Ernest C. Withers House

Withers worked for about sixty years, and by one estimate took between one and five million images. He studied at the Army School of Photography during the war and later served as one of Memphis's first African-American police officers. He was Stax Records' official photographer for twenty years, and he documented Negro league baseball in a 2005 book. In 2011 the Ernest Withers Museum and Collection opened on Beale Street, with about 7,000 square feet of gallery and the full archive held off site. The Library of Congress holds his work.

What the plaque says

Ernest C. Withers House Ernest C. Withers (1922-2007) began his career as a photographer in the U. S. Army during World War II. Upon leaving the military, he opened a commercial photography studio and worked as a freelance photojournalist for Black newspapers and magazines such as Ebony and Jet, as well as Newsweek and Time. He photographed Negro Baseball League members including Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Larry Doby, and Jackie Robinson. In 1955, Withers documented the trial of the two white men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, accused in the murder of Emmett Till. In 1957 he photographed the nine Black students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Occasionally Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attended some of the events he covered. He took pictures of Memphis' famed Beale Street musicians, Rufus Thomas, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. His work also captured the more ordinary life of Black Memphians.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 2.8 mi
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.
• Graceland — 3.4 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 4.5 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 5.0 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Chucalissa Indian — 2.8 mi
• Wedding of the Waters — 3.1 mi
• Elvis Aron Presley — 3.3 mi
• Willie Mitchell's Royal Studios — 3.9 mi