by Alex Heard
“Dad must have sensed the danger ahead of time,” she writes, “so his reasons for taking the case—with the chance of his practice being endangered with a pregnant wife and a toddler at home—must have been inspired by more than mere adventure…. He had told me in later years, regarding his practice, that he wanted to try to give the black man in Mississippi the full advantage of his rights under the law. He felt an obligation to his lawyer’s oath to serve anyone impartially, and I suppose then, in seeing the extreme exigency of Willie McGee, he had set his reasonableness aside.”
Judging by outward appearances, the first and third McGee trials were quite different. The 1945 edition was held with armed troops in the courtroom and the threat of lynching in the air. It was one-sided, simple, and quick—the transcript is only eighty-five pages long.
The third trial happened without the military presence, lasted several days, and produced a transcript totaling 910 pages. Most of the extra verbiage came during pretrial arguments over matters like venue, jury selection, and public attitudes toward McGee, issues that both sides knew would come up if the case was appealed again. It had been sent back twice on procedural grounds, so the challenge for the state wasn’t just to get a guilty verdict, but to keep it. To do that, the prosecution had to anticipate and neutralize any irregularities that might cause trouble down the line.
The state’s three-man prosecution team—locals all, and all more experienced than Poole and London—was led by Paul Swartzfager Sr., the new district attorney, a commanding, hefty thirty-nine-year-old army veteran who had been elected the previous summer after promising to take the McGee case to a swift conclusion. Working with him were the county prosecutor, E. K. Collins, and Jack Deavours, who had been hired as a special prosecutor by the Hawkins family.
Swartzfager died in 2000, but according to his son Jon, a lawyer based in Laurel, people in town let him know that anything less than lasting victory was unacceptable. Jon was only seven in 1948, but he says he remembers his father being summoned to the local VFW hall by a group of men—he doesn’t know who they were—who drove the point home.
“They wanted him to bust his butt to get a conviction,” Jon told me. “But then also to guarantee that the Supreme Court wasn’t going to reverse it, and to guarantee that he would get the death penalty to stick, and guarantee that Willie McGee would be executed. Well, my dad could guarantee all that, but truth of the fact is he couldn’t control what the Supreme Court was going to do.”
What could be controlled was how Laurel came off in the written record. Mob atmosphere? There wasn’t one. During early testimony, the courtroom was only partially full, and Swartzfager claimed that people in Laurel were, believe it or not, bored with McGee. On the stand, Laurel mayor Carroll Gartin testified to a distinct “lack of conversation or discussion” about the case. Thomas Gibbons, publisher of the Leader-Call, admitted that he personally thought McGee was guilty but said the public mood was as fair as you’d find anywhere. “[P]eople think justice ought to be done, but I haven’t heard anybody blowing their tops on account of it,” he said.
The courtroom would fill up once the trial started, but to counter this image of disinterest, the defense needed to produce witnesses who would testify that the public did care, and that there was rampant prejudice against McGee. Poole worked hard to find them, with help from a third lawyer, Jackson-based Clarence Holland, and Tennessee-based CRC investigator Laurent Frantz. But he wasn’t playing on a level field, thanks to the rapid pace set by Judge Collins, who presided for the third time and who, from the outset, seemed to function as an adjunct member of the prosecution.
The verdict of the second trial had been reversed on February 9. Poole and London signed up late in the evening on the 17th. The new indictment was issued on the 18th, and Collins scheduled the case for the 20th, refusing the defense’s request for a delay. By the 26th, Thursday of the following week, pretrial procedures were under way. The trial opened on March 3, a Wednesday. The whole thing ended three days later, on Saturday night.
The defense’s first move was to ask for a continuance. London put Poole on the stand so he could list the obstacles he’d faced while preparing. Because of his existing caseload in Jackson, he said, and because everything was happening so fast, he’d been unable to read the entire record from the first and second trials. He’d only had about fifteen minutes alone with McGee. He was trying to find new witnesses—he’d driven all over Laurel and Jones County talking to people—but he’d run into a wall of hostility and silence.
“I have talked with lawyers in Laurel,” Poole said, “one of whom said this to me: ‘You have done the craziest thing you could ever do by taking this case.’”
Poole’s statements backfired, giving Swartzfager easy targets during his questioning. Was Poole too busy to prepare? Tough. He shouldn’t have taken the job. He felt threatened in Laurel? Maybe he was panicking because he was green. “Now, whether the lawyer was ribbing you, or whether he was serious about the matter, nothing has happened to you, has there?” Swartzfager asked. Poole said it hadn’t, but he insisted the threat was real. He added, quietly, that two lawyers had told him this, not just one.
Swartzfager told him to speak up. “What was that, Mr. Poole?”
“I merely said there was another lawyer who told me that also.”
Swartzfager still couldn’t hear him.
“There was another member of the bar of the Second Judicial District of Jones County, Mississippi, that told me that also.”
At that, Deavours—who’d obviously heard every word—interrupted with a wisecrack. “You can’t put too much confidence in these lawyers,” he said.
“Well, they used to scare me too when I started out,” Swartzfager joked.
