by Alex Heard
And then there was the matter of the “bloody shorts,” which were introduced as evidence during the trial. Just one month after the crime, there was already a problem with this piece of material evidence: The bloodstains were disappearing. Pittman produced the shorts while questioning Valentine.
“I will ask you whether or not you found any blood on them?” he said. Valentine said he had. “Could you point out to the jury now where that blood is, or if there is any there now?”
“It is faded away,” Valentine said, pointing, “but it is right in this part right in here. There was quite a bit more on them than what is on there now, but you can tell by looking at it right there what it is.”
Boyd barely questioned Valentine. He didn’t bother to ask why the underwear hadn’t been sent to a lab.
When their turn came, the defense lawyers called no witnesses and said very little. Before resting his case, Boyd said to McGee, “Willie, do you want to go confer with us a while?” No answer. “Boy, if you have got any sense, you better be using it.”
The jury went out at 5:55 p.m. and came back two and a half minutes later. The verdict: guilty as charged. McGee was sentenced to die by electrocution on January 7, 1946. If that held up, he would be dead only sixty days after his arrest—faster even than the Hernando Three.
three
TAKE YOUR CHOICE
The irregularities of McGee’s first trial made it ripe for appeal, and the job fell to a white Mississippi lawyer named Forrest B. Jackson. At first glance, Jackson might seem like a strange pick, since he also did frequent legal work for Mississippi’s most powerful and flamboyant racist, Senator Theodore G. Bilbo. But he had a reputation for fairness in dealing with black criminal defendants, and it extended outside the state.
Jackson, forty-five, was a friendly looking, slightly jug-eared former farm boy from southwest Mississippi whose father had died before he was ten. In a biography he distributed when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1947, he prided himself on a hardworking childhood (“newspaper carrier, laundry worker, railroad laborer and clerk…salesman, Page in Mississippi Legislature…”) that was capped by his graduation from the University of Mississippi in 1923.
By the early 1940s, Jackson had built up a general law practice in the capital city, occasionally doing work for the NAACP. In a 1943 letter from Carsie A. Hall, president of the group’s Jackson branch, to the national office in New York, Hall mentioned him in connection with two trials, one involving three blacks who were charged with murdering an elderly white man in the town of Madison. “In this case Mr. Jackson has had no financial help,” Hall wrote, “yet he has spent his [own] money in getting the case appealed and he promises to go through with the case because he feels that the youths were not given a chance.”
Starting in 1944, Jackson represented Willie Carter, an accused murderer whose appeal was paid for by the NAACP. Though the effort failed—Carter was retried, found guilty a second time, and electrocuted in 1946—Thurgood Marshall, who worked with Jackson during this process, said he did “a splendid job.”
On the heels of McGee’s guilty verdict, Jackson was approached by Louis E. Burnham, a thirty-year-old African American from New York who had moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1941, where he served as organizational secretary for a civil rights group called the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Roughly ten days after McGee’s conviction, Burnham went to Mississippi on a fact-finding mission, interviewing the principal players in Laurel. He summarized what he learned in a December 26 report to George Marshall, head of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, a New York–based group that would be folded into the mix when the Civil Rights Congress launched in the summer of 1946. His memo was detailed and accurate—in fact, it was one of the most reliable things ever written about the case—and it opened with special praise for Jackson, who struck Burnham as “an unusually fair-minded and dependable man.”
In addition to taking on the appeal, Jackson agreed to help Bessie McGee recover money she’d paid to Earle Wingo, the man who had successfully defended the accused lynchers of Howard Wash. Willie was aware of Wingo’s reputation for winning cases; according to Bessie’s first-trial testimony, he’d asked her to hire him for the defense—which, if true, indicates that his mind was working all right before the trial started.
Wingo said no, but he told Bessie he would write the appeal if she paid him $1,000, half of it up front. (In 2008 dollars, $1,000 would be more than $11,000. Jackson charged $100 for the same service.) She somehow scraped together $205 and gave it to Wingo, who then made himself difficult to find. “Obviously, he was taking advantage of Mrs. McGee’s extremity and seeking to milk her for all she could beg or borrow,” Burnham concluded.
