by Alex Heard
Bilbo swung through Parchman on his return trip, looked at Shepherd’s remains—little more than a charred torso with stumps—and announced that his role in the matter was over. “I have neither the time nor the money,” he said, “to investigate 2,000 people.”
The McGee case also featured a dramatic escape attempt, though this was little noticed at the time, was never addressed by McGee’s defenders, and was quickly forgotten once the story ended. On February 20, 1946, inside the Hinds County jail, McGee masterminded a violent jailbreak that involved two other condemned black prisoners, Sherman Street and Charlie Holloway.
Or so it was reported in both Jackson newspapers. It’s possible that the whole thing was a put-on by the jailers, designed to erase McGee’s ability to pursue an insanity defense.
This isn’t as implausible as it sounds. During and after the first trial, McGee was depicted as a terrified imbecile who couldn’t put two words together. But the person behind this escape plot was anything but helpless. He was crafty bordering on brilliant, and ruthless enough to kill his way to freedom.
A faked escape would have served an obvious need for people who wanted to see McGee die. Anyone familiar with the first trial knew that an insanity-based appeal was coming, and there was dread that it might actually work. Jones County prosecutor Albert Easterling was worried that “Jackson doctors and witnesses” would be more gullible or lenient about diagnosing McGee than their Laurel counterparts, so he tried to pressure Sheriff Luther Hill into bringing him back to the Laurel jail. Hill refused. He said it was too dangerous to keep McGee down there for any reason.
News of the escape attempt was splashed across the front pages of both Jackson newspapers, which shouted the underlying message in case anybody missed it. “Willie McGee Faked Dumbness Until Time of Attempted Break from Hinds Jail Cell,” said the Clarion-Ledger’s headline. The story’s lead offered more of the same.
“Willie McGee, convicted rapist waiting an appeal of his death sentence on the grounds of insanity, is crazy—like a fox,” it said.
“This was agreed yesterday by Hinds county officials investigating the Wednesday night attempted jail break which revealed McGee had been putting on an act of helplessness.”
Of course, it could have happened exactly as the jailers described it, because McGee wasn’t mentally deficient. Whether he was faking insanity or was temporarily incapacitated by fear, he found his voice before long: By the time of his second trial in late 1946, he was communicating, haltingly, with his new defense lawyers, and he testified at length during the third trial. McGee, Street, and Holloway all faced imminent execution, so they had good reason to want to escape. And despite the jail’s reputation for being “escape proof,” it wasn’t. McGee’s alleged attempt sounds similar to a pair of successful escapes that happened before and after his incarceration. Prisoners probably knew about the first of these.
The old Hinds County jail no longer exists, but the reason it was considered secure is that it sat on the fourth and fifth floors of the Hinds County Courthouse, a fortresslike art deco structure opened in 1930. You had to take an elevator to get to it, a design that by definition choked off the possibility of easy escapes or rapid mob action. For anyone hoping to get out, the key was overpowering the jailer and getting to the lift.
In February 1944, three “youthful desperadoes” who’d been arrested for trying to rob downtown Jackson’s Robert E. Lee Hotel—white men in their early twenties named Lawrence Motari, Ralph Ward, and Roy Drake—ran past a jailer and trusty, rode down the elevator, stole a car, and kidnapped a high-school girl before being captured. In 1954, Gerald Gallego, a Californian who’d killed a Mississippi policeman on the Gulf Coast, and Minor Sorber, a Parchman inmate who’d killed a fellow prisoner, threw floor-cleaning fluid in the eyes of jailer J. C. Landrum and then beat him with a heavy strip of metal. They too rode the elevator down and fled. Landrum died a few days later; the escapees, both white, were captured and subsequently executed.
According to the Jackson Daily News story about McGee’s attempt, he had playacted his way through an elaborate con, pretending for thirty days straight to be a bedridden invalid, so shell-shocked by his arrest, abuse, and trial that he wouldn’t eat unless he was fed by hand. The jailers had allowed Street, a labor organizer who’d gotten the death penalty for allegedly raping a thirteen-year-old white girl from Jackson—a disputed case that Louis Burnham was also investigating—and Holloway, who’d been condemned to death in the town of Holly Springs, to enter McGee’s cell to feed and wash him.
