{"id":59750,"date":"2019-01-09T14:51:52","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T20:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=59750"},"modified":"2019-01-09T10:29:49","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T16:29:49","slug":"preston-lauterbach-stops-by-off-square-books-with-bluff-city-tuesday-jan-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/preston-lauterbach-stops-by-off-square-books-with-bluff-city-tuesday-jan-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Preston Lauterbach Stops by Off Square Books with &#8220;Bluff City&#8221; Tuesday, January 15"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>The little-known story of an iconic photographer, whose work captured\u2014and influenced\u2014a critical moment in American history.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"330\" height=\"499\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Bluff-City.jpg?resize=330%2C499\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-60227\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Who was <strong>Ernest Withers<\/strong>? Most Americans may not know the name, but they do know his photographs. Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and \u201960s: <strong>Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/strong> riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; <strong>Emmett Till<\/strong>\u2019s uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at one of his nephew\u2019s killers; scores of African-American protesters carrying a forest of signs reading &#8220;I am a man.&#8221; But while he enjoyed unparalleled access to the inner workings of the civil rights movement, Withers was working as an informant for the FBI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this gripping narrative history, <strong>Preston Lauterbach<\/strong> examines the complicated political and economic forces that informed Withers\u2019s seeming betrayal of the people he photographed. Withers traversed disparate worlds, from <strong>Black Power<\/strong> meetings to raucous <strong>Memphis<\/strong> nightclubs where Elvis brushed shoulders with B.B. King. He had a gift for capturing both dramatic historic moments and intimate emotional ones, and it may have been this attention to nuance that made Withers both a brilliant photographer and an essential asset to the FBI. Written with similar nuance,&nbsp;<em>Bluff City<\/em>&nbsp;culminates with a riveting account of the 1968 riot that ended in violence just a few days before Dr. King\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Brimming with new information and featuring previously unpublished and rare photographs from the Withers archive not seen in over fifty years,&nbsp;<em><strong>Bluff City<\/strong><\/em>grapples with the legacy of a man whose actions\u2014and artistry\u2014make him an enigmatic and fascinating American figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>About the Author<\/strong><br>Preston Lauterbach is the author of <em>Bluff City<\/em>, <strong><em>Beale Street Dynasty<\/em><\/strong>, and <strong><em>The Chitlin Circuit<\/em><\/strong>, a <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> and <em>Boston Glob<\/em>e book of the year. He is a former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellow. He lives near Charlottesville, Virginia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"25\" height=\"16\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg?resize=25%2C16\" alt=\"The Local Voice Ligature\" class=\"wp-image-14544\"\/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The little-known story of an iconic photographer, whose work captured\u2014and influenced\u2014a critical moment in American history. Who was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":60229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2239],"tags":[13756,13754,6136,13753,13750,7611,468,13755,13751,13757],"class_list":["post-59750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-literary-events","tag-beale-street-dynasty","tag-black-power","tag-bluff-city","tag-emmit-till","tag-ernest-withers","tag-martin-luther-king-jr","tag-memphis","tag-photographer","tag-preston-lauterbach","tag-the-chitlin-circuit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/2019-01-08-Bluff-City.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}