In his memo, Burnham discussed both of McGee’s lawyers, Boyd and Koch, sizing them up as precisely the wrong men for the job. “Koch played no role whatsoever in the trial,” he wrote. “Boyd went through the motions of defending his client. However, Boyd has no competence as a criminal lawyer, by his own admission to me. In addition, he does little practice of any kind, most of his time being spent in managing the Southern Hotel which he owns.”
Bessie sketched out McGee’s basic biography, telling Burnham that he was separated from his wife and four children, none of whom was named. He said McGee lived with Bessie at 105 Elm Street, in a “dilapidated two-room shack with outdoor toilet situated in a slum neighborhood. McGee’s earnings were the main support of his mother; some part of them were contributed for the upkeep of his children. Mrs. McGee (Bessie) helped by taking in washing.” Bessie’s house (which no longer exists) stood in a poor part of town known as the Neck, just east of the railroad tracks that bisected Laurel, and near another rough area named in the first trial, the K.C. Bottom.
Burnham also mentioned that, a few days after McGee’s indictment, Forrest Jackson—at the request of the NAACP office in Mobile, Alabama—tried to see McGee in the Hinds County jail but was turned away. Burnham tried to get in two days before Christmas but was also refused.
“These facts are important in light of Mrs. McGee’s description of her son’s behavior during her visits,” Burnham wrote. “The first time she saw him in jail was a few days after the indictment. At that visit she asked him if he was guilty. He said no. She then asked why he had signed a confession. McGee replied, ‘I signed to be living when you got here. You just don’t know what it was like.’” McGee said the confession had been written for him by his captors and that “they told me to sign or else,” thus contradicting the prosecution’s claim that he confessed voluntarily.
Willie didn’t say a word during Bessie’s subsequent visits. Burnham assumed this was explained by the “terrific beating and intimidation to which he has been subjected or…his state of sanity, or both.” Bessie, he said, spoke of “a strong possibility” that McGee had lost his mind. She talked about an aunt and two great-aunts who were “insane at death” and an uncle on Willie’s father’s side, Governor McGee, who “was recently confined in a mental ward at Tuskegee Veterans Facility.”
Burnham closed by ticking off some of the case’s oddities—“Why didn’t the woman cry out…?”—and noting possible grounds for review, including the issues of venue and race-based jury exclusion. Jackson got right to work: On December 28, 1945, he served notice of his intent to appeal. That action, filed in early January, automatically stayed the January 7 execution.
Maybe it’s not a surprise that Jackson provided honest service to his client; that’s what lawyers are supposed to do, after all. Still, the contrast between McGee and Jackson’s other client couldn’t have been greater. By the mid-1940s, Senator Bilbo was more than just another segregationist politician. He was the gold standard of the breed, and his last name, slightly tweaked, had become a nationally recognized label for racism and demagoguery: “Bilboism.” In a 1946 story published in Life, Senator Robert Taft, a powerful Republican conservative, called Bilbo “a disgrace to the Senate.” Bilbo countered that Life was
a “pink colored mongrel magazine.”
Though Bilbo played no direct role in the McGee case—he died before it took off as a national news story—Jackson’s involvement wasn’t the only connection. The opening months of the case overlapped with Bilbo’s final months as America’s least-loved senator. The CRC was well positioned to work on McGee’s appeal that summer and fall because, thanks to Bilbo, the group was already focused on Mississippi: Its first national project was a campaign to deny Bilbo his Senate seat after the election of 1946.
