George W. Tillman Jr. spent much of his life making sure other people’s stories would not be forgotten.
There were Memphis’ first Black police officers; the musicians and personalities who made Club Paradise part of the city’s soul-music history; the women who gathered by the hundreds of thousands for the 1997 Million Woman March.
And finally, there were 11 young Black football players from Memphis whose journey to Fisk University became deeply intertwined with Tillman’s own.
George W. Tillman Jr. — Memphis filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer, former Tri-State Defender photojournalist and an indefatigable chronicler of Black history — died Sept.12 at a local hospital. He was 71.
For his sister, Judith Gibson, the motivation behind much of her brother’s work could be distilled into four words.
“He said, ‘We are always forgotten,’” Gibson recalled. “‘There are so many other stories, Judy, that need to be told.’”
So Tillman kept telling them.
From athlete to storyteller
Born Aug. 17, 1955, Tillman came of age in Memphis during a period when the city — and the nation — was struggling through profound racial change.
Before there was a filmmaker, there was an athlete.
Tillman distinguished himself in football and track as a teenager, earning recognition as a quarterback and hurdler at Messick High School before continuing his athletic career at Fisk University in Nashville. He was part of Fisk’s 1975 Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship football team.
Gibson remembers flying into Memphis from her home in Washington, D.C., to watch her younger brother compete and recalls his love of sports as one of the defining passions of his youth.
But a knee injury at Fisk effectively ended Tillman’s hopes of pursuing football professionally.
“Sports was one of his loves until he hurt his knee when he was playing football at Fisk and he couldn’t play anymore,” Gibson said. “And I guess that’s when he went to the next thing — his next love, which was film and photography.”
The interest was already there.
“He was always wanting to do that,” Gibson recalled. “He always said, ‘I got a story to tell, and I’m going to show you that. I’m gonna produce a story.’”
Tillman would spend decades making good on that promise.
His filmmaking biography traces one early spark to seeing “Wattstax” — a documentary about a benefit concert organized by Stax Records to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles — while attending Fisk.
By the late 1980s, he had begun pursuing filmmaking more seriously, eventually studying screenwriting and developing projects that overwhelmingly centered Black life, history and culture.
His body of work would include projects such as “My Brother, My Friend,” about HIV/AIDS; “Two Million Women Marched,” documenting the 1997 Million Woman March; “The True Blue Lawmen of 1948,” about Memphis’ first Black police officers; “The Birth of Soul Music,” exploring the legacy of Memphis’ Club Paradise; and “Pride, Poise & Dedication: The Unsung Story of Coach George Glymph,” about the legendary South Carolina basketball coach who led his team to five state championships between 1974 and 1996. “The Birth of Soul Music” was selected for the Hometowner Spotlight at the 2023 Indie Memphis Film Festival.
Again and again, Tillman returned to history that risked slipping from public memory.
‘We are always forgotten’
Perhaps no project was more personal than “The Lucky Eleven.”
Tillman began working on the documentary in 2009, tracing the journey of a group of Black Memphis football players who enrolled in Fisk University in the early 1970s, when opportunities at predominantly white colleges remained limited.
Tillman was part of that story. The young athletes had grown up playing football together in Memphis. Several went on to professional football and careers beyond the sport.
But as the years passed, members of the group began dying.
“It took us a long time to make this film,” Tillman told TSD writer Candace Gray in 2025. “Several of the men passed away during the course of filming, but this story is so important, it had to be told.”
Gibson said her brother felt a responsibility to make sure their accomplishments survived them.
“He wanted to make sure that the story got out about the guys, ‘The Lucky Eleven,’” Gibson stated. “He said, ‘That story should be told.’”
The project evolved over years, with versions screened at Fisk. It was selected as a Hometowner Feature at the 2021 Indie Memphis Film Festival.
In August 2025, just days before his 70th birthday, Tillman celebrated another milestone as “The Lucky Eleven,” was screened at Malco’s Studio on the Square.
It had taken more than 15 years. For Tillman, that persistence was part of the point.
