by Alex Heard
Marcantonio wrote Bilbo to demand an apology. In his reply, Bilbo denied that “dago” was a slur against Italians—it was no more offensive than “Hoosier,” he insisted—even as he piled on the Italian slurs. “It is through you and your gang,” he wrote, “and I dare say many of them are gangsters, from the sin-soaked, communistic sections of the great metropolis of New York, that practically all the rotten, crackpot, communistic legislative schemes are being thrown into the congressional ‘mill.’…”
In March 1947, with Mississippi politicians busily trying to figure out new legal impediments to black voting rights, Bilbo published a book called Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization? in which he argued that the only solution to the looming race crisis was permanent segregation and eventual repatriation. Quoting from an earlier tract by another writer, he pushed the old, discredited idea that African Americans, whom he called “anthropoid apes,” were members not just of a different race, but a different species.
“[T]he hair is short, black, and frizzly—in fact, distinctly wooly,” Take Your Choice said. “Soft and velvety to the touch, the negro epidermis is, for the most part, quite free from hair, and would be interesting were it not for the outrageous odor it emits, especially under heat and excitement. This is sometimes so strong that I have known persons of our own race brought almost to the stage of emesis when compelled to inhale it for any length of time.”
At the heart of Take Your Choice, which flew off the shelves in Jackson, was the same taboo subject that made the McGee case so dangerous: interracial sex. Bilbo didn’t deny that it had happened in the South, but he believed, or pretended to believe, that the contact had always been one-way: white men having relations with black women.
In South America, he argued, the situation was different and disastrous—unchecked, two-way race-mixing there had debased the entire continent with a population of “mestizos, mulattoes, zambos, terceroones, quadroons, cholos, musties, fusties, and dusties.” But in America, “[a]s disgraceful as the sins of some white men” had been, “[S]outhern white women have preserved the integrity of their race, and there is no one who can today point the finger of suspicion in any manner whatsoever at the blood which flows in the veins of the white sons and daughters of the South.”
In the summer of 1946, Bilbo cranked it up as the Democratic primary approached. Reporters followed him around Mississippi, taking down his most outrageous statements. Much of it was the same old stuff, but with black voting rights now on the table, he broke new ground.
“Mississippi is white,” he said. “We got the right to keep it that way…. [I’m] calling on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes…. And the best time to do it is the night before!”
Bilbo kept it up as the primary approached. On June 22, speaking in Jackson, he argued that every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi” should use any means necessary to keep blacks away from polling places. “And if you don’t know what that means,” he said, “you are just not up on your persuasive measures.”
Even before election day, people started acting on such words. On June 6, Etoy Fletcher, an army veteran attending Jackson College on the G.I. Bill, was seized by four white men after attempting to register in the town of Brandon. In an affidavit, he said they drove him to a stand of woods, stripped him, and flogged his legs with a wire cable, threatening to kill him if he tried to register again.
Bilbo won the election on July 2, narrowly avoiding a runoff in a crowded field but beating his nearest opponent by nearly 40,000 votes. The “night before” line wasn’t forgotten, however. The Senate initially declined to act, but on September 6, the Campaign Investigating Committee announced that it would look into complaints about Bilbo’s statements. His enemies were confident that they were incendiary enough to get him booted out of Congress.
Bilbo had gone too far plenty of times. Why was 1946 any different? One factor was purely political. The GOP had won House and Senate majorities in the 1946 election. Going after Bilbo was a no-lose proposition.
But there were other reasons too. The country was changing, slowly but perceptibly, and people were paying more attention to his excesses. More than a million African Americans had served in World War II, 85,000 of them from Mississippi, and they came back with a pent-up demand for basic rights in areas like voting and jury selection. The July primary was the first since Reconstruction in which significant numbers of black Mississippians voted; despite Bilbo’s threats, roughly 1,000 cast a ballot.