Later, Poole’s inexperience showed when he went on too long about the single exception he’d found to the code of silence: a white woman in her late fifties named Mrs. O. A. McMullan, who reportedly told Poole, “The lawyers themselves should be shot for having anything to do with this case, for defending the old rascal. He is guilty and everybody knows it.”
Poole wanted to put Mrs. McMullan on the stand but she was said to be ill. He wanted a stay until she was fit to testify, and to that end he called in her physician, a Dr. C. H. Ramsey, who said she was suffering from coronary thrombosis and was “never” going to get better. Poole kept after him, asking if it would be possible to bring her to court “in a wheel chair.”
“In what?”
“In a wheel chair.”
“Well, she would have to be carried up.”
“That’s what I mean. That would be possible?”
“Well…the strain, the exertion, the excitement, just being a witness might cause her to have a relapse, in other words, a new attack.”
This was a bad image to conjure up: an old lady clutching her chest as she’s dragged into court on behalf of an accused black rapist. Things got worse when Clarence Holland took the stand and Swartzfager made him admit that Mrs. McMullan was his aunt. The only reason Poole “interviewed” her was that Holland was obliged to pay her a visit while he was in town. They’d gone to see her in the middle of what Holland sheepishly described as a bridge party and tea.
Poole’s search for new witnesses wasn’t a complete bust: He found a woman who was never called during the third trial, but who would be important to the case later. Her name was Hettie Johnson, and she had come up in the first trial, when she was mentioned as a resident of one of the houses McGee had gambled in. According to Poole, he’d learned that she had new information that would provide a solid alibi for McGee. He didn’t say what it was, just that she and her husband, William, had been difficult to locate, so he needed more time.
“They are Negro witnesses, and I have found now that they are residing in Florida,” Poole said. “They were residing in Laurel up until—until not long ago, and I got their addresses in Florida, and it took me some time to do that.”
Collins wasn’t about to let him reel
them in. After sustaining various objections by Swartzfager, he shut down this line of inquiry, saying, “The Court doesn’t think the testimony in this case shows any cause for continuance whatever.”
Poole and London were on firmer ground with the issue of jury selection. They alleged that the state had engaged in chicanery by planting the three blacks who served on the grand jury. How did it work? And why did it happen?
To Poole, the answers were obvious. The state needed black jurors to satisfy Patton. The challenge was to have them while simultaneously nullifying their presence. The way to do it was to put them on the eighteen-man grand jury, whose members didn’t have to vote unanimously to indict McGee. The trial jury, in contrast, would have to vote 12–0 to convict.
Poole and London questioned various circuit-court and county officials, including E. T. Orso, a Jones County supervisor who, during the second trial, had told Dixon Pyles that he was unaware of any blacks ever being picked for a jury in his district. Now he claimed he’d been pulling their names for years, without “any discrimination at all.”
Poole asked Orso to walk him through the Jones County voter statistics, which were similar to the Lauderdale numbers cited in Patton: 5,500 qualified whites, 45 qualified blacks. The most recent Jones County jury list had been drawn up in April 1947. Orso said he put the names of “six or seven” blacks on it. The total pool numbered 264 jurors, with 257 of them white.
Poole held up a copy of the list, explaining that the names were typed in three separate blocks. The first group, 42 names in all, was arranged alphabetically in three columns. Below that was a second group labeled OTHERS. Also alphabetical, it contained 187 names.
And below that, beneath a hand-drawn line, sat a third group of 35 names that weren’t alphabetized. The three black grand jurors—Barnes, Brown, and Arrington—were at the end of the list. Poole asked Orso “to explain why the names of the jurors have been listed alphabetically up until the last page, and at the middle of that page they are not named alphabetically.”
Swartzfager objected. Judge Collins told Poole to clarify what he was getting at.
“We are alleging…that the names have been arbitrarily placed on the jury list as well as being arbitrarily placed on the grand jury.”
Collins didn’t care for that. “Now, gentlemen,” he said to Poole and London, “when you say arbitrarily placed…. You would have to allege how they were arbitrarily placed on there, and introduce testimony to support that allegation.”
Deavours got angry. “I would like to ask whether he means…that the Clerk or somebody has been tampering with the Minutes, and that these names have been added to the list since it was made?”
“That is what I am trying to bring out,” Poole said.
“All right,” Deavours said, gesturing toward Orso, “why don’t you ask him if he has been tampering with the jury list?”
Orso didn’t wait to be asked. “Is that what you mean to infer, sir?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, sir, you are just wrong. There hasn’t been anything done to the list since last April.”
Right then, Poole started losing ground, because he didn’t have any witnesses—such as a documents expert—who were prepared to testify that they could confirm physical evidence of tampering. Lacking that, it was his theory against the word of every judicial official in Jones County. He pressed on anyway, asking Orso why all the names of potential black jurors were conveniently placed at the end.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But you did know that they were Negroes, did you not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You did know that you placed them on the jury list, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, don’t you know why…they were the last ones placed on the list?”
That caused a burst of objections; as before, Collins responded by shutting down the exchange. “The Court holds that all this is immaterial as to where and on what position the names of any jurors appear on the list,” he said. “The Board of Supervisors has a right to put the names anywhere he wants to in making the list.”
