"The Boy from Booker T."

STORYTELLING CATEGORY

Texas Monthly
03/22/2022

Jeffrey McWhorter’s photo essay, “The Boy From Booker T.,” started off modestly enough. In 2009, McWhorter was a student in the University of Texas’s Plan II Honors program trying to find subjects for his senior journalism thesis on the young sons of incarcerated men. Walking around East Austin, he chatted up a charismatic, fast-talking thirteen-year-old resident of the Booker T. Washington Terraces named Christian Martinez. McWhorter, who has a knack for putting people at ease, quickly gained the trust not only of Christian, but of Christian’s family and the boys Christian ran around with—and often committed crimes with. Five months and 43 visits later, McWhorter had taken a set of photographs and conducted a series of interviews that he turned into a stunning multimedia project.

That was remarkable enough. What is even more striking is that, a year later, when tragedy struck the Booker T. community, the residents turned to McWhorter to document their sorrow. Over the next decade or so, McWhorter stayed in touch with the now-former residents of Booker T., and he eventually conducted further rounds of interviews with many of them. Again, McWhorter’s genuine regard for his subjects encouraged them to speak candidly about their frustrations, their hard-won lessons, and their undimmed—or, in some cases, radically dimmed—ambitions.

The resulting piece is the sort of longitudinal, years-long study that journalists rarely commit to. As a work of reporting, it’s marked not by a deep dive into classified documents or the uncovering of official wrongdoing, but by something more unusual: a dogged insistence on developing a genuine rapport with people who lead difficult lives on the margins of American society.

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Submitted by Alicia Maria Meier.