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a slaughterhouse in Whitesboro, New Jersey. Little George was ten years old the first time his father brought him to the abattoir, where hogs are dismembered. At first little George merely swept floors and occasionally arranged frozen pig carcasses in the walk-in freezer, but eventually big George felt it was time for his son to learn the finer points of vivisection.
    Whitmore led his son toward one pig, which was still alive. He stood behind his son, wrapped his arms around George’s slender torso, and together they raised the meat cleaver high in the air. Little George was sweating; this was the same pig he had been playing with earlier in the day, riding it like a horse and feeding it cornmeal.
    â€œI can’t do it,” he said, wriggling out of his father’s grasp.
    The old man hacked at the pig with the cleaver. The pig squealed; blood ran like water from an overflowing bathtub. George threw up, vomit dripping down his chin onto his apron.
    â€œGo on home and don’t come back here,” said his father. “What’s wrong with you, ain’t you ever gonna be a man?”
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    THINGS CHANGED FOR the Whitmores once they moved to Wildwood, a shore town that became a chilly ghost town in the winter and then swelled with revelers—mostly Caucasian—in the summer. There was work to be found in Wildwood from late May to early September, when the bars, nightclubs, and show palaces turned the area into a blue-collar Jersey Riviera.
    Racial segregation was a fact of life, rigidly enforced. On Labor Day weekend in 1959—not long after the Whitmores first moved to the area—Mr. Entertainer himself, Sammy Davis Jr., interrupted his act atthe Bolero nightclub in Wildwood to tell a thousand visiting firemen that he was leaving town that night, though he’d been contracted to perform through the weekend. Davis explained that he would not work in a town where a Negro performer could not rent a motel room. After he finished the show, the club’s owner—suitably embarrassed—was able to find a motel room where Davis could stay. Unfortunately, the other members of his group would have to be lodged in private homes. Davis played out his weekend gig, but his name never again graced the marquee at the Bolero or any other club in Wildwood.
    There were plenty of blacks in Wildwood who had moved there to find work during the summer boom season. In keeping with the tenor of the times, most knew the unwritten rules of the segregationist North—which seemed like a refuge compared with the humiliation and terror of places like Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Few were more steadfast in adhering to racial norms than George Whitmore Sr. “I was a man who had one rule: mix with your own kind. That’s what I tried to tell my wife and my kids. Mind your own business and white folks’ll mind theirs. Just stay in your own back yard.”
    By the 1960s, however, protests in the South were stimulating a new consciousness of racial injustice around the country—and the old lines began to blur.
    In the spring of 1961, George Jr. was at a school dance when word spread throughout the gym that a Negro boy had insulted a white girl. Afterward, in the parking lot, a modest rumble ensued. Bicycle chains and baseball bats were brandished, racial insults shouted back and forth. The police arrived quickly, and fifteen or twenty boys were rounded up and taken to Wildwood’s new fluorescent-lighted police station. Charges were filed against a few of the boys, but all George got was a stern scolding from Lieutenant Parker Johnson.
    Lieutenant Johnson was a rarity in Wildwood—and not only because he was one of the few Negroes on the police force. Johnson’s family were black pioneers in the area. They had first settled in Wildwood back near the turn of the century, when the town was nothing but a small fishing village. For a long time the Johnsons owned a motel for