by Alex Heard
I didn’t know any of this when I first started researching McGee’s story a few years ago, but it didn’t take long to see that the case, after all these decades, was still full of mysteries that warranted a fresh look. I got interested one summer day in 2004, when I was browsing in a used bookstore and came across Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown, a history of lynching published in 2002. The book contains a brief account of the McGee case, and as I skimmed it, I realized I’d heard of McGee long before, in 1979.
Back then, I was a junior at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, studying English and history and working on student publications. The school provided us with the guidance of a part-time adviser named Jim Leeson, a former civil rights reporter who was originally from Hattiesburg, the town near Laurel where McGee was arrested in 1945. One night, as he often did, Leeson invited a few students over for dinner. Late in the evening, he played a tape he’d recorded himself in 1951, from a broadcast by Hattiesburg radio station WFOR. It was a live, half-hour news report that went out from the execution scene on the night McGee died.
The electrocution happened a few minutes after midnight on Tuesday, May 8, on the second floor of the Jones County Courthouse. As required by Mississippi law—for a condemned man of any race—McGee was put to death in a portable electric chair that was set up in the same courtroom where he’d been convicted. Inside, official onlookers—including local and state law enforcement people, prosecutors, newsmen, and a few male relatives of Mrs. Hawkins, who wasn’t there—waited for McGee to be brought over from the city jail next door and strapped in to the clumsy-looking wood-and-metal contraption. Outside, a crowd of roughly a thousand white adults and children milled around, talking, laughing, and looking up at the courthouse’s second-floor windows for a sign that the execution was about to happen.
A truck housing a generator was parked near the jail on a courthouse driveway. The electrical current would travel from the truck through long lines that snaked up to a second-story window and over the courtroom floor. The radiomen were outside too, using a portable transmitter they’d set up near the truck. There wasn’t much to see, so they made do by talking about the scene in the courtyard.
“Time is rapidly running out for Willie McGee,” said one of the broadcasters, a Mississippi radio veteran named Granville Walters.
“…[T]hey are opening the truck, getting it all set, ready to turn it on, so that the juice will be funneled up through these cables…to the chair.”
Leeson didn’t play this tape to be morbid. He was twenty when he recorded it—about my age when I heard it—and he shared it as an example of how much things had changed since his years in college. He grew up in Mississippi before the civil rights era began, when segregation and Jim Crow were the ironclad law of the land. I was born in Mississippi too—in Jackson in 1957—but my experiences were completely different. He lived in a small town in the 1940s, a decade when lynchings were still common in the South, public interracial romances were forbidden by law and custom, and famous political demagogues like Mississippi senator Theodore G. Bilbo still rolled into towns and delivered live, courthouse-square speeches promising that white supremacy would endure forever.
I grew up in the 1960s, on a suburban street that could have been almost anywhere. And although I was able to understand, dimly, that major changes were happening, it would be a pose to say that I really grasped what was going on. I was only four when James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, sparking fatal riots; five when Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson; and seven when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in the central Mississippi town of Philadelphia.
I reamined oblivious, even when the changes started affecting me directly. I was in seventh grade in 1970, when Jackson’s public schools were finally desegregated after sixteen years of resistance. By the time I started paying attention to current events—in ninth grade, which was also the year I first read To Kill a Mockingbird—my Mississippi years had come to an end. My father took a new job in Kansas and we moved in 1972. I’ve been back to the state many times since—I have family there—but only as a visitor, never a resident.
Seeing Dray’s book made me want to know more, not only about McGee, but about the history of Mississippi and the South as a whole between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s. It was an important and violent period—notable for the front-line activities of Communists and other radicals—and it’s usually skipped in standard histories of the civil rights movement.
I looked around for a full-length account of the McGee case, but I couldn’t find one, just a few pages here and there in books, old magazine and journal articles, and on Web sites. McGee was the subject of a chapter in Carl Rowan’s South of Freedom, a 1952 collection of reporting about race issues below the Mason-Dixon Line, and in Jessica Mitford’s 1977 memoir, A Fine Old Conflict. The case also came up in Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 study of the history and politics of rape.
From these and other accounts, I could see that the question of “what really happened” between McGee and Mrs. Hawkins was still a moving target. Dray seemed convinced that the affair story was true, as did Mitford, a former Communist Party member who was involved in McGee protests in Jackson in 1951. Brownmiller took the opposite view, pointing out that the affair was an allegation, not proven fact. She thought Mrs. Hawkins might have been telling the truth, and that she could have been defamed by people who found it easier to blame her than the Mississippi justice system, or who could not accept that, sometimes, black men accused of rape in the bad old days had actually done something wrong. Brownmiller didn’t mean this excused mob action or one-sided trials. She did mean that it was possible for a woman like Mrs. Hawkins to be turned into a caricature—that of a soulless, evil sex fiend who didn’t care who had to die to cover up her lust and lies.
