Earl C. Withers, Civil Rights Era Photographer

By Lisa Peakes on Friday, February 15, 2002.

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Currier Gallery Curator Kurt Sundstrom and NHPR's Lisa Peakes take a quick tour of the exhibit

In honor of Black History Month, the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester is showing a set of Civil Rights-era photographs. The exhibit of ten black and white photographs is titled ?I Am A Man?, after one of the photographs Ernest Withers took during the Sanitation Workers strike in Memphis in 1968. Withers is famous for his documentation of pivotal events during the Civil Rights era. Kurt Sundstrom, is the curator of the exhibit. He showed me the first photo that establishes the theme: The barriers between blacks and whites. In this photo, an exasperated Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is separated from the viewer by uniformed shoulders:
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Another photo shows what it was like on the first day the buses were desegregated in Montgomery, Alabama:
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When schools in Little Rock, Arkansas were desegrated, Withers was there:
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But Withers not only documented the African-American struggle for civil rights, he participated in the movement. In his famous photograph featuring dozens of black men holding placards reading ?I Am A Man?, some of the signs were painted by Withers. Ernest C. Withers will be 80 years old this year.

Tonight at 6, the Currier will have a free screening of the 1993 documentary, ?At the River I Stand?, about the Memphis Sanitation Workers? strike of 1968.
Admission to the ?I Am A Man? exhibit will be waived starting at 5 pm. For NHPR, I?m Lisa Peakes.