by Alex Heard
By the time we parted company, I had no idea what they were thinking. Eventually, they did decide to talk to me, but that didn’t happen for more than a year. As those months went by and we sporadically kept in touch, I started to believe that they would eventually choose to talk. To do nothing would mean, by default, condemning their mother to an eternal reputation as an adulteress, liar, and murderer. Sandra, for one, couldn’t tolerate that. As she put it to me later in an e-mail: “My mother was a victim. She’s become the accused.”
two
A MAN WASN’T BORN TO LIVE FOREVER
There’s an undated picture of Willie McGee that looks like it was probably taken at the time of his arrest in November 1945. It was shot by a now deceased Laurel man who sometimes photographed accused criminals in hopes of selling images to a newspaper or magazine. His brother, who held on to it, says there’s no record of when it was made. But, notably, McGee is dressed in street clothes: a checked jacket with dark sleeves and pointed collars, and, under the jacket, a light-colored shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. The picture shows a handsome young man with smooth skin, piercing eyes, a strong jaw, and a broad nose. He’s standing in front of a cell door, staring into the camera with a serious but calm expression on his face. If the photo is from 1945, he looks remarkably composed for a man in his position.
McGee would have known what was in store if he fell into the hands of a lynch mob. As a black man accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi in 1945, he would, at the very least, have been killed. At worst, he would have been tortured by an enraged gang of white men who might have taken their time before finishing him off with a knife, gun, or rope. There weren’t nearly as many lynchings in the South in the 1940s as there had been in the period between 1890 and 1930, but they still happened, and they could still be medieval in their intensity.
As McGee may have known, there had been a gruesome double lynching in 1942 near Shubuta, a small town about thirty-five miles northeast of Laurel. There, two fourteen-year-olds named Charles Lang and Ernest Green were taken from jail and killed by a mob for allegedly trying to assault a thirteen-year-old white girl. They were found hanging from a rusty old bridge over the Chickasawhay River, but they’d been mutilated first. Madison S. Jones, an NAACP field operative who filed a report on the incident, wrote that the boys’ “re-productive organs were cut off. Pieces of flesh had been jerked away from their bodies with pliers and one boy had a screwdriver rammed down his throat so that it protruded from his neck.”
In an earlier era, McGee’s chances of living long after a rape charge would have been slim to none. But by the mid-1940s, he had a reasonable shot of surviving to face trial, because local and state law enforcement officials often made serious efforts to keep potential lynching victims out of mob hands. A lot depended on who was governor at the time, and McGee was arrested during the term of a chief executive who cared about law and order: Thomas Bailey.
Still, the prospect of a trial couldn’t have been much comfort. In many cases from that era, the court proceedings were only formalities, with all-white, all-male juries virtually guaranteed to deliver guilty verdicts and death penalties when a black person was accused of raping or killing a white, whether the evidence was strong or weak. Civil rights people in the North had a rueful term for it: “legal lynching.”
A typical legal-lynching episode occurred in early 1934, in the northwest Mississippi town of Hernando, when three black men from Memphis—Isaac Howard, Johnny Jones, and Ernest McGehee—were tried on charges of robbery and the alleged sexual assault of a seventeen-year-old white schoolgirl. Like McGee, they were hurried off to Jackson after their arrest and kept there until it was time for them to appear in court. When they were delivered to Hernando on February 12, 400 National Guard troops were assembled to provide safe escort. “Rifles, sidearms, grenades, gas guns and gas masks were issued to them,” the Associated Press reported, “and they were accompanied by engineers who will be available to build barricades.”
Even with all that firepower—and barbed-wire tangles circling the courthouse—several locals tried to force their way in. One old man sliced his hand on the wire and was asked by a reporter if he’d cut himself accidentally. “Hell, no,” he said. “We want those Negroes.”
