HISTORIC MOMENTS
Memphian George Whitworth was about to meet MLK Jr. Then King was killed.
When listening to George Whitworth talk about his life, don’t expect the Cliffsnotes version. Expect the encyclopedic one.
Encyclopedic because Whitworth, 82, a retired lawyer who served as city attorney during the administration of Mayor William B. Ingram and who has also spent more than 50 years as consul to Guatemala in Memphis, is not only a collector of history, but a witness to it.
He’s tucked much of that history into his brain, and into a trove of books and memorabilia that fill a room in his Spanish Colonial Revival home.
His website, titled, “The George Whitworth Collection… Memphis History and Memorabilia,” features vintage photos and slides of Beale Street, Main Street and a frozen Mississippi River, among others.
It’s a history annotated with Whitworth’s experiences and autographs of those who had a hand in shaping it; a history so rich that he answers most questions with stories.
He can’t help it. He has so many of them.
“I have so much on my brain that I want to communicate,” Whitworth said, after the second time that his wife of nearly 60 years, Sylvia, nudged him to finish answering the reporter’s first question before delving into another topic.
“There’s a rumor going around that I talk too
“I have so much on my brain that I want to communicate. There’s a rumor going around that I talk too much, and she’s [Sylvia Whitworth] the one spreading the rumor.”
George Whitworth
much, and she’s the one spreading the rumor.”
They both laugh.
Then again, Whitworth has a lot to talk about.
Like in 1968, when Whitworth took civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks, who at that time was the first Black criminal court judge in Tennessee, to the annual Memphis Bar Association party at the old Claridge Hotel.
“There were some lawyers who didn’t want him [Hooks] to be invited to that party,” Whitworth said. “I talked to Judge Hooks and said, ‘Judge, it’s important that you come to this meeting. You’re the first Black judge in [Tennessee] history to be appointed…
“…We’re going to set two chairs up…we’re going to sit down, because there’s some people who don’t want you there. But if they want to meet you, they’re going to have to come up to shake hands with you, and if any of them come up there and get ugly, they’re going to have to come through me.”
Whitworth said Hooks, who was staying at the Lorraine Hotel, met him at the party – which was on April 4th. He had planned to ask Hooks to introduce him to Martin Luther King Jr. after it was over.
But that was not to be.
King was assassinated while they were at the party.
“We could hear a bunch of sirens and everything going on... two Africanamerican gentlemen got off the elevator and told us that Dr. King had been shot,” Whitworth said.
It’s a moment that lives in Whitworth’s mind, and in an autograph on the pages of Hooks’ autobiography, “The March for Civil Rights.”
It reads: “To George Whitworth, who was with me at the Bar function when we got news of Dr. King being shot. God continue to bless you.”
Hooks died in 2010. But his autograph is one of many that Whitworth amassed from authors and other prominent figures over the decades.
The signatures that he sought, as well as a book collection that features yearbooks from Black high schools and histories of Memphis’ legal community, reflect a man whose life has been shaped by empathy and a yen to find the context of what shapes people’s lives.
“I have every yellow fever book that’s ever been written,” Whitworth said. “…I always tell people I’m a collector, not a historian.”
The empathy began when Whitworth was a child. His father, who worked at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, was a union activist.
“He founded the AFL-CIO unit at Firestone and fought [actions by ] Mayor [Edward] Crump,” said Whitworth. “My father didn’t walk out the front door without a pair of brass knuckles on.”
They lived in the Rozelle-annesdale neighborhood near Central Gardens – and six houses away from Willie Johnson, a Black grandmother who was raising her grandchildren, and who he came to know and love.
“We were all poor as church mice, but my mother was a Mississippi girl, and a subsistence farmer, and my parents
were labor union people,” Whitworth said. “When you know people, you grow to love them.”
And he also spent time with his father’s relatives in Marianna, Arkansas, where Mexican migrant laborers harvested cotton.
“My aunt was the county nurse, and I would go with my aunt as she was giving them inoculations,” he said, explaining how he was exposed to Latin cultures.
That exposure set Whitworth on a circuitous path to ultimately becoming a lawyer; a path shaped by experiences and events.
After graduating from Central High School in 1957, Whitworth attended Tulane University on a football scholarship. He majored in Spanish and in Latin American history – and was able to minor in law and quit playing football under a combined degree program.
“I was sick of football, and there was a coach there who was trying everything to run me off, to make my life miserable,” he said.
While in law school, Whitworth said he applied for a scholarship with the Cordell Hull Foundation to study international law in Venezuela. Three people applied, and he was selected.
For Whitworth, that selection came with another brush with history. Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman who was the only person tried for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – he was acquitted – interviewed him for it.
“He called me down to his office and said, ‘I wanted you to know, in person, that I recommended you for this scholarship, because your Spanish is a thousand times better than these other guys.’”
Also, during his last year of law school, in 1963, he caught up with Sylvia Lazo, a Nicaraguan student, who he had been smitten with years earlier after seeing her during a free campus movie in New Orleans.
“She didn’t remember who I was, but I had spent two hours looking at her,” Whitworth said. “I never forgot her…
“I ran into her again in New Orleans. We dated a month, and I asked her to marry me.”
She eventually said yes, and although Whitworth was selling used cars at that time, he did such a good job that his manager allowed him to drive a new Chevrolet on their wedding day.
But even then, history caught up to them.
Whitworth had planned to join the Marines, because he feared he would be drafted. On Sept. 10, 1963, he had planned to sign the papers.
“But that night, [Sept.9] on the national TV, Kennedy exempted married people from the draft,” he said. “So, George Whitworth was a no-show on the 10th.”
More than a month later, Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 23, 1963. The Whitworths were driving to Memphis to settle here when they heard the news.
“To this day, it sends chills down my spine,” Whitworth said.
Whitworth was ultimately hired as chief city prosecutor for the city court by Ingram. That happened, Whitworth said, because someone overheard him defending Ingram to a YMCA member who didn’t like the fact that Ingram, while serving as city court judge, didn’t allow police officers to describe Black defendants with racial slurs.
“All of a sudden, we had this judge [Ingram] who, when policeman would come into court and say, ‘this n-word was going this fast on Poplar,’ or, ‘this nword was doing that,’ would say, ‘If you come into my court saying that word again, I’m going to send you to jail,” Whitworth said.
That helped Ingram to beat A.W. Willis in the 1963 mayor’s race. When he won, Ingram remembered the conversation that was overheard, and offered Whitworth the city attorney job.
The next mayor, Henry Loeb, who was elected in 1967, fired Whitworth. But then, another opportunity emerged: President Lyndon Johnson appointed him as honorary consul to Guatemala in Memphis.
“For the first 30 years when I was consul, I issued passports, because Americans wanted to go there,” he said. “I also helped with adoptions from Guatemala.”
The appointment offered Whitworth a chance to bring his Latin American history and Spanish skills full circle. Among other things, he and Sylvia, who was teaching Spanish at what was then known as Memphis State University, formed an exchange program between Black students in Memphis and Guatemalan students.
Oh, and Whitworth was still practicing law – and still making brushes with history.
In 1998, when the National Civil Rights Museum gave Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, its International Freedom Award, and his friend, Benjamin Hooks, the National Freedom Award, Whitworth was there.
Gorbachev, he said, gave him a hug. And, ultimately, an autograph.
And another memory to tuck into his brain – along with the memorabilia on his shelves.
Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com and you can follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw