by Alex Heard
More recently, Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown covers the three trials in a single paragraph and doesn’t mention Pyles at all. Dray, by necessity, had to compress the story—his book is a complicated narrative that touches on dozens of lynching and legal lynching cases—but it’s a shame Pyles didn’t make the cut. Dray writes that “the CRC” raised the issue of race-based jury exclusion in the second trial, which is true but incomplete. It was Pyles who did that, and it required grilling a cavalcade of county officials about fraudulent voting-rights practices that were integral to the Jim Crow system. In the process, he helped force a historic, unpopular change in Mississippi jury selection that came about in 1948, at the start of McGee’s third trial.
When Pyles does come up, the reviews aren’t always kind. Abzug seemed to like him—in an interview done nearly fifty years later, she remembered him as “a decent guy, a labor lawyer”—but others have assumed he was a lightweight, a shyster, or a one-dimensional bigot who, like Boyd and Koch, didn’t care enough about McGee to give the case his best. In a letter sent to the CRC’s Milton Kemnitz two weeks before the second-trial preliminaries in Laurel, Laurent Frantz—a CRC staffer from Tennessee who was involved in the case—said Pyles wasn’t up to the job, calling him “inexperienced in this sort of work” and saying he lacked “an adequate theoretical foundation to find his own way in it….”
In Communist Front?, Gerald Horne’s 1988 history of the Civil Rights Congress, Horne concluded that Pyles’s use of “nigger” proved he was a racist whose heart wasn’t in it. Later, he thumped him again while discussing another Mississippi case Pyles handled for the CRC in 1947—a tricky one that involved members of an African-American family named Craft, who fired on four law enforcement officers as they approached the family’s home in rural Smith County, apparently thinking they were part of a lynch mob.
“As had happened in many of their other cases in the South, CRC had incredible difficulties with local counsel, this time the familiar Dixon Pyles,” Horne wrote. “By early in 1947 they had already paid him $2,130 and had agreed to pay him $3,000 more.”
That’s phrased to sound like price-gouging, but Pyles never pretended he took these cases to be charitable. As for his word choice, it’s offensive now and it was offensive then, but that’s the way white people often talked in the 1940s. A better-known transgressor was President Truman, who in 1945 referred to Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell as “that damn nigger preacher” during a White House staff meeting.
Pyles was an establishment figure in a segregated society, so his views on race and society wouldn’t resemble today’s norms. But he was also a lawyer who’d taken an oath, and every indication is that he did the best he could with the tools he had. The CRC’s leaders must have agreed, because after the second trial they hired him to help write the second appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. They also pleaded with him to stay on the job when the third trial approached.
Finally, Frantz’s point about Pyles’s “theoretical foundation” raises a question of its own: Which theory would equip you to walk into a courtroom where the men inside would rather kill your client than look at him? Though it wasn’t reported at the time, it was stated convincingly in later interviews and appeal documents that Troy Hawkins was caught sneaking a pistol into court, and that he said he was prepared to shoot McGee or his lawyers if he didn’t like what he heard.
What the job required, as much as anything, was courage, and Pyles had plenty of that. Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, he graduated from Central High School in Jackson and attended Millsaps College, also in Jackson, from 1930 to 1933. Standing five feet three inches tall and weighing 150 pounds, he was compact, physically strong, and mulishly determined. His mother and stepfather moved away from Jackson when he was sixteen, but he stayed behind, living in a boardinghouse and working to support himself. The summer after graduating from Millsaps, in a typical adventure, he headed off to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, where he earned money by pulling fairgoers around in a rickshaw.
“He had broad shoulders and was built like a fireplug,” says his son, Todd. “He had what you call ‘short-man attitude.’ He had a friend named Weaver Ellis Gore III, who used to say that if he could just get Dixon’s vote, it would be unanimous that Dixon was a son of a bitch.”
After the World’s Fair, Pyles went back to Jackson, where he started out in journalism. He got a job writing for the Clarion-Ledger, which led to a job on radio station WJDX, where he became what he proudly called “the first radio news commentator in Mississippi.” He’d met Bilbo as a high-school student, came to know him better during his newsman days, and traveled to Washington in the mid-1930s to ask for a Mississippi-based job with the Federal Housing Authority, which he got. Later, he bounced around in short-term posts in Louisiana and Mississippi and contributed unsigned writing for Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, reporting on subjects like the Gulf Coast shrimp-fishing industry.
Pyles entered law school in Jackson in 1937 and opened his practice in early 1940. One of his first clients was a famous central Mississippi gambler and bootlegger named Dewey Swor, who was still a public scourge as late as 1948, when he was arrested for numerous bookmaking violations. Pyles said Swor put him on retainer mainly because he didn’t drink. “He told me, ‘Jackson has some good lawyers, criminal lawyers particularly, but when it gets dark they all get drunk,’” he said. “‘If they get arrested and put in jail, I cannot depend on those that I have on my payroll.’”
Pyles went into the army in 1942 and became a gunner in an antiaircraft artillery battalion, part of the Sixth Armored Division of the Third Army under General George Patton, which punched its way through some of the worst campaigns in Europe. He took part in major battles in Normandy, the Rhineland, and the Ardennes, commanding a half-track with two 37 mm antiaircraft guns mounted on a turret in the center of the bed.
“When I was growing up,” Todd told me, “we had a .45-caliber service weapon that had Plexiglas in place of the usual brown handles, with a family photograph mounted behind the glass. My dad personally shot down an ME-109”—a Messerschmitt Bf-109, the workhorse fighter plane of the Luftwaffe—“and went over and took a souvenir, which was the glass out of the cockpit.”
Todd makes it clear, in his funny, rueful way, that Dixon could be a rough parent, but that didn’t negate his admiration. “He is still my hero,” he said. “You must understand that. He was not sweet and kind. He had a tendency to piss people off. Hell, he used to win cases by pissing people off. He’d get his witnesses up there and ask smart-ass questions until they lost their temper.”
Todd is well aware of Dixon’s role in the McGee case, which he calls “an extraordinary act of courage in enemy territory.” He thinks he took it on for a combination of reasons. One being that, yes, he needed the work. But another was genuine conviction. “He was a progressive who really did care about the little guy,” Todd said. But there was something more elemental at work too: “He just didn’t like anybody telling him what to do.”
Like Laurel, Hattiesburg was a small city that owed its existence to the nineteenth-century timber boom. It wasn’t incorporated until 1884, but it had become a busy place by the 1940s, a crossroads of highways, railroads, and manufacturing nicknamed Hub City. Hattiesburg’s numbers had swollen a bit during World War II, thanks to Camp Shelby, a huge army base southeast of town, but Shelby was downsized after the war ended. Another notable institution was Mississippi Southern College, a former teacher training school that was still a few years away from a period of growth and construction that would later turn it into a sizable campus.
The Forrest County Courthouse was similar to Laurel’s—a big, brick-clad building at the edge of the downtown business district, with a Confederate soldier out front, standing guard on top of a pillar. From Pyles’s perspective, the two locations weren’t any different. He’d hoped to get as far away from Laurel as he could, to a north Mississippi town like Tupe
lo. Instead, he would have to present his case before the same judge, Burkitt Collins, and McGee’s fate would be decided by an all-white, all-male jury that was certain to have unforgiving opinions about black men putting their hands on white women. Mrs. Hawkins wasn’t a local, but there were local connections to the case. McGee had been arrested in Hattiesburg, and Mrs. Hawkins spent ten days there in a hospital. She also had a sister, LaVera Hooks, who lived in town.
Not surprisingly, McGee—who was jailed in Hattiesburg for the trial’s duration—was still in a state of great personal distress. He looked terrified whenever he had to enter the courtroom, and he continued to say nothing. “[H]e was crazy at the time we tried [the case],” Dan Breland told Spivak, the Daily Worker’s investigator. “He didn’t open his mouth…. Never did get a word out of him. Not one word.”
Pyles pursued three lines of defense, in all instances looking past the trial and toward what he assumed would be a second appeal. First, unlike Boyd and Koch, he tried to put meat on the insanity plea. Step one was to get McGee examined by a qualified psychiatrist. During proceedings held in Laurel before the venue shift, he told Judge Collins that every psychiatrist in Mississippi—all of whom were employed by the state mental hospital in Jackson—had refused to examine his client. So he called on a psychologist from the capital named N. B. Bond, who performed hurry-up jailhouse examinations and concluded that McGee had the mind of “a normal eight-year-old child.” Pyles wanted to get a second opinion from a psychiatrist in New Orleans, a Dr. Charles E. Holbrook, but Holbrook told him he wouldn’t be available for three or four days. Could he have that much time?
Collins ruled that this was too long; the court couldn’t recess “while the defense was out fishing for witnesses.” Later, both sides agreed that insanity arguments would be presented during direct testimony, not at a separate hearing.
In another move, Pyles said he had been told that Willie had tried to enlist in the army but was taken out of training because his mind was shot. He’d called around and had been “advised upon reliable information” that McGee had served in the army briefly—he didn’t say when or where—and had been put in “a ward set aside for the observation of mentally deficient patients” before being discharged. Specifically, Pyles said, “records will show that the defendant is suffering from syphilis of the brain.” He asked for additional time and the court’s assistance to obtain the army records. This too was denied.
Most of Pyles’s effort went into a challenge of the jury-selection systems in Jones and Forrest counties, which, like those in every other Mississippi county, were designed to exclude African Americans from serving. The issues he raised had come up, with strikingly similar details, in Alabama in 1933, during the second set of circuit-court trials involving the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine black males—most of them teenagers—who’d been accused of raping two white women on a freight train. Their lawyers asked the court to quash the indictment based on the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries. The judge refused and the state supreme court upheld him, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the verdicts, saying the county’s reasons for exclusion—basically, that it happened because there weren’t any blacks with sufficient judgment or qualifications to serve—wouldn’t wash.
That was Alabama in the 1930s. By 1946, jury exclusion was still the rule in Mississippi, though it was under assault there as well. Pyles may have known that the same questions were already before the state supreme court in a case called Patton v. Mississippi, an appeal of a murder conviction of a black defendant in Meridian, a railroad town sixty miles northeast of Laurel. Either way, he knew that, to lodge a successful appeal, he and Breland had to get it on the record that blacks were kept off juries in Laurel and Hattiesburg—and why.
To do this, they put one official after another on the stand, including circuit clerks, members of the county boards of supervisors (whose job it was to place names of potential jurors in the jury box), and other city officials involved in compiling jury lists. All agreed that they’d never seen a black serve on a grand or petit jury during their combined decades of public service. Luther Hill, the Jones County sheriff, was asked whether, at any time during a career that stretched back forty-six years, he had served a jury summons on an African American. “I don’t remember that I did,” he said.
Generally, the reasons given had to do with raw statistics. To serve on a jury, you had to be a registered voter, and there weren’t many registered blacks. With a straight face, the officials said this was just the way things had worked out, and that no pressure was applied to keep blacks from registering. And if they did happen to be registered and were called? They voluntarily elected not to serve.
During questioning by District Attorney Homer Pittman, Bill Hosey, a former Laurel mayor and Jones County prosecutor, insisted that the names of black voters were sometimes drawn from the jury box, but these men declined to take part of their own free will.
“We have always had in this county about 35 to 50 negroes that were qualified electors,” he said. “They were the better class of Negroes and when they were drawn for jury service…they would ask to be excused.” Why was that? Because they were “of that class of intelligent Negroes that didn’t want to appear as a juror in court.”
That was double-talk, and Hosey seemed to be enjoying his time on the stand. Under cross-examination by Pyles, he boasted that, in his experience, white jurors often went easier on black criminals than on white criminals—one of those surprising facts of Southern life that they didn’t tell you about up north. “I have had more Negro defendants turned aloose, that is, acquitted, in my eight years as prosecutor, by white jurors than I have white defendants acquitted,” he said.
“Did you ever have any white defendants turned aloose by negro jurors in your eight years of office?” Pyles asked.
“No, sir,” Hosey said, “and I would rather not answer that question, because I thought my forefathers settled that question in Jasper County in 1876 with a negro sheriff when they stole—”
This caused a commotion, and it was never explained what happened to the negro sheriff. Collins banged his gavel and excused Hosey. Though he let Pyles keep going—asking the same questions of Forrest County officials—he’d already made up his mind.
“[T]here isn’t a scintilla of testimony offered by the defendant in this case to show that there was any legal fraud in drawing jurors for Forrest County, either actual or legal,” he said at the end. “[T]he testimony shows that they were drawn by the Board of Supervisors as contemplated by law….” He overruled both motions to quash the jury panels.
“Note our exception,” Pyles said. He would have more to say on the subject later.
The last chore was jury selection, a process of questioning and winnowing that was limited by a simple fact: No matter how deep you went into the pool, the candidates weren’t going to change much. No women. No blacks. Just white males who were primarily blue-collar. Among the potential jurors at the start, there was a postal clerk, a woodworker, a student at Southern, an auto mechanic, a piano repairman, a farmer, a pulp-mill machinist, and a truck driver. Almost to a man, they said they could listen to the case and make up their minds without prejudice against McGee.
Pyles didn’t believe it, but he’d had his say about the jury’s makeup. He rejected a few candidates—as did Judge Collins—but he didn’t seem interested in a long selection battle. Three men were excused because they said they’d already decided McGee was guilty; two because they were over sixty; and one because he opposed the death penalty.
“I have been thinking, sitting here studying about that,” this man said, “and I would hate—I’m not trying to shirk my duty, but…I would hate to bring in any verdict that takes a man’s life.” That was enough to get him bounced. The jurors had to set the sentence, and they had to be open to one of three possible outcomes: innocent, guilty with a penalty of life in prison, and guilty with a penalty of death.
Direct testimony began on Novem
ber 11, a Monday. The prosecution, led by Homer Pittman, presented the same case as before, with a few variations and in more detail. They put Willette on the stand first, and she repeated the story she’d told in December 1945. Lying in bed with her infant daughter, she’d heard something crawling on the floor, reached out in the dark, and felt “a human being…. I felt along and finally got up on his head and there was that old, the kinkiest hair I have ever felt…. I asked him, ‘What do you want? Go away. Why did you come here?’”
Mrs. Hawkins said she called out to her husband but knew he wouldn’t hear her because he was in the back and was a heavy sleeper. (“He has changed now,” she said.) She told the attacker she was men-struating, but said he didn’t care, and that he ordered her to “get them goddamned rags off, and them goddamned britches off.” She said she could smell him (“like old beer”) but couldn’t see him. The rapist said that if she didn’t shut up and give him what he wanted, he would start killing people. “All the time I was trying to protect the baby with one hand and trying to shove him away with the other hand,” she testified.
Pyles was aggressive when he cross-examined Mrs. Hawkins, starting on Monday afternoon. This session was long and emotional—she was already drained from revisiting the crime, and Pyles kept her on the stand for three hours. “The witness faltered several times in telling her story,” the Hattiesburg American reported, “and then, during the cross-examination by defense attorney Dixon Pyles, became so visibly upset that Judge Burkitt Collins ordered court recessed shortly after 5 p.m.”
Pyles had decided to make Mrs. Hawkins the centerpiece of his third courtroom strategy. In a move that would cause confusion in the years ahead, he pursued the idea that she had legally “consented” to having sex with McGee. But this had nothing to do with the love-affair story. It was about her failure to scream loud enough or fight hard enough during the rape. According to a motion introduced by the defense, this failure tended to “raise a presumption that no rape was committed upon her….” Why? Because Mississippi law said that if a rape victim didn’t fight as hard as she could during an assault, what happened technically wasn’t a rape.