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.