Meanwhile, Bilbo had picked a bad year to get caught inciting midnight attacks on black people, because too much of that was going on already. The wartime dip in Southern lynchings ended in 1946, a year that saw a new outbreak of violence, much of it directed at returning black soldiers.
Some of these cases became famous, including the February 1946 beating and blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old veteran of the Pacific theater, on his way home from military service, who was arrested in Batesburg, South Carolina, after a disturbance on a Greyhound bus. During a stop about an hour north of Atlanta, Woodard asked the bus’s white driver if he had time to run inside and use a restroom. The driver said no and cursed him; Woodard cursed him back, and the driver told him to go ahead but make it fast. At the next stop, Batesburg, the driver contacted the police and told them Woodard was drunk and disorderly. He was taken off the bus by Police Chief Lynwood Shull, clubbed, and hauled into jail, where he was punched in the eyes with the end of a billy club. By the next morning, he’d permanently lost his eyesight.
The Woodard blinding became a national symbol of the injustices being committed against black veterans. Orson Welles talked about it repeatedly on his ABC-Radio show Orson Welles Commentaries, and Woody Guthrie wrote a protest song called “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” In August, 20,000 people turned out at a Harlem rally to raise money for his medical care and living expenses. In an interview, Woodard, a Bronx resident, echoed a theme heard again and again that year.
“Negro veterans that fought in this war don’t realize that the real battle has just begun in America,” he said. “They went overseas and did their duty, and now they’re home and have to fight another struggle, that I think outweighs the war.” Woodard’s personal struggle was an exercise in frustration. In November, Shull was acquitted of federal civil rights charges at a trial in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1947, Woodard sued Greyhound—and lost.
Other notorious 1946 incidents occurred in Columbia, Tennessee; Walton County, Georgia; and Webster Parish, Louisiana. In Columbia, on February 25, an argument and fight involving a navy veteran named James Stephenson, his mother Gladys, and William Fleming, a white radio repairman, led to the Stephensons’ arrest and release on bail. In short order, a mob formed near the black part of town, known as Mink Slide. That night, residents of the neighborhood doused lights and loaded weapons, anticipating a vigilante attack. Many of these men were returning soldiers, and it was rumored later that several white mob members did in fact charge into Mink Slide, only to be wounded or killed, their deaths attributed locally to “heart failure.”
“It is felt that white Columbia can’t admit, even to this day, that it took a beating when colored decided to protect themselves and prevent one of the most dastardly crimes known to humanity,” the Afro-American reported. “Mink Slide stood…as a solid wall….”
What is known is that four white policemen, patrolling the streets that night, were wounded by shotgun pellets. The next morning, hundreds of police and state patrolmen went in to arrest the shooters and get some payback. They ransacked businesses, searched homes, seized weapons, and arrested upwards of one hundred people. Two days later, two prisoners, William Gordon and James Johnson, were shot to death by guards at the Columbia jail, allegedly while trying to escape. Only the black rioters were charged, most of them with attempted murder. The case went to trial later that year, with Thurgood Mars
hall leading the defense. In October, to the surprise of nearly everyone, an all-white jury acquitted twenty-three of the twenty-five defendants.
In Georgia, one of the most notorious lynchings of the postwar era happened on July 25, when two young tenant-farmer couples—Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Dorsey—were shot to death in broad daylight by two dozen white men who waited for them in an ambush. Roger Malcom had been jailed in the north-central Georgia town of Monroe after he had a fight with Barney Hester Jr., the son of the landowner he worked for. What started the fight was unclear—one rumor had it that Hester took a romantic interest in Dorothy Malcom—but it ended when Malcom wounded Hester with a pocketknife. He was arrested and jailed. After a week behind bars, he was bailed out by a local landowner named J. Loy Harrison, who was supposed to drive him, Dorothy, and the Dorseys back to their homes. Instead he took a different road and handed them over to a mob, claiming that he was taken by surprise. All four were taken into a stand of woods, lined up four abreast, and gunned down with dozens of rounds from pistols, rifles, and shotguns. The case became a national scandal and prompted a major probe by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI, but no one was ever charged with murder or federal civil rights violations.