Rowan, a prominent black journalist originally from Tennessee, didn’t seem sure either way. At times posing as a drifter, he traveled to Laurel in early 1951, where he heard juke-joint talk to the effect that everybody in town knew McGee and Mrs. Hawkins were carrying on. However, he had no way of knowing whether this was truth or fiction. Politically, Rowan was a middle-of-the-roader who didn’t care for McGee’s Communist defenders, and he believed their interference did more harm than good. In a chapter called “Run! The Red Vampire!” he wrote, “The Reds, shedding crocodile tears, put a fatal ‘curse’ on McGee, for non-Communist liberals began to shy away. A Negro leader explained that the ‘case would warrant the support of the general public, but because the Communists are connected with it, the people are afraid to say anything.’”
From where I was based—Santa Fe, New Mexico—it was hard to do much research, but I did notice that the case’s basic facts didn’t match up from one telling to the next. For whatever reason, nobody spelled Willette Hawkins’s first name right, using variations like Wiletta, Willett, and Willametta. There was also confusion about McGee’s children. One book said he had four, named Willie Earl, Della, Gracie Lee, and Mary. Another said there were two, named Adolphus and Marjorie. Those were small mistakes, but they hinted at something significant. It seemed possible that, like Eleanor Roosevelt, the people who had written about the McGee case really didn’t know much about him or Mrs. Hawkins.
The other glaring problem was missing information. The three circuit-court trials were never summarized in much detail, which was probably a sign that the transcripts hadn’t survived. It was unclear whether Bella Abzug had argued the case in trial court or had come in later, during appeals. It was evident that some of the defense work was handled by in-state lawyers—I saw the names Dixon Pyles and John Poole, Mississippians both—but there were few facts about who they were or what they did.
At some point that summer, I realized that if I wanted to know more, I had to start over, diving in to see if I could find comprehensive newspaper coverage and primary documents—transcripts, appeals, letters, organizational papers, FBI files, and s
o forth. If the information wasn’t available, I’d probably hang it up, because there was no reason to keep reading secondhand accounts.
At the same time, I would try to find any surviving children of McGee and Mrs. Hawkins, and if I couldn’t locate them—or if they refused to talk—I’d probably quit for that reason as well. They were sure to know indispensable things. If they wouldn’t open up, I’d never feel confident that I knew the whole story.
Of the two main tasks, I suspected that finding family members would be harder. McGee’s wife, Rosalee, became a public figure during the case, because the CRC sent her on speaking tours that took her all over the North, Midwest, and West. But then she dropped out of sight, appearing in only a couple of newspaper stories after 1952. I had no idea where she ended up, what happened to her children, or whether they numbered two, four, or six.
I had less to go on with the Hawkins children: All I knew was that, circa 1945, there were three young girls. What were their names? And were they or their parents still alive?
It took months to find out, and as I did so—through trial, error, and luck—I became convinced that the old, long-dormant story of Willie McGee deserved a complete reexamination. Partly because it was an important civil rights episode that had never been explored in full. Partly because, as I soon found out, some of the mistakes about the case were game changers.
I found the Hawkins daughters first—sort of. For months, I didn’t know what their names were, and it would be a while before I communicated with any of them directly. A Web search led me to a woman named Mary Mostert, a Utah-based freelance journalist in her seventies who had written about McGee for the Nation back in 1951, when she was a young progressive based in Memphis, Tennessee. Mostert, who had moved to the right politically since then, was still working, and she’d recently written a Web article that used her old Nation story as an example of how the political bias of editors can distort what a journalist intends to say.
Her sense in 1951 was that the case was too confusing for her to know whether McGee was guilty or not. But the Nation, she said, had changed her words to emphasize his innocence. Just the opposite happened to a colleague who filed a report for Time. He was unsure too, but since Time was known for its strong anti-Communist line, his editors manipulated his copy to underscore McGee’s guilt.
I called Mostert, who told me her piece had prompted two of the Hawkins’s grown grandchildren to e-mail her, asking for tips on researching the case. Later, she heard from one of the daughters, who explained that it was she who had inadvertently aroused the curiosity of the grandkids. This woman—Mostert wouldn’t give me her name at first—had gotten upset when she happened to see an HBO documentary profiling Beah Richards, in which Richards read from “A Black Woman Speaks.” She had heard about the affair story, but she didn’t know until seeing this program that it was so widely accepted as fact. She mentioned this to her sisters, who told their children about it. Some of the grandkids decided to do Web research on their own, which led them to Mostert.
I asked Mostert what the family’s goal was. She wasn’t sure, and she wouldn’t give me contact information. Instead, she passed my name along to the daughter. For months, I communicated with her indirectly, using Mostert as a go-between and occasionally seeing snippets of what she’d written in her e-mails. It was no surprise that she believed McGee was guilty.
“When I was eight years old, Willie McGee broke into our home and raped my mother,” she wrote in one. “My twenty-month-old sister was in bed with her. My [other] sister and I were in the next room. My father was in the back bedroom, trying to rest after a late shift at work and helping my mother comfort a sick child. Our lives changed forever.”
