by Alex Heard
The Eyes of Willie McGee
A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South
Alex Heard
For Jim Leeson
I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes…
The
Faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night.
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night
—Lorraine Hansberry, “Lynchsong,” 1951
Contents
Epigraph
One The Hot Seat
Two A Man Wasn’t Born to Live Forever
Three Take Your Choice
Four Her Jitterbug
Five God Don’t Like Ugly
Six The Malady of Meddler’s Itch
Seven The Odds Against Smiling Johnny
Eight A Rumpus of Reds
Nine Country Girl
Ten Communists Coming Here
Eleven A Long, Low Song
Twelve Bare-Legged Women
Thirteen Sorrow Night
Epilogue Whiskey in a Paper Sack
Bibliography
Notes
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
one
THE HOT SEAT
On May 8, 1951, a thirty-five-year-old African American named Willie McGee was electrocuted in Laurel, Mississippi, on a much-disputed charge that he raped a white housewife named Willette Hawkins. A few days later Eleanor Roosevelt, who was traveling in Europe, received a protest letter about the execution, sent by a Swiss citizen who identified himself as Mr. F. Aegerter.
Aegerter didn’t know Roosevelt and she didn’t know him. But he knew she was in Geneva for a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, so he took a moment to sound off about the human rights of Willie McGee, a man whose death he deeply mourned. During a legal battle that lasted more than five years, McGee’s story had risen from obscurity to fame, and Aegerter, who probably read about McGee in French-language newspapers, felt certain he was innocent. As he knew, the former First Lady had avoided taking part in a widely publicized campaign to stop the execution. He wanted to know why.
Roosevelt didn’t apologize. Just the opposite, she pushed back. In a reply written on the 18th, she told Aegerter she was very familiar with the facts of the McGee saga—unlike him. “[Y]ou do not seem to have much understanding of the case about which you write,” she informed him coolly. “It is quite true that all of us oppose a law which is applied differently to white and colored and that happens to still be in effect in some southern states….
“In the case of Willie McGee, while I regret there should be this discrimination in the law, I have to add that he was a bad character and so was the white woman, so there was very little that one could feel personally about.”
That sounded definite, as if she had inside information. But the truth was that Roosevelt knew very little about McGee or “the white woman.” A lot of what she thought she knew—and this was true for Aegerter as well—was rumor mixed with fact, unproven allegations, or simply wrong, since the story produced more than its share of inaccurate reporting, lies, and colorful but useless folklore.
The “bad character” phrase makes it clear she’d heard about and believed the most explosive allegation of all: McGee’s claim that his sexual encounter with Willette wasn’t a rape but an act of consensual sex, part of a long-standing love affair that she had instigated. As for Roosevelt’s observation that the story lacked elements that could stir the soul, she couldn’t have been more off base, because Aegerter wasn’t the only person who cared. By 1951, hundreds of thousands of people knew McGee’s name and what it represented, and many had passionate opinions about what had happened to him inside Mississippi courtrooms.
The story began in November 1945, when McGee, a longtime Laurel resident who worked as the driver of a wholesale grocery-delivery truck, was charged with breaking into a home in a middle-class white neighborhood and raping Mrs. Troy Hawkins, a thirty-two-year-old housewife and mother of three.
The rape allegedly happened in the predawn hours of November 2, a warm autumn Friday. As the still-traumatized Mrs. Hawkins told police after daybreak that morning, she was asleep in a front bedroom with a sick twenty-month-old girl at her side. Her thirty-seven-year-old husband was in a room near the back of the house, having gone there after spending several hours helping Willette take care of the child. She said she woke up and heard a man crawling toward her on the floor. In an instant, he was on top of her, smelling like whiskey and threatening to kill her and the child if she didn’t shut up and submit. Once he was done, he told her never to say a word about what happened or he would come back and kill her. Then he ran out the front door. Mrs. Hawkins said it was too dark to see the rapist’s face, but she knew he was black by the texture of his hair.
McGee became a suspect in part because he didn’t show up for work on Friday, but also because Laurel police found witnesses—including two male friends of his—whose statements seemed to place him in the vicinity at the time of the assault. He was arrested the next day in a nearby city, Hattiesburg, briefly taken back to Laurel, and then driven to jail ninety miles away in Jackson, the state capital. Jackson was home to a massive county courthouse with a two-floor, upper-story lockup that was considered safe from attacks by lynch mobs. Often in cases like this, black defendants were whisked away from wherever they’d been arrested and taken straight to the Hinds County jail.
