Op-Ed Contributor: Who Will Mourn George Whitmore?

I RECEIVED news this week of the death of George Whitmore Jr., an occurrence noted, apparently, by no one in the public arena.

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That Whitmore could die without a single mention in the media is a commentary on a city and nation that would rather bury and forget the difficult aspects of our shared history.

Forty-eight years ago, as a New York City teenager, Whitmore was initiated into an ordeal at the hands of a racist criminal justice system. For a time, his story rattled the news cycle. He was chewed up and spit out: an ill-prepared kid vilified as a murderer, then championed as an emblem of injustice and, finally, cast aside. That he survived his tribulations and lived to the age of 68 was a miracle.

I first met Whitmore in the spring of 2009 while doing research for a book that posited that his experiences constituted an important subnarrative to the racial turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Finding him was not easy. I eventually tracked him down in Wildwood, N.J., not far from where he'd been born and raised. I found a man who was broken but unbowed, humble, with glimmers of an innocence that had been snatched from him a long time ago. For a time in his adolescence, he'd been infamous. By the time I found him, he was anonymous, and that was O.K. with him.

Back in April 1964, like a horrifying urban-jungle version of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," Whitmore began a nearly decade-long ramble through the justice system that still boggles the mind. It started on a misty morning when Whitmore, 19 years old, African-American, raised in poverty and a grade-school dropout, was taken by a handful of New York City detectives into the 73rd Precinct station house in East New York, Brooklyn. After a 22-hour interrogation by numerous detectives — all of them white — he was coerced into signing a 61-page confession detailing a series of horrific crimes, including, most notably, a brutal double murder of two young white women on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The case had become known in the media as "The Career Girl Murders." The killings took place on the same day — Aug. 28, 1963 — and perhaps at the exact time that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The confession was front-page news. The Brooklyn cops who were involved congratulated themselves; one was given a special award for exemplary work. But the confession was a fraud. To most objective observers, it didn't seem likely that Whitmore could have committed the murders. At his arraignment, he told the judge that he'd been coerced into admitting guilt. Few cared: he was a disposable Negro who'd been raised in a shack alongside a junkyard in Wildwood — a "drifter," described in one account as "possibly mentally retarded." He was indicted, imprisoned and declared a monster.

America was just on the cusp of the civil rights revolution; it was a time of pernicious institutional racism. A black kid had been railroaded, and he wasn't the first nor would he be the last. But the detectives had made the mistake of pinning on him the city's most notorious open murder case, which brought about a higher level of scrutiny than the average homicide.

The case quickly began to fall apart. The detectives claimed that they had found a photo of one of the career girls in Whitmore's wallet when they arrested him. He'd told them he'd found it at the murder scene and stolen it, they said. None of it was true. (He did have a photo on him, but it was not of either of the victims.) On the day of the murders, witnesses had seen him sitting in an empty catering hall in Wildwood, where he was working at the time, watching King's speech on television.

Despite a mounting belief among some civil rights activists associated with the N.A.A.C.P., and a few intrepid journalists, that Whitmore was innocent, he remained in prison, facing two death sentences. Depressed, frightened and alone, he pondered his imminent demise at the hands of the state. He asked other inmates: "If you were going to be put to death, which would it be? The chair? Lethal injection? What's the least painful way to die?" A teenager, having committed no crime — ever — at that point in his life, pondering what means of execution he would choose: this was his reality.

T. J. English is the author of "The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge," about George Whitmore Jr.