Inside, the prisoners were kept in a vault until they emerged just long enough to plead guilty. They were taken back to Jackson in a steel-barred train; one month later, they were returned to Hernando for hanging. (Mississippi’s portable electric chair wasn’t put into use until 1940.) Even then, it was necessary to have a 200-man guard on duty and circulate false stories about their arrival time.
Were these men guilty of anything? They might have been, but it’s hard to know since the judicial process was so corrupted. As they died on the gallows, they issued a stream of statements, prayers, and confessions that sounded like scripted warnings to members of their race. Their last words were widely quoted in Mississippi newspapers, including the Laurel Leader-Call, which, coincidentally, ran a front-page story about the execution on the same day Troy and Willette Hawkins got married. The message was clear: Don’t touch white women, or this, most definitely, will happen to you.
“Tell others of my kind never to attack none who don’t belong to them,” Howard said. “Tell ’em never to do that. I believe in my God—goodbye.”
“I want to warn others of my race,” said Jones. “I wish some of them were here to see how we go. It’s awful.”
Though, technically, these men weren’t lynched, they took a very fast ride to oblivion: only eighty days passed between their arrests and deaths. This brand of speedy retribution is what McGee was looking at, and in early December, when state troopers brought him back to Laurel for his arraignment, he didn’t look calm anymore.
The crime that put McGee in the crosshairs happened sometime after 4 a.m. on November 2. At first, any details about what took place were slow in coming, skimpy, and controlled by the police chief, sheriff, and local prosecutors.
The Leader-Call wrote about the alleged rape the same day it occurred, in a short item headlined “Forcible Entry, Criminal Assault, Reported.” The victim wasn’t named, just described. She was a white woman living with her family on South Magnolia Street, and she’d been taken away to recover at a hospital in “a nearby city.” (The story didn’t say, but it was Hattiesburg.) She was raped by an attacker who threatened her life if she made a sound.
This story and a follow-up said there was a suspect, but it wasn’t Willie McGee. The first man arrested was a thirty-four-year-old laborer named Floyd Nix, who was described as “a former employe [sic] of the woman.” Sheriff Luther Hill and Chief of Police Wayne Valentine had rounded up several black men for questioning and released them that day. With Nix, they felt confident enough that he was their man that they sent him to Jackson for safekeeping. The reports never said what evidence this decision was based on.
On Saturday, November 3, everything changed with the arrest of a man identified in the Leader-Call as “Willie Magee, 30-year-old Laurel negro.” The paper spelled his name wrong but got his age right: McGee was born on November 4, 1915, so he turned thirty the day after he was picked up. He was arrested in Hattiesburg on a larceny charge, stemming from unauthorized use of a truck owned by his employer, the Laurel Wholesale Grocery Company. The report correctly said—though police initially denied—that McGee had confessed to the rape after being taken back to Laurel from Hattiesburg. He didn’t stay in Laurel long. Like Nix, he was taken to Jackson for protection and questioning. During all this time—and for the next thirty days—he was held without benefit of counsel.
One week later came another major development: “Magee” had confessed in writing, to Jones County Attorney Albert Easterling, who took down his statement at the Hinds County jail. In addition, the Leader-Call reported, physical evidence and fingerprints had been gathered and “sent to Washington to the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory for analysis.”
There were no furth
er details, but they wouldn’t be long in coming, since the trial, predictably, got fast-tracked. The next circuit-court session in Laurel wasn’t scheduled until February 1946, but the presiding judge, F. Burkitt Collins, didn’t want to wait. He ordered a special session starting on the first Monday in December, with the trial to be held at the circuit-court building in downtown Laurel.
In some ways, Laurel wasn’t a typical Mississippi town—it had a different backstory than many Magnolia State communities, and, in 1945, a very different feel, because it was a highly industrialized place in an agricultural state. The population was 31,000—with whites outnumbering blacks roughly 65 to 35—and there was a booster spirit in the air before and after World War II, with a sense that growth and expanding wealth were the city’s inevitable destiny.
