Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers

Ernest Withers (1922–2007) documented the civil rights movement as a photographer, but another side to his seminal career is now coming to light; "he had spied on the civil rights movement for pay." Does his status as an FBI informant cast a different glow on some of the most influential images of the century, including those of Emmett Till and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Lauterbach (former visiting scholar, Rhodes Coll.; Beale Street Dynasty) posits an investigative biography to expose Withers's secret FBI history, but this bold assertion never comes to the forefront of the narrative. Withers's own story is weaved into the lives of the subjects behind his best-known photos, and Lauterbach shows that much may be attributed to his need to support ten children on a small salary that the FBI could supplement. Although the author succeeds in capturing the tensions of the era, the FBI plot fails to jell.