by Alex Heard
Amid the drumbeats, there were even rumors of Ku Klux Klan activity, which was unusual. The Klan was a national force in the 1920s, and it would be important again in the 1960s. But in 1950 it was a marginal outfit, treated as a joke by Mississippi journalists. On July 17, 1950, an A.P. story outlined a Klan power struggle going on in Jackson between Dr. Lycurgus Spinks, a “white-maned” eccentric who ran for governor in 1947, and Thomas J. Flowers, a retired New York policeman originally from Mississippi. In late May, Spinks held a small rally at his “white frame ‘Imperial Palace’” on the outskirts of Jackson—“the first Klan extravaganza here in the memory of veteran newsmen,” the story said—but it was a weak display. Policemen told Spinks he couldn’t burn a cross on his lawn, so he didn’t. Among the spectators was a “Negro boy [who] watched wide-eyed without being molested.”
The FBI wasn’t so sure the Klan was irrelevant. Throughout the five-day period bracketing the 25th, as the situation in Jackson shifted from unruly to dangerous, agents and informants circulated throughout the city, taking notes, hanging out in government buildings and hotel lobbies, and writing reports. The Bureau’s file on the McGee case contains dozens of revealing pages about the events that ensued, including a detailed, unsigned summary document that says the FBI believed local Klansmen were responsible. Whether these were Spinks men, Flowers men, or unaffiliated freelancers remains unknown. After all these years, the names of any alleged Klansmen are still blacked out.
As it happened, Reverend Harris’s thousand-man army never materialized. The CRC had negotiated with Governor Wright, who agreed to grant an audience to a manageably sized group, numbering around a dozen, which consisted of liberal Democrats, former Wallace supporters, and even a Communist or two—though nobody advertised that affiliation. Behind the scenes, there were a few black CRC members in Jackson that week, but everybody who appeared before Wright was white, including the delegation’s leader, CRC attorney Aubrey Grossman.
There were several women, among them the most prominent delegate, Dr. Gene Weltfish, a Columbia University anthropologist who had studied under the late Franz Boas, an early proponent of the scientific view that no race was inherently inferior. Weltfish’s research specialties were the customs and languages of Indian tribes like the Pawnee, but she became well known for a 1943 pamphlet called The Races of Mankind, which she co-wrote with her Columbia colleague Ruth Benedict. Using plain language to describe contemporary research into human traits like skin color, cranial shape, and intelligence scores, Races championed Boas’s egalitarian racial views against the backdrop of World War II, at a time when America’s stance on race was painfully contorted—given that the government was condemning Hitler even as it sent a segregated army to fight him.
“All races of man are shoulder to shoulder,” the pamphlet said.
“Our armed forces are in North Africa with its Negro, Berber, and Near-East peoples. They are in India. They are in China. They are in the Solomons with its dark-skinned, ‘strong’-haired Melanesians. Our neighbors now are peoples of all the races of the earth.”
Races was supposed to be a unifying propaganda tool, countering Nazi superman theories, but American race theories killed its chances of becoming a government publication. Both the USO and the army decided against distributing the pamphlet, because Southern congressmen raised so much hell over some of its contents.
The problem was Benedict and Weltfish’s argument about intelligence, which they said was influenced more by opportunity than by skin color. Citing 1917 test results from black and white soldiers in the American Expeditionary Force, they pointed out that blacks from New York, Illinois, and Ohio outscored whites from Mississippi, Kentucky, and Arkansas. This happened, they said, because the Northern blacks in the sample generally had better access to education. They tried to put it delicately—“Negroes with better luck after they were born got higher scores than Whites with less luck”—but this still infuriated powerful Southern legislators like Kentucky’s Andrew J. May, chair of the House Committee on Military Affairs.
