for generations, they are attached to their land loved ones, and most don’t want to leave. Some of the younger people are torn between the desire to go places offering more opportunities and diversity, and their love for their family and area. Every parent hopes for a better future for their children, but few think things will change in Mississippi. However, they all go about living their full lives. They ignore and rise above external pressures.

Sadly, Levon passed away this past January, after 10 years of freedom. Did he get to see this book?

Levon was the first person to receive the book right from the printer. He took it all around town, and he was proud of it.

The way the book is bound is wonderful–I love the way the book itself is the book jacket! As an artist, tell me about the decision to create this book like this, in that it makes such a strong impression before it’s even opened!

I don’t like jackets on books and I wanted the cover printed with a discreet lamination. I didn’t want any typo on the cover, either. I felt Levon and Kennedy were so powerful in this photograph that they drew you in. The book wouldn’t be what it is without the work of my lab Laumont on the book files, and the amazing printing of Meridian Printing. And again, Damien Saatdjian’s input was also invaluable to achieve the results we wanted.

Isabelle Armand will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Seeing the Light in Mississippi” photography panel at 4:00 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

Category: Civil Rights (Page 1 of 4)

Author Q & A with Jerry Mitchell

Susan T. Falck’s ‘Remembering Dixie’ raises questions about historical memory

Author Q & A with James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens

James Meredith’s ‘Three Years in Mississippi’ receives a much needed reprint

Haunting Mississippi images in Florence Mars’ ‘Mississippi Witness’

‘Just Trying to Have School’ records how students, teachers, administrators experienced desegregation

Author Q & A with Preston Lauterbach

‘A Spy in Canaan’ is a deep slice of civil rights era surveillance

Ed Scott’s story in Julian Rankin’s ‘Catfish Dream’ is essential and hopeful reading

Author Q & A with Isabelle Armand

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