The trial was held in early December, amid so much local hostility that the governor of Mississippi sent McGee back to Laurel under heavily armed guard. It lasted only a day, with an all-white jury sentencing him to death after deliberating for less than three minutes. There would be two more circuit-court trials—the first two verdicts were reversed on procedural grounds by the Mississippi Supreme Court—followed by a three-year period of state and federal appeals, including multiple appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.
For a long time—through all three trials, in fact—the McGee case was barely noticed outside Mississippi, but by the end that had changed dramatically. People all over the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia had read or heard about his death sentence and were convinced he was either the victim of a racist frame-up or, if guilty, had been condemned unfairly, since Mississippi’s death penalty for rape was only applied to blacks, never to whites. In 1950 and 1951, thousands of individuals sent letters, postcards, and telegrams to public officials who had the authority to halt the execution—including Mississippi’s governor and chief justice, the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, and President Harry S. Truman—demanding either a new trial, a prison term instead of death, or outright clemency. A week before the execution, Truman even heard from McGee’s children, who pleaded with him in a letter to save their father.
Dear Mr. President,
We are writing to you about our daddy Willie McGee who have been in jail five years and on May eight they are going to put our daddy on the hot seat. Will you please not let him die, Mr. Truman. You is our president.
My name is Gracie Lee McGee. I have two sisters and one brot
her. My poor mother is somewhere trying to get my daddy home. She may come by your house. Please help her.
Like F. Aegerter, most people who spoke out weren’t public figures, but several were—or soon would be. McGee’s lead defense attorney during the appeals was Bella Abzug, a young labor lawyer from New York who was destined for fame in the 1960s and 1970s as a feminist and politician. Long before that, the McGee case put her in the national spotlight for the first time. In March 1951, William Faulkner, the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, signed off on a press release that said that McGee was probably innocent and should be spared. In April, Albert Einstein issued a statement in which he asserted, with utmost confidence, that “any unprejudiced human being must find it difficult to believe that this man really committed the rape of which he has been accused. Moreover, the punishment must appear unnaturally harsh to anyone with any sense of justice.”
There was a lot more besides—support from people like Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Jessica Mitford, Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Frida Kahlo, along with protests from labor unions, political groups, and foreign governments. As McGee’s last day approached, the U.S. State Department sent a staffer to monitor the case in Jackson because many foreign embassies, prompted by inquiries from citizens back home, were demanding to know why Mississippi seemed determined to kill an innocent man. By the end, news organizations all over the world—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Life, Newsweek, the Nation, and newspapers overseas—were covering McGee intensively. The day after his electrocution, the French paper Combat spoke for many when it declared that “the Mississippi executioner has won out over the world conscience…Yesterday morning a little of the liberty of all men and a little of the solidarity between the peoples died with Willie McGee.”
What prompted much of this was McGee’s claim about interracial sex, a real-life version of a fictional theme that, nearly a decade later, would be at the heart of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel; To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, Mayella Ewell, a lower-class white woman, sets up a deadly chain of events when she and her father tell the sheriff of a Depression-era Alabama town that she was raped by a black man, Tom Robinson, who narrowly escapes lynching just before his trial starts. In court, Atticus Finch, a local white attorney of flawless integrity, presents a convincing case that Mayella lied—that she’d made a pass at Tom, was rejected, and went along with the false accusation to save herself from her father’s violent rage. An all-white jury finds Robinson guilty anyway and sentences him to death. He’s shot and killed while attempting to escape from jail.
McGee’s story was just as grim but much more carnal. In Mockingbird there was no sex, just fabricated accusations about it. In the McGee case, the sex—if it happened—was rampant and insanely risky, given the time and place. According to McGee, it all started when he was waxing floors in Mrs. Hawkins’s home one afternoon and, he said, “she showed a willingness to be familiar.” With small children in the house and her husband at work, she took him to a bedroom, stripped, and flopped down on a mattress. This wouldn’t be their only encounter: in a story that evolved considerably over time, McGee said they had sex frequently during an affair that lasted for several years.
Though McGee said he tried to break off the relationship, knowing he’d be lynched if they were found out, Mrs. Hawkins supposedly wouldn’t let go. She publicly harassed him and his wife, Rosalee, accosting them both on the streets of Laurel and calling Rosalee a “Negro whore.” She turned up at his house to knock on his door, drove him to a graveyard for midnight encounters, and left a note in a gas-pump nozzle at a service station where he worked.
Her final misdeed was to condemn McGee to death by crying rape once the affair came to light, and for this she would be pilloried in the years ahead. A few months after McGee died, an African-American poet and actress named Beaulah Richardson—who, under the stage name Beah Richards, was nominated for an Oscar in 1968 for her supporting role in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—set the tone in a poem called “A Black Woman Speaks.” One of its chief villains was Mrs. Hawkins, “the depraved, enslaved, adulterous woman, whose lustful demands denied, lied and killed what she could not possess.”
