Daddy, I Want To Be Free Too: William Edwin Jones pushes daughter Renee Andrewnetta Jones during protest march on Main Street, Memphis, August, 1961, 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. Pushing his daughter in a stroller bearing a placard demanding social justice, William Edwin Jones walks alongside a patrol car with three policemen inside. Withers’s image is a study in tension and contrast. As the men regard each other with suspicion and unease, the young girl looks in the other direction, seemingly unaware of the potential for conflict and innocent of the struggle for civil rights referenced in the placard above her