Finally, there was the August 1946 lynching of army veteran John C. Jones near Minden, Louisiana. Jones and a cousin, Albert Harris Jr., were arrested for allegedly prowling around the home of a white woman named Maddry. This appeared to be a frame-up, and it came out later that Jones had been asking questions about oil-producing land that his grandfather owned, which the old man had leased out for a pathetically low amount. After being held for several days, Jones and Harris were freed when Mrs. Maddry declined to press charges. Upon their release, a group of armed men abducted them, threw them into separate cars, and drove into the country. Harris was beaten severely but survived and managed to escape. Jones died, reportedly after being tortured with a meat cleaver and a blowtorch. Subsequent investigation pointed to a conspiracy involving local law enforcement officials, but there were no criminal indictments. The federal government later brought civil rights charges against five men, including two deputy sheriffs and three oil-field workers. All were found not guilty in 1947.
Senator Bilbo had no role in any of these killings, but many people believed his rhetoric and style had everything to do with them. Speaking at a protest rally in Washington after the Malcom-Dorsey lynchings, Max Yergan, president of the National Negro Congress, said that Bilbo and others like him “stand with bloody hands in the murders of these men and women of Georgia….” In Yergan’s view, they should be “brought to the bar of justice as the stooges of Hitler were brought to the bar of justice at Nuremberg.”
That fall, two investigations of Bilbo took shape. One centered on voter intimidation; the other was a probe by a Senate subcommittee into alleged kickbacks paid to Bilbo by defense contractors.
The Man also faced very serious health problems. He was a cigar smoker, and that summer he developed a gum irritation that led to a diagnostic procedure in New Orleans. It revealed a malignancy and infection that required the removal of part of his jaw. He bragged that the operation gave him “more mouth” and said that all traces of the cancer were gone, but in fact the disease made rapid progress as the new year approached.
The voting-rights challenge marked the first major crusade by the Civil Rights Congress, which spent thousands on its national “Un-seat Bilbo” Campaign. Novelist Dashiell Hammett, who served as the CRC’s New York president during the organization’s early years, wrote Bilbo to invite him to a Manhattan dinner—set up to raise funds for his removal—telling him to “feel free to come” but to leave “your klansman’s outfit home.”
It also marked the first time the CRC crossed paths with the NAACP during a cause, and the NAACP kept its distance. Both groups had a hand in organizing testimony by Mississippi blacks regarding voter intimidation, but NAACP head Walter White ruled out the idea of cooperating with the CRC, arguing that “it is imperative that this…be done under non-Communist auspices lest there be support for Bilbo as a victim of the ‘Reds.’”
Ultimately, both groups got help from in-state organizers who rounded up witnesses. The CRC’s point man was Percy Greene, editor of the Jackson Advocate, the state’s leading black newspaper. Greene would be heard from again as the Willie McGee case gained traction.
In early December, a five-member Senate committee traveled to Jackson to take testimony from Mississippi citizens, among them several blacks and black veterans who described the threats and violence they’d experienced while trying to vote. In a hearing held at the federal building downtown, Etoy Fletcher repeated his story about the beating he took at Brandon. Varnado R. Collier, who tried to vote in Gulfport, said he was swarmed by ten or fifteen men who knocked him senseless. Joseph Parham of McComb testified that, after he registered, an unidentified white man came up to him and said, “What kind of flowers do you want?” In all, roughly one hundred witnesses were called between December 2 and 4. Forrest Jackson was there throughout, counseling Bilbo and challenging testimony.
