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Pickrick Project

An Augmented Reality Experience

  • The Pickrick Project
    • Articles
    • Gateway Cafeteria Opens
  • Timeline
    • Civil Rights Act Signed
    • Contempt Hearing Set for Maddox Pickrick Closure Amidst Government Pressure and Integration Efforts
    • FBI Investigates Maddox for Assault
    • Maddox Sells Segregation: Pickrick Continues Non-Food Business Ventures
    • Constance Baker Motley Argues the Case Against the Pickrick and Maddox 
    • Heart of Atlanta Motel Incident
    • Integration Resistance at Pickrick
    • Court Upholds Civil Rights Act 
    • NAACP Files Suit Against Pickrick 
    • Leb’s Restaurant Protests
    • Lester Maddox’s Court Hearing
    • Lester Maddox’s Defiance of Civil Rights Law and Gun Charge Hearing
    • Maddox Found Non-Compliant
    • Maddox’s Segregationist Rally
    • Pickrick Protest
    • Pickrick Renamed as the Lester Maddox Cafeteria
    • Pickrick Segregation
    • Pickrick Showdown
    • RFK Seeks Contempt Charges Against Maddox
    • US Supreme Court Affirms Civil Rights Act in Heart of Atlanta Case
  • People
    • Ministers
      • Albert Dunn
      • Albert Sampson
      • Charles Wells Sr.
      • George Willis III
      • Woodrow T. Lewis
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George Willis III

Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration. Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.

Early Life and Military Service

George Willis III, also known as “Yellow Socks” during his boxing days, led a life of service and dedication to his community. Willis joined the army as a teenager to become a paratrooper and made a name for himself in the boxing ring, once upsetting the crowd in Yokohama, Japan, after securing a split-decision victory over his Japanese amateur opponent.

Ministry and Education

After graduating from the Interdenominational Theological Center in 1965, the Reverend George Sylvester Willis III pastored at Texas churches, including in Waco, Dallas, and Houston, before his death in 2012 at age seventy-seven.

Legacy

The US Army veteran continued his studies after leaving Atlanta, pursuing his passion for justice and equality. Even as he led churches, Willis served as a substitute teacher in Texas.

Quotations

Kay Willis Describing George

Ever studious, George Willis stood ready to jot down sermon ideas whenever they came to him.
“He always kept a pen and pencil in his pocket,” Kay Willis says. “Whenever the Lord gave him a message, he wrote it down.” When someone did George Willis a kindness, he’d often respond with three successive thank-yous. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he’d say. Kay Willis has found herself at times repeating the same six-word appreciation.

Classmate Willis would “sit at the feet of Dr. King” at Friday night sermons and consume his message, says his widow. “You learned from the master. That’s where he got his stability. He said he was a servant,” she says.

Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (pp.53, 54). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.

Description of Pickrick Showdown

George Willis was driving, Albert Dunn in the passenger seat, and Woodrow T. Lewis in back. Dunn and Willis had been ringleaders of the integration plan, hungry to test the new law at a restaurant that had served its popular diner fare only to White customers, and Lewis felt equally emboldened to demand a seat at the table. As the trio pulled toward the Hemphill Avenue establishment, they witnessed a mass of bodies standing out front, up to one hundred people, anxiously awaiting their arrival. Many held axe handles, the largest of them thirty-six inches long.

“There was a mob of Whites standing there when we drove up to the Pickrick restaurant yard,” Lewis says. “Willis was very, very angry and Dunn too. They were saying, ‘Look at them, look at them, look at them.’ Willis said, ‘I should take this car and drive it right through the crowd.’”

Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (pp. 83-84). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.

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