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    To those who knew him, George was a good-natured kid, five foot five, skinny, with an easy smile—something of a miracle given the life Whitmore had led. He came from poverty and had known nothing else. Sometimes his personal circumstances weighed heavily on his shoulders; pain and disappointment became a daily fact of life for him, though he usually kept them hidden. He tried to maintain a veneer of anonymity, ducking his head and averting his eyes as if he were trying to disappear.
    Generations earlier, long before Martin Luther King Jr.’s stirringcalls for change, the predicament faced by Whitmore and others like him had been detailed by another great African American leader. “The Negro is a sort of seventh son…shut out from the world by a vast veil,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk . “The shades of the prison-house are closed round about us all: walls straight and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.”
    Whitmore was born on May 26, 1944, in Philadelphia. The location was more or less an accident: George’s father was an itinerant laborer whose family had come up from the South along with tens of thousands of other Negroes in the 1930s, years before the Great Migration. Memories of the Ku Klux Klan and segregationist Jim Crow laws were part of the family inheritance. Having settled briefly in Philadelphia, the babies came fast and furious. First Shelley, the oldest, then George Jr., then Gerald and Geraldine.
    â€œI never did like big cities,” Whitmore Sr. would say years later. “Always wanted to move out to the country. Things kept getting in the way. Birdine, my wife, was a frail sort, sick a lot. Little George got sick, too. Was not but eight months old an’ he had a terrible attack of diarrhea. Spent seventeen days in the hospital. All his veins were closed up, kept givin’ him blood in his chin an’ his head. Oh, we thought it was bad for George. He’s still got some of those scars.”
    The Whitmores did eventually get out of Philadelphia. In 1947, when George was three years old, the family packed up their meager belongings and headed toward the Garden State. “I remember the night, that summer,” George Whitmore’s mother recalled. “We were all crowded, all six of us, in this car we borrowed and we drove over the Camden bridge into New Jersey. It was very funny. On the Philadelphia side, it was very hot, we were all perspiring. The minute we crossed over into Jersey it was freezin’. It was like we were goin’ into a different world.”
    New Jersey was a different world; the Whitmore family bounced from home to home in Cape May County. There wasn’t much money, which turned George Sr. into a bitter man. “He was mean,” recalled Birdine. “He would just walk in the door and slap me for no reason. So mean. He has so much hate in him. Somethin’ tore at that man, and he would come home mean.”
    Birdine tended to the children, which was a full-time job. “Sometimes you think they’re all the same, little kids just eatin’ and playin’ and cryin’, but a mother can tell them apart. They’re different, all my children were different. Gerald always wanted to be a policeman…. George was the artist. I remember George with the drawin’s most. George [would] sit in the corner and draw. I’d tell big George when little George was just two or three that that boy was goin’ to be an artist, but he’d just shake his head and say, ‘You stop that talk, woman. You give that boy ideas. No nigger boy grows up an artist. He goin’ have to work for a livin’.”
    George Sr. held a series of odd jobs, including a stint at