By that point, Bilbo—who brayed as loudly as radio’s Senator Claghorn and immodestly called himself “the Man”—was a fat target, a walking caricature who was routinely trashed by everyone from newspaper editors to folk singers to filmmakers. He was denounced for his racism in the 1946 song “Listen, Mr. Bilbo” and cited by name as an anti-Semite in the 1947 movie Gentleman’s Agreement. He was the partial inspiration for a mixed-race college football game played in the mid-1940s at the Polo Grounds in New York, pitting black teams like the Tuskegee Warhawks against the U.S. Navy’s all-white New London Undersea Raiders. In a preview of the 1946 contest, the Daily Worker promised “a nice afternoon watching the Bilbo white-supremacy myth get booted all over the lot.”
That year, Bilbo was called “America’s most notorious merchant of hatred” by the Saturday Evening Post, which published a summertime profile about his primary campaign. “The 68-year-old senator…who has become so widely known as a fountainhead of intolerance, is a little man who attempts to offset his undistinguished appearance with a red necktie and diamond stickpin,” the Post’s Milton Lehman wrote. “…His big head, set with squinty blue eyes and thin lips, is scarred by a blow from a pistol butt….
“Like his personal appearance, Bilbo’s political record is also undistinguished. During the New Deal he tied himself to the Administration, originating nothing, but taking credit at home for every piece of favorable legislation.”
The Post neglected to mention that Bilbo’s long career had seen a few finer moments. Was he a racist? Down to the marrow. But as his most thorough biographer, Chester M. Morgan, points out, Mississippi voters originally responded to Bilbo not because of race-baiting, but because he promised, and sometimes delivered, progressive reforms that were a bright spot in state politics during the first quarter of the twentieth century.
On a gut level, Bilbo’s supporters also loved him because he was colorful and bombastic, in an era when politicians had to show their stuff in front of live crowds in small-town settings. “With incantation from the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare, he held his audience spellbound,” wrote his first biographer, A. Wigfall Green. “Perched high on the porch or on the balcony of a courthouse…he seemed not five feet two in height but a giant: ‘On the stump,’ said one of his disciples, ‘he’s 7 feet 10 inches tall.’”
Sometimes he was legitimately funny, in ways that did no harm and showed an inventive mind at work. As a young state senator in 1910, Bilbo decided to attract attention to himself with a mock legislative attack against a certain popular, stimulating soft drink and its many imitators. So he introduced a bill banning “the manufacture, sale, barter, or giving away of…coca cola, afri cola, ala cola, caffi cola, carre cola, celery cola,” and thirty other imaginary variations, including “mellow nip,” “revive ola,” and “french wine of coca wise ola.” He was so proud of his joke that he introduced the bill three times.
At his worst, Bilbo used the same verbal talents to attack and defame, and his mouth almost got him killed the next year. Some of the scars on his head came from a 1911 pistol-whipping he suffered after calling one political opponent, a former Mississippi prison warden named John J. Henry, “a cross between a hyena and a mongrel, begotten in a nigger graveyard at midnight, suckled by a sow and educated by a fool.”
This was the Bilbo that so many people came to hate, the snapping-turtle loudmouth who would say anything for a laugh, a gasp, or a vote. By 1946, unfortunately, this was the only Bilbo left. And in the context of the McGee case, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: Though Bilbo had plenty of opposition inside Mississippi, he was still one of the most popular elected officials in the state.
Born in 1877, the Man came from southern Mississippi’s Pearl River County, a backwoods area far from the state’s traditional power centers. His rise was made possible by changes in Mississippi election law in the early 1900s that opened the Democratic Party nominating process—previously controlled by a convention of wealthy planters and their allies—to white primary voters of all economic levels. Poor white farmers, called rednecks and peckerwoods by their political betters in the Delta, were soon able to hoist a few champions, including Bilbo’s leather-lunged predecessor, James K. Vardaman. After serving in the state senate and as lieutenant governor starting in 1912, Bilbo ran a gubernatorial primary campaign in 1915 that promised a host of progressive changes in how Mississippi was managed, and he followed through when he won.
