Visitors to the Arkansas State University Museum can catch a bit of this region’s history from the late 1940s through the 1960s between now and April 18. Renowned photojournalist Ernest C. Withers chronicled black baseball, the civil rights movement, and the Memphis music scene.

Among the figures included in the exhibit are baseball greats Larry Doby and Jackie Robinson, music greats Lionel Hampton, B. B. King, Elvis Presley, and Ike and Tina Turner, and civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and the Little Rock Nine.

Born in August 1922, Withers grew up in Memphis and returned to the Bluff City after serving as a military photographer in the South Pacific during World War II. His self-published photo pamphlet on the murder of 14-year-old Emmitt Till helped spur the African-American struggle for equality.

Many of his photographs have become emblematic of the movement from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 to the Memphis sanitation workers strike in 1968. At that time Withers’ work appeared in The New York Times, Jet, Ebony, Newsweek, and Life. Now it shows up in television documentaries, history books, and in exhibits around the country.

On Sunday, April 4, Withers will be coming to the ASU Convocation Center auditorium where he will be honored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences as the Inaugural Corinne Sternheimer Greenfield Lecturer. The event begins at 2 p.m.

Rather than present a formal statement on his work, he will engage in a public conversation with F. Jack Hurley, the chair of the History Department at the University of Memphis. Hurley is an expert on the history of American photography in general and Withers’ career in particular. Together the men will explore the background and meaning of the photographs.

A reception for the speakers will follow in the ASU Museum. Admission to both the lecture and the reception is free and the public is welcome.

The ASU Museum, located in the west end of the Dean B. Ellis Library complex, is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday hours are 1-5 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call the museum at (870) 972-2074.

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