The clemency delegation’s rank and file also included less prominent people who were picked because they were young, idealistic, and clean-cut. Frank Stoll was a former bomber pilot, originally from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who had flown some forty-five combat missions in the South Pacific. He and his wife, Anne, met in Chicago after the war and fell in with a group of progressives centered at the University of Wisconsin, among them Lorraine Hansberry, the African-American poet and dramatist who would later write A Raisin in the Sun. Sidney Ordower was a veteran from Chicago who had fought in Normandy, where he won a purple heart as an infantry captain. Among his interests, Ordower was a gospel music lover; he became a Chicago fixture in later years by hosting a TV program called Jubilee Showcase.
Some of the delegates were fated for Red Scare conflicts with the federal government as the 1950s ground on. In 1952, Weltfish was attacked for stating publicly that the United States was using germ warfare in Korea, which echoed the propaganda of the Soviet Union. That year, she told a Senate subcommittee that all she’d done was hand out a statement from a Canadian peace activist who had made the charge, but she refused to answer questions about whether she agreed with this claim or had ever been a Communist. Columbia’s trustees weren’t pleased. Though they denied that politics were a factor, they terminated her contract as a lecturer in 1953.
Another woman in the group was Winifred Feise, who still had clear memories of the clemency hearing when I interviewed her by phone in 2005. Feise was a former New Yorker who, at the time of the hearing, was living in New Orleans with her husband, Richard Feise. They’d moved there when Richard took a wartime job with Higgins Industries, builder of PT boats and the Higgins boat, a landing craft used on D-day. Both had been involved in leftist politics since college, and both would wind up on the government’s watch list of suspected subversives. In New Orleans, they got to know activists like Oakley Johnson, an English instructor who’d been fired from New York’s City College because of his left-wing political beliefs, and James A. Dombrowski, who was director of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an interracial progressive group.
Up until the summer of 1950, Winifred Feise hadn’t paid much attention to the McGee case. But the CRC needed bodies in the field, so she signed up. Before going to Jackson for the hearing, she’d been part of a small group that went to Laurel from New Orleans to knock on doors and ask questions about Mrs. Hawkins. These visits were noticed, and the visitors’ movements were reported in Laurel and Jackson newspapers. On July 14 the Laurel Leader-Call published sketchy details about “two men and two women” who turned up in the Magnolia Street neighborhood looking for evidence that McGee had done yard work on the Hawkins’s block. A man named F. S. Ford said the strangers were told repeatedly that McGee was a truck driver, not a yard man, but they persisted. As the story suggestively put it, “The men who accompanied the two women remained in a high-powered and expensive automobile as the contacts were made at the doors of the homes within the crime vicinity.”
Winifred was in that group, and she remembered knocking on the door of the Hawkins’s next-door neighbor, the Jensens. While the men talked to Mrs. Jensen, Winifred carefully studied the driveway between the Jensen and Hawkins homes. It was her understanding that Mrs. Jensen had testified that she saw McGee run down this driveway during his escape.
That’s not quite right, but Winifred seemed certain that this was part of the prosecution’s case. “The whole story was made up anyway,” she told me. “These two, this woman and McGee, had known each other since they were kids playing on the tracks and stuff. At least that’s the story we had. He had an affair with her. Nobody ever denied that. It was not a rape.”
On the morning of the clemency hearing, Feise came up by train from New Orleans, arriving with another woman, Martha Wheeler, at the Illinois Central Depot, a sturdy brick building on Mill Street, in the shadow of the Hotel Edwards. Walking east into the heart of downtown, she
was armored against the day in a sundress and wide-brimmed straw hat.
“We put on our gloves and our hats and knew that we had to behave and be good,” she recalled. “The few blacks who were on the street saw us coming and nodded or blinked or let us make eye contact to let us know that they knew we were there. It was an absolutely eerie and amazing sensation and experience.”
When the women got to their hotel, the Heidelberg, a surprise was waiting. Feise assumed the meeting would take place in some nondescript state office building, but she was told Governor Wright had decided on a fancier setting—the house of representatives chamber in the New Capitol. The hearing was going to be a public show.