Sometimes, through Mostert, I would pass along a piece of information I had come across, and during one of these exchanges I made a mistake that almost shut down the conversation for good. Since I didn’t have any sources in Mississippi—just friends and relatives—I was cold-calling all over the place at first, talking to anybody from old civil rights activists like Ed King (a white Jacksonian who’d worked with Medgar Evers and who shared a home with one of Dixon Pyles’s sons, Todd) to Richard Barrett, a New Jersey transplant who had made a name as Mississippi’s most outspoken modern segregationist. Barrett had some useful thoughts about sources, but I should have been more careful. In an e-mail to Mostert, I mentioned him in connection with something he’d said about libel law. She sent the Hawkins daughters only a fragment of what I’d written, and for a long time they thought he and I might be colleagues on the extreme right. Given the nature of the McGee case, they wanted nothing to do with that.
I found the McGees in an equally roundabout way. After spending weeks trying to track them down without success, I wrote a letter to the editor of the People’s World—a Chicago-based newspaper descended from the Daily Worker—hoping that some old-timer who remembered Rosalee McGee would call. Several months later, I got an e-mail from Bridgette McGee Robinson, a woman from Las Vegas who said she was Willie McGee’s granddaughter. The People’s World ran my letter online, so my name turned up in a Web search she’d done while looking into the case. She also told me about another relative who was interested: Tracey McGee, the granddaughter of McGee’s late brother, Jasper McGee Jr.
I reached Tracey first. A longtime Bay Area resident, she said that she and Bridgette had only recently learned of each other’s existence. Now they were doing research with an eye toward co-writing a family history about the case. She added that two of McGee’s children, Willie Earl and Della, were still around, both of them living in Las Vegas. And then she left me hanging with a cryptic statement. “I have to tell you that some of the things people say about this case are wrong,” she said.
Like what?
“I shouldn’t talk about that on the phone. Can you get out to Las Vegas and talk to Bridgette and Della?”
My wife, Susan, and I made that trip in February 2005, traveling by car and arriving on a Friday night. The next morning, we rolled onto the endless pavement of North Las Vegas, following one of the city’s racetrack boulevards, Camino Al Norte, and taking a series of quick turns that put us on a side street called Jose Leon. The street was in a quiet development of middle-class homes that baked blandly under the winter sun.
Bridgette, who was in her thirties, greeted us at a side-door entrance and took us into a small beige living room that merged with a dining room where she’d laid out finger food and drinks. She was plump, funny, and friendly, as was her husband, Harold, a cheerful man who came bounding off a couch to shake our hands. Willie Earl wasn’t there. He either couldn’t show up (because of health reasons) or didn’t want to; I was never sure which. Della was on a couch, sitting silent and stone-faced. She was in her late sixties, but she hadn’t retired. At the time, she was working at the Stardust Hotel.
We settled in around the table, Della at the far end, Harold on the couch, and Bridgette next to me and Susan, her pile of old newspaper stories and family photos within easy reach. She started showing us things, beginning with an old colorized photographic portrait of a light-skinned black woman. I’d never seen a picture of Rosalee McGee before and assumed this was she. But as Bridgette told me, this woman’s name was Eliza Jane Payton McGee, and she, not Rosalee, was the mother of all of Willie McGee’s children. There were four: Willie Earl, Della, Gracie Lee, and Mary. Bridgette and Della had never heard of an Adolphus or Marjorie. Whoever Adolphus and Marjorie were, they weren’t part of this family.
The Eliza Jane Payton news was a stunner. Rosalee McGee—loyal wife, selfless mother, brave CRC spokesperson—had been central to how Willie’s story was presented to the public during his appeals. She and Willie always acted as if the four children were theirs, and as if Rosalee had custody of them throughout the duration of the case. But Della said that she, her siblings, and her mother left Mississippi after McGee’s arrest. Among other things, this meant the “Gracie Lee” letter to President Truman was faked.
Why did
Rosalee and Willie lie about their relationship?
Bridgette and Della didn’t know, but solving this mystery was very important to them. To Della, Rosalee was an identity thief, and she said there had been an episode long ago—she couldn’t remember when—in which Rosalee had tried to collect Social Security payments that belonged to McGee’s biological children.
While we all puzzled over this, Bridgette asked Della if she thought Rosalee might have been a girlfriend of Willie’s rather than a wife. Apparently, he got around. “Couldn’t it have been possible,” Bridgette said, “that he was going with…whatever, Willameeta, whatever her name was—”
“The woman that he was supposed to rape?” Della said.
“…That he was going with her, and then he could have been going with a black woman too? And he could have been with grandma. He was that type of man.”
There was no particular response to that. Maybe Della didn’t want to talk about what type of man he was in front of me. I tried an easier question, asking if she had clear memories of him. She was in grade school when he was arrested in 1945.
“Um…hmm, I remember him,” she said.
“Can you tell me what was he like?” I mentioned that, in one account I’d read, McGee was depicted as being simpleminded, but that this didn’t seem right. I’d seen a picture of him published in Life. He didn’t look mentally impaired.