Tennessee Williams weighed in too, years later, in his 1957 play Orpheus Descending. In act one, Carol Cutrere, an eccentric white Mississippian, talks about her early involvement in civil rights causes, saying, “I delivered stump speeches, wrote letters of protest about the gradual massacre of the colored majority in the county…. And when that Willie McGee thing came along—he was sent to the chair for having improper relations with a white whore—I made a fuss about it. I put on a potato sack and set out for the capitol on foot. This was in winter. I walked barefoot in this burlap sack to deliver a personal protest to the Governor of the State…. You know how far I got? Six miles out of town—hooted, jeered at, even spit on!—every step of the way—and then arrested!”
Eleanor Roosevelt may not have known all the lurid details, but she knew the basics. In the end, though, the reason she ignored McGee was more about politics than personal distaste, and from her perspective this was the only wise choice she had.
Roosevelt was no coward about civil rights. Among much else, she’d faced down her husband and his advisers in 1934, when she supported federal anti-lynching legislation that FDR refused to get behind, fearing the loss of white Democratic support in the South. But she could only push it so far, and the McGee case was beyond the pale because it involved a third color along with black and white: red. Many of McGee’s supporters were Communists, and during his long legal ordeal, his defense was paid for by the New York–based Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a group whose staff and supporters included radioactive far-left figures like Robeson, CRC head William L. Patterson, Communist Party chief William Z. Foster, and the writers and editors of the Daily Worker, the contentious organ of the Communist Party USA.
Throughout 1950 and 1951, a lot of the pro-McGee protest noise came from Communist governments overseas. The ruling officials of Red China denounced Truman for allowing McGee’s death, while the Soviet Union sent out crackling radio broadcasts that railed against the United States for its racial hypocrisy. On the home front, domestic Communists and radical union members marched through the streets of major cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., where a group of men wearing FREE WILLIE MCGEE T-shirts chained themselves to the columns of the Lincoln Memorial. News of the execution was a blow to one of the most famous American Communists of the era, Julius Rosenberg. Just after it happened, in a letter to his wife, Ethel, written from his prison cell, the accused atomic spy lamented the evils of a system that would allow such an injustice to occur.
“Ethel I was terribly shocked to read that Willie McGee was executed,” he wrote. “You know how I am affected by these things…. My heart is sad [and] my eyes are filled with tears. Shame, America!! Shame on those who perpretrated [sic] this heinous act!! Greater Shame on those who did not lift their voices and hands to stop the…Mississippi executioner.”
Roosevelt knew all about the Communist connection. As letters between her and her contacts at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People show, her opinions about McGee were essentially dictated to her by the NAACP, which stiff-armed him because the CRC had gained control of the case.
The NAACP’s hostility had its roots in the spring of 1946, when the group, along with many other liberal, progressive, and left-wing outfits, was invited to Detroit to participate in a two-day “Initiating Committee for a Congress on Civil Rights.” The NAACP sent observers who reported that the gathering ended with the merger of previously existing organizations into an ambitious new entity called the Civil Rights Congress. CRC leaders vowed to become a major new force in turning post–World War II agitation for civil rights and Cold War–era civil liberties into a movement that would sweep the nation.
That meeting took place in April; within days
, NAACP personnel were already brooding about the new competition. “Gloster Current telephoned my house from Detroit last night, saying he felt we should watch very carefully the newly set up National Congress of Civil Rights Organizations,” NAACP executive secretary Walter White wrote in a May 1, 1946, memo to a colleague. “…He opened up the conversation by saying that the so-called civil rights conference had been called by the Comrades. I regard Gloster as an expert on the activity of the Comrades and on their various ‘fronts.’”
The upshot was a blanket policy of noncooperation. Throughout the ten-year history of the CRC, the NAACP almost always balked at joint effort on cases, like McGee’s, that involved allegations of racially motivated judicial railroading.
The NAACP conveyed its feelings directly to Roosevelt in July 1950, when the McGee case began making national news in advance of a July 27 execution date that was later postponed by the U.S. Supreme Court. “This is, unfortunately, another one of those cases where the Communists persuaded an apparently innocent family to turn over the case to them,” White wrote her on the 24th. With the case approaching its climax in the spring of 1951, Roosevelt received an appeal from a CRC lawyer named Aubrey Grossman. She promptly wrote to tell him that he didn’t have his facts straight. It could be reasonably argued, she said, that McGee’s punishment fit the crime, but in any event such matters were best left to the wiser heads at the NAACP. Do that, she advised, and unfortunates like McGee “would not have added suspicions aroused against them.”