Tent City Family: This family was evicted from their home for voting, Sommerville, Fayette County, Tennessee, 1960, from the portfolio I am a Man

Working in Memphis in the 1950s, Withers photographed events that defined the American Civil Rights movement. His role as a participant, not just as a spectator, afforded him exclusive access and he single-handedly documented a staggering number of the political gatherings, social events, and celebrations that defined the movement. Withers first gained notoriety for his photographs of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American who was brutally murdered in Mississippi; his images became symbols of racial violence in the American South. Since then, children figured as important political symbols within Withers’s body of work. In his photographs, Withers was able to convey how children, though technically excluded from the political sphere, are nevertheless impacted by political developments and social attitudes. His ability to capture both the innocence of childhood and the reality of political strife created some of the most emotionally charged and poignant images of the Civil Rights era.

In response to the first drive for African American voters in the rural south, white citizens of Fayette County devised ways to systematically suppress the Black vote. A list including 1,000 names of African American Fayette residents who registered to vote was distributed to local businesses, resulting in service being denied at local gas stations, groceries, and banks. Their insurance policies were cancelled, they lost their jobs, and they were evicted from their homes. In this photograph, Withers presents a family living in a tent city, which its residents referred to as the “Fayette County Freedom Village.” With unreliable access to food and water for nearly two years, families lived in the camp, relying upon the remarkable tenacity of their familial bonds—evident in this photograph—to sustain them in the face of extreme racial injustice.