Direct testimony began on Friday morning, with the prosecution laying out a slightly expanded version of the same case it had presented twice before. Once again, Willette and Troy led off by describing the terrors of that night in November 1945, while other witnesses—Bill Barnes, George Walker, Paul Britton, and so on—made it seem plausible that McGee was on Magnolia Street when the crime occurred. Mrs. Hawkins’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. John Jensen—who hadn’t testified at the first trial—said that Willette turned up that night at the back of her house right around a quarter to five, hysterical, screaming, and wearing only a “small halter.” Jensen said she took her inside and wrapped her in a sheet, which got stained with her menstrual blood.
When Mrs. Hawkins took the stand, journalists and spectators were cleared, and a question hung in the air: How far would the defense go in cross-examining her? Lawyers on both sides would have known that Pyles, in his appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court, had spent many pages arguing that her failure to scream or to resist McGee constituted consent.
For Pyles, the key was the phrasing she used in her first-trial testimony.
“The prosecutrix testified that…she stated or thought, ‘Well, if that is all, I can take it,’” he wrote. “She admits that she was not afraid for herself, but that if she resisted she would awake the children.
“From her own testimony,” Pyles went on, “it appears that she valued the sleep of her children more than her virtue. A further careful scrutiny…leaves a strong inference that she consented to the sexual act.”
What most people didn’t know was that McGee had told Poole—just as he’d told Pyles—that Mrs. Hawkins seduced him, though with Poole he didn’t mention the “double indemnity” plot. In Poole’s 1952 interview with Spivak, he said he’d heard McGee’s affair story and had even looked into it, but only in a “scanty” way that didn’t lead to any corroboration. Later, based on things he’d heard from a source in Laurel, he decided he didn’t believe it—at least, that’s what he told Spivak. Poole said that, after the trial was over, he paid a visit to a highway patrolman who’d been friendly to him, to ask for an honest account of what he knew about Mrs. Hawkins’s private life.
“I told him that…I’d just like to talk to him privately and that I didn’t want any lies,” Poole said. “…He said that he went with [Willette] prior to the time she got married. At that time, he did think she was not the type girl that would do it.”
“That would do what?” Spivak asked.
“That would go out and commit adultery.”
“[W]omen don’t run around committing adultery and advertising it.”
“He is the type of fellow that would get anything in his hands he could find,” Poole said.
“He was, eh?”
“Frankly, I don’t believe he [was] trying to cover up this thing at all.”
Not a word of this came up during the trial. Questioned by Deavours, Mrs. Hawkins told her story again, and he asked what she did to resist. “I begged him not to do anything,” she said. “I pleaded with him and I pushed him, and he was so big and rough, he was just a brute and there was nothing I could do.”
“Did he make any threats towards you?”
“He said, ‘I will cut your throat. Don’t make any noise, I will cut your throat.’…The baby kept whimpering and he said, ‘Keep that damned brat quiet or I will cut her head open’ or something to that effect, and during that time I was calling Troy, and every time I said anything he would shut me up…and he told me what he came for, and he said he was going to do it and me dead or alive, and the only reason in the world I took such things was for my family. You know, mother instinct is something.”
She went on to say that she never consented but was overpowered by a man whom she described as “a brutal beast” and “a monster.” There wasn’t anything she could do to fight back
, she said, but she would have submitted anyway if that had been necessary to save the lives of her family. “I would have taken anything in preference to having anything happen to my little girls,” she said.
When Poole’s turn came, he established that Mrs. Hawkins couldn’t identify the rapist, because it was too dark to see his face.
“I never saw him,” she agreed.
“All you know is that he was a big monster of a Negro, that was what you thought?”
“He was a Negro, and he was a beast.”
“And he was a big old Negro, and as you termed it a while ago, a monster—”
Deavours objected. She said she hadn’t seen his face; there was no need to belabor it. Poole moved on, having made a point that wouldn’t do him much good with a white jury. At five feet seven inches, McGee was no “monster.” But he was young, muscular, and black, which was all the jurors needed to hear. Besides, whatever size he was, a physically fit male would have seemed monstrous enough to a ninety-two-pound woman with a baby in her arms.
Trial transcripts can make for stark reading, because there’s no descriptive language about a witness’s tone of voice or physical reactions. In the case of Mrs. Hawkins, however, it’s evident that she became terribly upset during her time on the stand. Poole and London talked about this toward the end of the trial, arguing that the prosecution had tried to prejudice the jury by putting her in a side room after she’d stepped down, so they could hear her sobbing. London called her “very much upset, almost hysterical” and said she started crying toward the close of Poole’s questioning. As the transcript shows, Poole pushed her in a way that would have angered local spectators.
At one point, after Mrs. Hawkins described the moment when she realized that the man crawling toward her on the floor was an intruder, Poole asked whether she’d screamed when she “first knew it wasn’t Troy.” She’d already stated that, in her groggy state, she thought the person on the floor was her husband. By the time she realized he wasn’t, the attacker was on top of her, using his strength to pin her down and threatening to kill her.