Some 150 to 200 people assembled in the house chamber at 11 a.m. Roughly 25 CRC members were on hand, 10 of them serving as official delegates, but only 4 men and 2 women ended up speaking. Abzug wasn’t there. She’d done her part the day before, when she, along with Poole and Bloch, argued the error coram nobis petition before the Mississippi Supreme Court. Chief Justice Harvey McGehee turned it down on the morning of the 25th, by which time Abzug was already in Washington, preparing to ask for a last-minute stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court. McGehee said the defense was offering no new evidence for its claim that Mrs. Hawkins had perjured herself. He called the charge “wholly unsupported by any proof other than that the petitioner himself had sworn to such general allegation.”
Along with local and regional reporters, the Northern press was represented by John Popham of the New York Times, Stephen Fischer of the Compass, and Harry Raymond of the Daily Worker. A Jackson Daily News photograph taken that morning showed Raymond, with a sly look on his face, walking into the house chamber—next to Governor Wright, Chief Justice McGehee, Attorney General John Kyle, and Colonel T. B. Birdsong, the state commissioner of public safety.
A caption identified Raymond as a reporter for “the Daily Worker of New York, a Communist publication,” but that didn’t quite cover it. In fact, he was exactly the kind of person Fred Sullens was so worried about: an old-school Communist agitator, one who used journalism the same way Sullens did—as a tool for advancing his political beliefs, often at the expense of accuracy. Raymond’s real name was Harold J. Lightcap. During his long career on the left he’d done time for violent rioting in Union Square (he was arrested in 1930 along with Communist leader William Z. Foster), had reportedly served prior sentences for burglary and auto theft, and had been married to a radical labor organizer from Russia, Rose Nelson (aka Rose Lightcap), who was indicted in 1950 on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. As a Daily Worker reporter, Raymond was tireless and fearless, a hard-drinking man who’d covered everything from the race riots in Columbia, Tennessee, to the Willie Earle lynching to the Smith Act trials.
The house chamber was an ornate space with high ceilings, dark furniture, and a color scheme that bathed its inhabitants in soft light. The CRC delegates were seated in big swivel chairs on the front row of the legislators’ floor area, facing a lectern with a microphone. Wright and McGehee sat in the second row, interrupting when they felt like it—which was often—through mikes mounted at their desks. Spread out in seats behind the main group, or leaning against walls, were dozens of local spectators, American Legionnaires, and even a reputed Klansman or two—many of them visibly hostile to the visitors from the North.
The hearing lasted just over two hours. Dressed in a wide-lapeled suit, his graying hair slicked down on the sides, Aubrey Grossman led off, starting out calmly but getting frustrated as it became obvious that his arguments weren’t doing any good. “[Grossman] delivered the opening address in tempered language,” Popham wrote in the Times, “but…made the closing talk in a shouting voice, and was shaking his finger at Chief Justice Harvey McGehee….”
Both sides contributed to the futility of what took place, but much of the blame goes to Governor Wright, who had no interest in a productive discussion. In essence, the hearing was a strategic (and effective) means of bottling up the opposition while giving the appearance of fair play. He’d managed it so that there were only a handful of CRC delegates in town. Now he had them cooped up in a government building, a setting he controlled, instead of marching around on the streets.
On the CRC’s side of the gap, there were two problems. At least one person in the group should have taken the time to read the transcript of the third trial, which was stored right there in the capitol. Judging by the back-and-forth that day, it’s apparent that the delegates gleaned their knowledge of the case almost entirely from newspaper stories or, as Winifred Feise had done, from word of mouth. “Some claimed they had read portions of the record,” a Jackson Daily News story said, “but admitted that what they read was printed either in the leftist newspaper, the Daily Compass, or in Civil Rights publications.” The group’s skimpy knowledge base left them vulnerable when Wright and McGehee, lawyers both, pounded them about not having their facts straight.