“The governor early established good relationships with most law-makers and then implored, prodded, cajoled, and pressured them into passing a legislative program that remains unsurpassed by any four-year period in modern Mississippi history,” Morgan wrote. “Under Bilbo’s whip hand the legislature gave Mississippi a board of bank examiners, a highway commission, a pardoning board, a tuberculosis hospital…a tougher antilobby law…and the largest appropriation ever for education.” Bilbo’s second gubernatorial term—from 1928 to 1932—was a bust, weighed down by his futile campaign to move the University of Mississippi from Oxford to Jackson. But when he won his first of three Senate terms in 1934, he found fresh life as a New Deal loyalist, supporting FDR almost in lockstep throughout his first four years.
Because of this record, Morgan labeled Bilbo a “redneck liberal,” using “liberal” in the sense that he supported an active, progressive federal government. No other meaning could reasonably apply. Bilbo didn’t always play the race card on the stump—for much of his political career, Mississippi blacks were so marginalized that there wasn’t much need to bring them up—but when you look at his actions and speeches in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, there’s no doubt where he was coming from.
In 1928, in support of Al Smith’s presidential bid, Bilbo reportedly spread a rumor that Republican candidate Herbert Hoover, during a flood-relief trip to the Delta the year before, had flouted Mississippi conventions by dancing in public with Mary Booze, a Mississippi African American and GOP committeewoman. During a flurry of arguments over what Bilbo had actually said, he tried to trap Hoover by asking him to state clearly whether it would be “indecent, infamous or disgraceful for you to come in contact with or dance with a woman of the negro race.”
That year, one of the most notorious lynchings in Mississippi history occurred under Bilbo’s watch, the mob murder of an escaped black convict named Charley Shepherd, who ran away from Parchman prison after allegedly killing his supervisor, J. D. Duvall. Bilbo didn’t do anything to stop it, and he had plenty of time to get organized. In the aftermath, his only response to this hellish event was a wisecrack.
The Shepherd case started at 3:30 a.m. on Friday, December 28, when Duvall’s wife found his body on the floor of their dining room, his throat cut and his skull crushed by a hammer. Shouting for help, she realized that their eighteen-year-old daughter, Ruth, was missing. The early assumption was that Ruth had been murdered by the forty-one-year-old Shepherd, who lived among the family as a trusty, cooking and cleaning. A multi-county Delta manhunt ensued that lasted three days and involved airplane surveillance, bloodhounds, and hundreds of armed men driving country roads and marching through forests.
Ruth came out of woods alone on Saturday, dazed and bruised and telling rescuers that Shepherd had kidnapped her and forced her to stagger along with him while he tried to escape. Shepherd gave himself up on Monday morning to a plantation owner, Laura Mae Keeler, after securing her promise that she would turn him over to a jailer instead of vigilantes. Keeler tried to
make good on that; she and a few local men attempted to drive Shepherd to jail in the Delta town of Cleveland. But they were stopped on the road by unidentified men who took Shepherd away.
Shepherd may well have been guilty—the evidence certainly pointed that way, and he was in prison for the murder of his wife and mother-in-law—but he deserved his right to due process instead of the prolonged horror show that followed. He was driven through country towns for seven hours to draw a crowd for the ritualistic lynching that everybody knew was coming. Early in the evening of December 31, near the town of Rome—about thirty miles away from Cleveland—some 4,000 to 6,000 people assembled in a forest clearing. Shepherd was tied to a five-foot-high pile of wood, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze. Mob members had crammed mud in his mouth and nostrils so the smoke wouldn’t kill him before the flames did, and he reportedly stayed alive for close to an hour. One newspaper report said his screams could be heard from half a mile away.
Throughout the days of search, capture, and lawlessness, Bilbo made only token attempts to exert executive authority. On Sunday afternoon, he sent three dozen state troops to Parchman, with orders to help with the search but not to take charge. That day, Bilbo left Jackson by car with his son, Theo Jr., en route to Theo’s boarding school in Tennessee. He checked in at Parchman, made an empty comment or two, and left Mississippi. When Shepherd was seized by the mob, the state guard, obeying Bilbo’s orders, made no attempt to find the lynchers or intervene. A spokesman said their job was not “to kill a lot of people trying to take away the murderer….”