The resources that mattered most were pine trees and oil, not cotton. Laurel was in the heart of south Mississippi’s Piney Woods region, a vast sea of trees that covered all or part of twenty-five counties. The woods were originally inhabited by Choctaws and Chickasaws; by the early 1800s, white settlers originally from South Carolina were coming in to what was then the Mississippi Territory, settling on lands that the Choctaws ceded in treaties with the United States. Jones County was founded in 1826, nine years after Mississippi entered the Union. It was a place of small settlements and subsistence farming, not of the big plantations associated with the Mississippi Delta, the flat, rich-soiled agricultural crescent in the northwest part of the state.
Consequently, Jones was never a major slaveholding county—there were only about 400 slaves there just before the start of the Civil War—and this distinction was, and still is, significant to the area’s lore and self-image. Jones was home to a sizable amount of pro-Union feeling; during the war this gave rise to a guerrilla movement that was later mythologized into something nobler than it really was. The renegades were led by a Confederate deserter named Newton Knight, whose men were elusive because they knew the woods and rivers like no one else. Their motives were a mix of Union loyalty, a desire not to get shot fighting on behalf of plantation owners, and the freebooting spirit of frontier adventurers.
The legend, which isn’t quite true, is that Jones County formally seceded from the Confederacy, reestablishing itself as a Union stronghold called the Free State of Jones. James Street, a novelist from Lumberton, Mississippi, fictionalized the Knight story in a 1942 novel called Tap Roots, which Universal made into a motion picture in 1948.
Tap Roots is an interesting old book, but it’s also a little duller than it could have been, because Street softpedaled the most compelling theme connected to Newton Knight: interracial sex. Knight had children with both his white wife, Serena, and (probably) with an ex-slave named Rachel. Children of Newton and Rachel intermarried, starting a line of “white negroes” who were a fixture of the Piney Woods. One of Rachel’s great-grandsons, Davis Knight, was fated for a starring role in a Jones County courtroom the same year the Tap Roots movie was released. In 1948, after marrying a local white girl named Junie Lee Spradley, Knight was charged with breaking Mississippi’s law against mixed-race marriage.
Laurel wasn’t founded until 1882, when the building of the New Orleans and Northeastern railroad—later acquired by the Southern Railway—created a demand for timber to complete the line. The first mill was opened that year by a man named John Kamper, who later sold out to Midwesterners whose investments changed Laurel from outpost to town: George and Silas Gardiner, and Charles Eastman. In April 1891, they, along with Lauren Eastman, began Jones County operations of the Eastman Gardiner lumber company, a major Jones County employer. The mills were why Willie McGee lived in Laurel to begin with. He was born in the country near Pachuta, but his father relocated to Laurel after World War I. Jasper Sr. turned up in the Laurel city directory in 1922, as a laborer at Eastman Gardiner. In the 1936 directory, he was still with the company. Willie’s brother, Jasper, was listed as a student, and Willie was listed as an unspecified laborer. Their address was “64 3d Red Line.” The red line was an area of red-colored company housing.
By 1939 the first-growth pines had been gone for years, but Laurel was getting more product out of less wood with a boost from science. A special edition of the Leader-Call called Laurel “the Chemurgic City,” explaining that this coined word conveyed the magic that took place when technology, applied to agriculture, yielded products that had never existed before.
Since “chemurgy” is not in the dictionary as yet, Laurel feels she must act the part of Noah Webster:
Pronounce it thus:
Chem-urg’-y: accent on the second syllable. (Kem-urg’-y.)
Meaning: A movement to find industrial uses for products of the soil.
The prime example was the Masonite Corporation, an important Laurel employer—founded in 1926—whose economic might earned an eight-column headline in the Leader-Call supplement: “Chemurgic Development of Masonite Rivals Aladdin’s Story.” The Masonite process was invented by a transplanted West Virginian named William H. Mason. It involved taking scrap wood pieces and using high-pressure steam to reduce them to wood fiber that could be reconstituted into sturdy boards and panels.