The other problem was the same thing that hobbled Abzug, something that only she or Patterson had the power to change. The CRC kept implying that it had electrifying new evidence proving that Mrs. Hawkins had lied. But they wouldn’t say what it was, insisting that the place to do that was inside a courtroom during a fourth trial. Grossman ran into this wall almost immediately.
“Let me make this clear,” he said. “We feel positively, definitely, strongly that Willie McGee is innocent. And an innocent man should not die…. The evidence, excluding the confession, is meaningless. As time passes, facts will come out to show Willie McGee is innocent.”
What facts? He didn’t say, so his plea came down to telling hostile state officials that they were cruel and unfair. Grossman threw in a general indictment of Mississippi itself, touching on Jim Crow laws, lynchings and legal lynchings, and the state’s racist congressional delegation. He said it was “no accident” that the McGee case happened in the home state of a man like Representative John Rankin, whose ideas were “totally false.”
Wright bristled. “I assume that your group came in good faith to present reasons why I should stay the execution of Willie McGee,” he said. “You have criticized everything, including the administration of justice in the state of Mississippi. I’m not going to have any more criticisms of our courts, of our customs. Stick to this case!”
It went like that with speaker after speaker. Frank Stoll, the veteran from Wisconsin, said he didn’t know all the facts but asked that the state allow a new trial anyway, one “where there isn’t a mob yelling outside.”
Ordower also admitted he hadn’t read the transcript, but said that basic knowledge of the trial was enough to show any thinking person that the evidence was inadequate.
McGehee peppered him with questions about the trial, touching on fine-point details like the break-in method used by the rapist and the location of the parked grocery truck. Ordower replied that everything introduced by the prosecution was “very circumstantial evidence.” He happened to be right, unless you counted the confession, which McGehee certainly did. He reminded Ordower that it was, after all, his court that had recognized the confession’s legitimacy. Did Ordower not understand that it was judges who decide whether a confession was free and voluntary?
During her turn, Weltfish tried an anthropological argument, which came off as condescending. She told Wright and McGehee that their “customs and background” made it impossible for them to look rationally at a rape case involving a black man and a white woman. “Your stresses and anxieties don’t permit for objectivity,” she said.
“It is your opinion that there should be no death penalty for rape?” Wright asked.
Weltfish answered with a question. “Do you know how many places in the world rape is punished by death?”
“I don’t, but I’m not interested,” Wright said. “I’m interested only in Mississippi law.”
“Has a white man ever been condemned to death for rape in this state?”
“I don’t know. But it woul
dn’t make any difference.”
Wright also attacked Rosalee McGee’s trustworthiness. During his heated exchanges with Feise, he made it clear that he knew Rosalee wasn’t Willie’s first spouse. He referred to the Compass stories as “a pack of lies written by Willie McGee’s so-called wife.”
“Is she not Willie McGee’s wife?” Feise said.
“I don’t know which one she is,” Wright countered.
Feise got some licks in too, shocking the audience with the audacity of her questions. “It was obvious throughout that Mrs. Feise…disturbed Gov. Wright and his supporters most deeply,” Fischer wrote in the Compass. While some women “turned their heads or hid their faces in handkerchiefs,” Feise said she’d given the entire controversy deep consideration—from a woman’s perspective. Though she was thin herself, it was her belief that Mrs. Hawkins should have, and could have, fought off the rapist.
“Could I allow myself to be raped in bed with one of my children by my side?” she asked. “Just lie there and let myself be raped? If so, it would mean that I permitted it.” After the gasps died down, Feise scandalized the crowd again with questions about such topics as Mrs. Hawkins’s menstrual period.
When the time came for a final appeal, Grossman collected his thoughts and asked Wright to issue a stay. “I’m saying to you, Governor, unless you have some interest in putting McGee to death immediately, what human hurt can be done to delay it, so people throughout the world will never say you refused to grant a stay when McGee’s attorneys assure you they have new evidence to present? I ask only for a stay so the evidence can be presented and the issue proved.”