Bilbo was there for it all, looking cadaverous but feisty, dressed as usual with his diamond stickpin. He rallied enough to read a prepared statement, take questions, and cackle at his enemies. He admitted that, yes, he favored any lawful means of prohibiting blacks from voting, denying that he had advocated any unlawful acts. He also denied saying, as the Clarion-Ledger summarized his words, “that negroes trying to vote should have gasoline poured on them, or that the leaders of the Mississippi Progressive Voter’s League…should be atomically bombed and exterminated from the surface of the earth.”
Questioners like Iowa senator Bourke Hickenlooper confronted him with other things he’d said, including this statement: “The white people of Mississippi are sitting on a volcano…. We are faced with a nationwide campaign to integrate the nigger with the social life of this country.”
“I subscribe to that,” Bilbo replied. “If I didn’t say it, I wish I had.”
Did he also say, “The nigger is only 150 years from the jungles of Africa, where it was his great delight to cut him up some fried nigger steak for breakfast”?
“Yes.”
Had he also said that Clare Booth Luce, the author and wife of Time founder Henry Luce, was “the greatest nigger-lover in the north except Old Lady Eleanor Roosevelt”?
“I said that,” he agreed with a smile, “…that is true too.”
The committee’s Democratic chairman, Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana, shrugged off any link between Bilbo’s rhetoric and violent acts, saying that he hoped Bilbo would be unanimously exonerated. The senators’ vote broke three to two in Bilbo’s favor, along party lines, and the committee dutifully forwarded its report to Congress.
When the new Senate convened in January 1947, leaders of the Republican majority organized to try to deny Bilbo his seat, pending further investigation into the charges. Southerners began a filibuster, and pro-and anti-Bilbo forces were still fighting it out when a “compromise” was reached on January 4.
In truth, it was a stalemate. Bilbo had to go back to New Orleans for a new round of jaw surgery, so final resolution of the fight was tabled until he returned. He left, by car, before dawn the next day, with Forrest Jackson loyally on hand to drive him home. “If I live I will be back with my fighting clothes on,” he vowed before leaving Washington. “And if I die I’ll come back and haunt you.”
Bilbo spent the next few months in Jackson and New Orleans, dealing with medical procedures and rallying for one last show of public defiance. In March 1947, he held a barbecue for 10,000 people in his hometown of Poplarville, the site of a beloved estate he called the “Dream House.” One of his guests was Gerald L. K. Smith, a nationally prominent white supremacist who called Bilbo “the most persecuted man in the world.”
The Man died in New Orleans on August 21, 1947. During his final hospital stay, he either had a last-minute conversion or forgot
his most cherished beliefs. In an interview done a few weeks before his death, he told African-American journalist Leon P. Lewis, of the Negro South, “I hold nothing personal against the Negroes as a race.” He probably thought he meant it.
four
HER JITTERBUG
McGee’s second circuit-court trial started on October 7, 1946, in the Jones County Courthouse. After the Mississippi Supreme Court’s reversal, a change of venue seemed like a given. But on the 9th, Judge Collins said no to the defense’s motion for a shift in locale, accepting the state’s claim that a “fair and impartial” jury could be assembled in Laurel.
Collins was just being stubborn. He knew nothing had changed, and it was obvious the trial had to be moved. For three days in a row, McGee was transported from Hinds County to Jones by armed state troops who were there for one reason: to keep him from getting lynched. “Twenty troopers were stationed inside the courthouse and thirty were ranged about the yard with machine guns in trucks, while the negro was placed in jail,” the Leader-Call reported after the first of the transfers.
This time, McGee’s defense was in the hands of a more formidable lawyer: Dixon Pyles, a short, burly, balding thirty-three-year-old who took over at Forrest Jackson’s recommendation and whose fees and expenses were paid by the CRC. Jackson and Pyles knew each other from political and legal circles. Both had been Bilbo supporters—during the Depression, Bilbo had gotten Pyles a much-needed federal patronage job—and both kept offices in the Century Building, a structure in the heart of downtown Jackson, no longer standing, that was popular with attorneys.
