For nearly 40 years, photographer's negatives lay, unprinted, in storage
By Zack McMillin
Contact
April 3, 2006
Tommy Towery grabbed his camera, an Anscomatic Rangefinder, left the Memphis State campus and headed Downtown, where there would be another march in what Towery and other Memphians at the time called the garbage strike.
He was hoping to capture something dramatic.
It was March 29, 1968, and what the world now calls the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike stood at a crucial juncture. It was one week after a freak 16-inch snowstorm had postponed a march scheduled with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and one day after a march with King was aborted when violence between marchers and Memphis police led to rioting and the death of a 16-year-old boy.
It was one week before King would be murdered, on April 4, in Downtown Memphis.
As Towery recalls, he was disappointed by what he found that Friday afternoon -- a peaceful march, accompanied by National Guard troops. He snapped 29 frames before a policeman wielding a shotgun not-so-politely asked him to leave.
"I went down and took pictures wanting to be a war correspondent type thing, thinking there'd be riots, Mace and all of that," says Towery, now a technical support specialist at the U of M. "But it didn't happen. It was a peaceful situation."
He developed the negatives, but by the time he returned from Memphis State's premature Spring Break -- after Dr. King's murder, the school broke early -- he never bothered to make a print.
The negatives went into a binder, where they stayed for nearly four decades, following him through a 20-year career in the Air Force -- to Texas, California, Nebraska, England. When a garage in Fort Worth flooded, they were damaged, possibly beyond repair, but Towery, an admitted packrat, held onto them.
For most of the past 15 years, upon Towery's return to Memphis, they stayed locked in a storage unit.
Last week, in professor Tony de Velasco's Rhetoric and Public Controversy class at the U of M, those pictures finally had an audience.
As Towery, 59, explained to the students, it was not until last summer that he thought to rescue the images.
He started with old-fashioned darkroom techniques, washing and cleaning debris from the negatives, then used technology to salvage history -- 26 images, all of them marred by some degree of fading or spotting.
He digitized them with a negative scanner, and what Towery saw on his computer screen motivated him to spend 10-15 hours on each black-and-white image.
The photos are, like history itself, alive with possible interpretations, rich with telling details, blurred by time and shadows.
There are more famous pictures of the strikers, more searing and powerful, especially those by renowned Memphis photographer Ernest Withers. Towery doesn't claim his photos are masterpieces, but sees them as significant because of the time they were taken and the way they finally found life.
Some of his photos focus on the National Guardsmen, with their bayonets and machine guns.
Some focus on the marchers, their weapons the now iconic I AM A MAN posters.
Others show the aftermath of the violence of the day before, with shop windows shattered and garbage strewn in front of them.
All of the pictures carry subtle reminders of a Memphis that is long past -- the Blue Light Studio where students took their senior pictures, Main Street with cars, Beale Street with its pawn shop row.
One of Towery's favorites shows a white woman carrying a sign with stenciled lettering: THE NAACP SUPPORTS THE FIGHT FOR DECENCY. You can see the back of an older man, wearing a fedora, looking at the marcher.
In the many hours he considered the photo, repairing it pixel by pixel, Towery constructed his own interpretation of the moment, as he explains to the class.
"To me," he says, his voice Southern and nasal, "(she) has become the symbol of the, you know, Yankees coming down to the South and joining in on the march. And this white guy is the symbol of the South looking down in disdain at the marchers.
"Now, you can interpret it however you want, but in my photographic eye, this is how I took it."
De Velasco, the professor, wants the students in the class to see the issue from differing angles, and Towery provides more than just pictures for fodder.
It turns out that Towery's stepfather, Clozelle Kleier, had been best friends with Memphis mayor Henry Loeb, and when Towery tells the class that the Loeb he knew was "an honorable man," it obviously runs counter to history's judgment of his actions in 1968.
If he was so great, junior Delvin Lane asks Towery, why didn't Loeb do more to protect the citizens of Memphis from "the risk of health problems and disease with simple negotiation?"
This aligns with history's more accepted view of Loeb, as a strong and stubborn mayor more bent on resisting what many white Memphians considered outside agitators than in addressing the concerns of the sanitation workers.
Towery's view: Loeb acted no different than current mayor Willie Herenton might react in a similar showdown with city workers.
That doesn't quite satisfy Lane, who peppers Towery with more questions about Loeb's intentions, and this is exactly as de Velasco wants it.
These rescued photos, of a peaceful day in the whirlwind of a week that will forever define Memphis, provoke the kind of debate and reconsideration that can make history compelling.
As the professor tells the class: "History is a complex thing, no matter what. There are so many different layers."
Even in black and white.
--Zack McMillin: 529-2564
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