On the night of the 20th, Street and Holloway went back to their cells after attending to McGee, who then “slipped out of his cell before the master switch could be thrown, locking all the doors of the cell block.” Next, he sneaked over to collect fifteen keys that Holloway had made, supposedly using a file (never found) to grind away at pieces of weather-stripping he’d torn loose from around his cell window. McGee worked his hands through the bars that sealed off the cell block, picked a lock protecting the switch box, and used a coat hanger to throw a lever that opened the main door. Once he accessed the switch box, he opened the doors to Street’s and Holloway’s cells.
After that, the three men hid and called out to the jailer, C. M. Herring, saying McGee needed medical attention. Herring unwittingly walked in, “only to be met by a heavy blow from an iron strip weighing about eight pounds, in the hands of McGee.”
Herring was a large man, 215 pounds, and he put up a “terrific struggle, knocking two of the negroes down several times.” But he was soon beaten to the floor, hit so hard that he suffered five “deep gashes” on the back of his head. He pretended to be unconscious while Holloway begged McGee and Street to stop hitting him with the iron, yelling, “He’s dead!”
Two lawmen, Chief Deputy J. T. Naugher and highway patrolman Sam Moorhead, were downstairs in the sheriff’s office when they heard about the disturbance by way of a phone call from a trusty on another floor. They hopped in the elevator and headed up to stop whatever was going on. Seeing the top of the elevator as it ascended, the three escapees despaired and ran back into their cells, locking themselves in and throwing the keys into the jail’s main corridor.
Neither newspaper ran a picture of the prisoners, but both ran photos of Herring, sitting up in a hospital bed the next day, less than twenty-four hours after the attack. He was smoking a cigarette, and though his head was wrapped in bandages, he looked chipper for a man who’d had his skull bashed in the night before. The stories said he suffered badly bruised arms and a dislocated right shoulder. In the photographs, he was shirtless, and no bruises or scratches were visible. His left arm, not his right, was in a sling, and his face was unmarked. The Jackson Daily News may have understated things when it said he was responding “nicely” to treatment.
As for McGee, with the plot foiled, he reportedly reverted to his old ways. “All during the morning,” the Daily News said, he “howled like an animal in his solitary cell. He was quiet whenever no one was around, but if someone passed his cell door and made any noise, he would put up a heart-rending cry and moan.”
If McGee did howl, he had good reason. In those days, Mississippi kept its executions moving: Street and Holloway were both dead within six months. McGee knew he might not be far behind.
Lynching statistics are an inexact science, but there had been a time when something like the Charley Shepherd killing happened every week in a Southern state, and Mississippi, running neck and neck with Georgia, probably had the highest rate of them all. According to Lynchings in Mississippi, a 2006 study by Julius E. Thompson, roughly 500 of the 5,000 or more U.S. lynching victims between 1865 and 1965 died in Mississippi. Between 1890 and 1920, the state saw at least 450 lynchings, an average of more than one a month. A few victims were white men or black women, but the overwhelming majority were black men, who were killed without trial for alleged crimes ranging from murder and rape—murder, or a charge of murder, being the most common by far—to arson, as
sault, burglary, counterfeiting, and non-crimes like “insulting a white woman” and “informing.”
The South, of course, wasn’t the only place where lynchings occurred, and they didn’t happen only to blacks. According to Thompson’s figures, the number of blacks lynched nationally in the 1880s was actually less than the total number of whites, because lynching was still a common form of frontier justice in the West. But in Mississippi the practice was primarily a tactic of racial control and revenge, and that pattern solidified as the years went by. Thompson counted 280 Mississippi lynchings in the 1880s, 20 of which where of whites. In the 1890s, there were 195 lynchings, only 5 involving whites. By the 1930s, a decade that saw 52 lynchings, only 2 had white victims, and in the 1940s there were 15, none involving whites.