“I’ve seen good and bad days,” he told the TSD in that 2025 interview. “Now it’s about supporting our community and teaching the kids what it means to persevere, endure and not give up.
“I refuse to give up.”
A storyteller and part of the TSD story
Tillman’s relationship with the Tri-State Defender extended beyond being the subject of its coverage.
He worked as a TSD photojournalist and contributing writer, photographing and reporting pieces of Memphis history as they unfolded.
In 2015, for example, Tillman interviewed the Rev. Ralph White about his role in helping facilitate the surrender of Tremaine Wilbourn following the killing of Memphis Police Officer Sean Bolton. Tillman’s photography also appeared with TSD coverage of community leaders and government and local news.
In 2019, Tillman told TSD readers a remarkable story of his own involving Memphis guitarist Larry Lee and a piece of a guitar said to have been smashed onstage by Jimi Hendrix. Lee had entrusted the artifact to Tillman years earlier; Tillman eventually worked to have it preserved for public display.
Sometimes the history was intensely personal.
Brother from another mother
When Florence Louise Taylor-Jackson died in 2022, Tillman remembered the Orange Mound matriarch in the pages of the TSD as his “Mother from God.”
He had met Jackson when he was 15. After football, basketball or track practice, Tillman would go to her house and eat and spend time with her children.
One of those children, Velder Taylor, remembers wondering at first who the boy was who kept showing up at their home.
Her brother, LeBonne “Bonnie” Taylor, was Tillman’s best friend. The Taylor-Jackson home was closer after practice than Tillman’s own home near Parkway and Airways, Taylor recalled, and before long George was eating dinner with the family.
Eventually, nobody thought of him as a guest.
“George was really close to our family,” Taylor said. “He would come over, he would tell me and my sisters what he wanted us to put on his plate, what food he wanted to eat, everything. George loved my mother.”
The relationship endured for decades.
“George was always a nice person,” Taylor said. “His personality never changed, his attitude never changed. He was just a really fun, nice guy to be around.”
The man behind the camera
Gibson remembers that same warmth, although with the affectionate realism of a sister.
“He was a good brother overall,” she said. “He did some things that I did not like, and I’m sure I probably said some things that he didn’t like. But nonetheless, he was my brother.”
During Tillman’s Fisk years, Gibson was living in Washington, D.C. When Tillman and friends traveled toward New York, she recalled, they sometimes dropped him off at her home.
Brother and sister would sit on the porch talking.
“We would talk till the sun would be coming up,” Gibson said. “We’d be laughing and talking like kids.”
“He was a fun-loving person.”
Tillman also spoke openly about the faith behind his perseverance.
“I come from a praying family — my mother and father, all my brothers and sisters,” he told Gray in 2025. “We were in church.”
He remembered a card his sister once sent him bearing a message he carried with him: “When you shine the light on others, the light shines even brighter on you.”
“And I believe that,” Tillman said.
His final years tested that resilience.
‘You gotta get back up’
A serious bout with Legionnaires’ disease hospitalized him, and Gibson said Tillman subsequently faced other significant health problems. Gibson said Tillman suffered from blood clots in his legs and lungs. His cause of death was heart failure, she added.
Yet in his 2025 TSD interview, Tillman framed even his hardships through the language of an athlete who had learned to get up after being knocked down.
“To be a champion, to be the best, you have to work hard and make sacrifices,” he said. “That was embedded in me as a championship-winning athlete. When you get knocked down, you gotta get back up.”
Tillman is survived by a son and two grandsons who live in Ottawa, Canada, as well as siblings and extended family. Additional survivor information was not immediately available.
A memorial service will begin at 11 a.m., Oct. 3, at First Baptist Church-Lauderdale, 682 South Lauderdale St., Memphis, TN 38126.
For Taylor, the boy who started showing up at her family’s house after practice never really stopped being another brother.
“George will always be in our hearts,” she said. “He will always be like another brother to us. He will always be there in spirit, and we really love George Tillman.”