Perfecting this involved some hard-knock experimentation. In one early attempt, Mason crammed wood chips into a homemade cannon, plugged it, steam-heated the contents to 800 degrees, and knocked off the plug with a pole, releasing a tremendous explosion of wet, wood-fiber shrapnel. A separate pressing process formed the fibers into a solid mass that was surprisingly strong. As a result, Masonite was good for more than just paneling and insulation. During World War II, many of the army tanks made at the American Car & Foundry plant in Berwick, Pennsylvania, were lined with two thicknesses of Masonite boards.
The various things that made Laurel unusual—the romanticized history, the modern industry, and an early influx of Yankee cash—were a source of local pride, and for many they fed a belief that Jim Crow–era Laurel was an easier place for a black person to exist than was the Delta. “Bi-racial investment and philanthropy displayed by the city’s benefactors stood in stark contrast to the views of most white Mississippians,” David Stanton Key, a Laurel native, wrote in a 2001 master’s thesis on the city. “The…progressive outlook transcended traditional racial divisions and helped create a town of the ‘New South’ in the heart of the Piney Woods.”
This was true only up to a point, because Laurel in 1945 was still rigidly segregated, still ruled by the same sexual taboos and voting-rights suppression as any other Mississippi town. Even so, there were tangible differences, like the existence of the Oak Park Vocational High School, which stood out as one of the best schools in Mississippi in the 1930s through the 1950s, producing prominent graduates like opera singer Leontyne Price and Olympic long jumper Ralph Boston. To Cleveland Payne, who attended the school and wrote a history about it called The Oak Park Story, everything good about Laurel was embodied there.
“An affluent class of northern whites had become part of the fabric of community life and influenced greatly the character of the town by setting the tone for cultural values and aesthetic appreciation,” he wrote. “Too, a black middle class had emerged.” In 1928, with donations of land, money, and buildings from wealthy local philanthropists, Oak Park was opened as a school that gave eager, motivated black students a chance to aim high in both vocational and academic course work.
Boston, a 1957 graduate of Oak Park, shares Payne’s strong feelings about the school. “Oak Park was the lifeblood of everything,” he told me in a phone interview. “Everything that was African-American in Laurel revolved around it.” But he wasn’t so sure about Laurel’s exceptionalism. The main Oak Park building burned down in ‘57, and, in his opinion, “It was not spontaneous combustion. We were pretty sure that somebody set it afire.
“For quite a while,” he added, “I understand that Laurel was known as ‘liberal Laurel.’…But if you understand Laurel, you understand that Sam Bowers was from there. How liberal could you be if you ha
ve a man like that living there and who had a following there?”
Bowers, who wasn’t born in Laurel, was around during the tail end of the McGee case, but he made his mark at a later time: He was Mississippi’s most powerful Klan leader in the 1960s and the architect of the Philadelphia murders. Even so, Boston’s point applies just as well to the McGee era. It was true: Laurel was a different sort of town, the existence of Oak Park proved that. But when the McGee trial got going, New South Laurel suddenly became a very Old South place.
On December 3, when McGee was brought back to Jones County for his arraignment and plea, he was under protective armed guard, requested by the sheriff, Luther Hill, and provided by Governor Bailey. During his monthlong stint in Hinds County, nothing was published about what he said and did—or what was said and done to him. It must have been a stark experience, because McGee came home a transformed man, scared out of his wits and unable, or unwilling, to speak, even to his lawyers. From the time of his first trial until the end of his third—more than two years later—he would not utter a single intelligible word in public, and he gave every indication of having lost his mind.
“The negro arrived shortly after 3 o’clock under guard of approximately fifty state troopers,” the Leader-Call reported. “He was dressed in clothing similar to that worn by the guardsmen, including a helmet, and was chained. The officers had to drag him from the car and the prisoner was evidently either crazy or putting on a good act, say witnesses. He was shaking all over and jibbering, unable to answer intelligently the questions of the court.”