As lynching totals went down overall, Southern politicians and newspaper editors often proclaimed that the region was solving the problem on its own, so there was no need for interference in the form of federal anti-lynching legislation. In one sense this was true: 1895 was a lot worse than 1945, when the Tuskegee Institute—the Alabama-based academic research center that kept an official tally of American lynchings—counted just one Southern lynching, of a Florida man named Jesse James Payne. But groups like the CRC often argued that Tuskegee’s counting methods were too conservative, and that they missed cases that should have been tabulated.
No doubt they were right. Tuskegee’s own clip files on lynching—a massive collection of several decades’ worth of newspaper stories and reports on lynchings, legal lynchings, and similar incidents—sometimes contain newspaper stories about racial atrocities that didn’t show up in its own year-end statistics.
For example, a few months after McGee’s alleged jailbreak in 1946, in the Mississippi Delta town of Indianola, a twenty-eight-year-old black man named Alonzo Rush was reportedly lynched with the full cooperation of officials in the surrounding county, Sunflower. According to a story published in the Afro-American newspaper, Rush had been accused of having an affair with a white woman, who admitted to the affair but refused to press charges. Rush was kidnapped, taken off into some woods, executed in what the paper described as a “home-made electric chair,” and delivered to a black undertaker, who gave a reporter a grisly description of his remains.
“Electricity of high voltage had passed through the body for about five minutes,” the story said. “The scalp where the cap fitted was cooked thoroughly in barbecue fashion. Flesh around the knee, where the knee band was placed, was cooked to the bone.”
Did this really happen? That’s hard to say, but the detailed account makes it seem likely. Even so, Tuskegee didn’t include Rush in its lynching totals for 1946.
In 1950, a year when Tuskegee reported only two lynchings, its annual roundup didn’t count the notorious Attala County massacre, which happened southwest of the central Mississippi town of Kosciusko on January 8, 1950. The trouble began on December 22, 1949, when three white men who’d been drinking moonshine—Malcum Whitt, Windol Whitt, and Leon Turner—went on a spree that involved harassing three black families in their rural cabins. At the home of sharecropper Thomas Harris, they tried to rape Harris’s wife, Mary Ella, and were arrested at the scene by the county sheriff, who’d been alerted by one of the other families. They escaped from jail about a week later, hid in the woods several days, and descended on the Harris cabin on the night of the 8th, apparently believing Harris had turned them in. Turner went inside with a pistol, wounding two people and killing three: Frankie Thurman, 12, Mary Burnside, 8, and Ruby Nell Harris, 4. Though the prosecution pressed hard for a death penalty in the cases of Turner and Windol Whitt, all three men got prison terms.
By the mid-to late 1940s, with lynching on the wane, groups like the CRC were paying just as much attention to legal lynching, which they said Tuskegee also undercounted. “In its 1947 report on lynchings in America the Tuskegee Institute notes that there has been a decrease in deaths by mob action during the past 10 years,” said a Daily Worker story from 1947. “In that period the Alabama Negro college states that 273 lynchings have been prevented by officials or citizens….
“The report does not show, though, what happened to those who were ‘saved’ from the intended extralegal executioners.” The story went on to argue that many of these people wound up just as dead, following one-sided trials before all-white juries.
“Legal lynching” cases are even harder to quantify than lynchings, but the best measure is probably state-by-state executions for rape—an offense for which black men were disproportionately condemned—and there, the available statistics support the view of the CRC. According to one tally, between 1800 and 1964, Mississippi executed 29 men for rape or attempted rape, all of them black.
In this category, though, Mississippi wasn’t the leader: The numbers were much higher in other Southern states, including Texas, Georgia, and Virginia. In Texas, the estimated execution total over the same time period was 137; in Georgia it was 108; and in Virginia it was 136. Not long before McGee’s execution, Virginia executed 7 black men accused of taking part in a rape of the same woman. They were known as the Martinsville Seven, and their case would join his as a rallying cause for the left.
Because the CRC didn’t trust Tuskegee’s statistics, the group, from the start of its existence, began compiling clips and records of its own. Years later, the CRC would make explosive use of this material, generating headlines around the world about the unjust practices of Southern courts.
News of McGee’s jailbreak rattled Forrest Jackson. In late February, he sent the local newspaper stories to Abraham J. Isserman, a labor lawyer affiliated with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. “I regret that this disturbance occurred and may prove most unfortunate on appeal results,” he wrote. “This apparently demonstrates that Willie McGee has been faking as to his mental condition and as to his inability to talk.”
Nonetheless, Jackson filed the appeal on March 28, arguing that the lower court should have granted McGee’s lawyers more time, a change of venue, and a proper examination by a qualified physician or psychiatrist.
“The futility of their hurried effort at defense without his help, without investigation or the searching out of witnesses, is apparent from the record,” Jackson wrote. “…The proceeding pressed on relentlessly to conviction and sentencing, with no opportunity for unprepared counsel to catch their breath, or to remedy their enforced lack of prior preparation. An ignorant negro pauper on trial for his life was, through lack of time, denied effective counsel and left defenseless in the face of death.”
The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled on June 10, granting McGee a new trial on venue grounds but ignoring all the other claims. Citing cases in Mississippi and other states, the court said it was well established that when “the public is so aroused against [the] accused that it [is] necessary to call out the militia or otherwise protect him from violence or to remove him from the county,” a change of venue should be automatic.
As a precedent, the judges mentioned a Texas case that involved an African-American man who had killed a white man during a fight, which reportedly started with a show of “impertinence and insolence” by the killer. The case aroused fury among local whites—necessitating a militia escort at the trial similar to the one that safeguarded McGee and the Hernando defendants—and the Texas court noted that verbal disrespect, by itself, had compounded the danger to the defendant.
The Mississippi judges agreed, adding that McGee’s crime involved an even greater insult: interracial sexual assault. “It will be noticed that…the [Texas] court referred to impertinence and insolence on the part of negroes towards white people as fruitful sources of aggravation,” the opinion said. “How much more so is a charge, and reasonable grounds to believe it, of rape by a negro against a white woman.”
Now that McGee was getting a new trial, he needed a new lawyer, because Forrest Jackson was bowing out. Why? Most likely, he got cold feet after the alleged jailbreak. Or he may have bee
n too busy. By November 1946, when the second McGee trial took place, Senator Bilbo was embroiled in the last big battle of his life.
Bilbo’s final exit was a theatrical event that made for an irresistible spectacle in newspapers all over the nation. It combined new forms of organized protest involving Mississippi blacks and their Southern and Northern allies; political fireworks; the Man’s legendary mouth; and the wrathful hand of fate, which hit Bilbo hard during his remaining months.
Fueling everything was the fight over African American voting rights in Southern states, which had been at issue in an important U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1944, Smith v. Allwright. In that case, argued before the Court by Thurgood Marshall, the justices ruled eight to one that an all-white Democratic primary held in Texas was unconstitutional. This set the stage for attempts by African-Americans to vote in Mississippi’s Democratic primary on July 2, 1946. That prospect, as much as anything, sent Bilbo over the edge.
He’d been heading that way for a while. In 1938, railing against one of several anti-lynching bills that stalled in the Senate—thanks to Southern filibusters—Bilbo said, “If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie….”
In 1944, he promised to make Eleanor Roosevelt “queen of Greater Liberia” once he succeeded in his quest to send American blacks “back” to West Africa. In the summer of 1945, he shadowboxed with his longtime enemy, New York congressman Vito Marcantonio. A woman from Brooklyn named Josephine Piccolo wrote Bilbo to criticize him for opposing the extension of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, part of Roosevelt’s wartime push to ban discriminatory hiring in national defense industries. “I find it very hard to believe that you are an American citizen,” she wrote. Bilbo returned serve with a letter that began, “My Dear Dago,” followed by, “If I am mistaken in this, please correct me.”
