by Alex Heard
Pyles became a prominent figure in Mississippi and was known for representing labor unions, including locals affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). That was another small irony, since Bilbo, Pyles’s onetime mentor, hated the CIO. Bilbo could be pro-labor in his way—he supported the 1935 passage of the Wagner Act, which protected the rights of workers to join unions and engage in collective bargaining—but his loyalties were to railroad unions and the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). To him, the industrial workers’ union was too friendly to both blacks and Reds, and the CIO alienated him further when its political action committee targeted him for defeat in 1946.
“Bilbo was convinced that the Communists were in back of [the CIO],” Pyles told historian Chester M. Morgan in an interview, “and that if they…became as well-organized as he thought they would, then Communism would take over through them. So he fought the industrial unions tooth and nail.”
In 1946, Pyles was less worried about labor-union preferences than about finding paid labor for himself. He’d served in the army during World War II, landing in Normandy shortly after D-day and seeing action in five major European campaigns. He was still rebuilding his practice when Jackson approached him. “I had no business, and so in order to give me some business, Forrest Jackson persuaded me to become the defense counsel for Willie McGee,” Pyles recalled. “And I persuaded, against his will, a young lawyer named Dan Breland to assist me in it.”
Over the years, Pyles sat for several interviews in which he talked about what it was like to defend McGee. Describing packed courtrooms and a “wrought up” public mood, he said he had no doubt that he and Breland could have gotten McGee or themselves killed if they’d said or done the wrong thing in court.
He meant this seriously, but he also joked about it as time went by. For the rest of his life, Pyles entertained colleagues with a well-practiced anecdote about a death threat he got in Jones County, after he presented arguments for a change of venue. The way he told it, a group of surly local white men was waiting for him and Breland at the bottom of the courthouse stairs, angry that he was trying to get the trial moved. One of them called Pyles a son of a bitch and told him he had exactly thirty minutes to get out of Jones County.
Tossing his keys to Breland, Pyles said, “You take care of the car.” Not wanting to waste a second, he started running toward the county line, moving so fast that he skimmed over the surface of a mill pond. As for that thirty-minute time limit? “I’ve still got twenty-nine of them left,” he laughed in his loud, raspy voice.
In the end, Pyles got his way about venue. Cooler heads in Laurel persuaded Collins that he had to step aside and let someone else make the decision. “[M]embers of the bar down there told him he was making a fool of himself, that he would be reversed again,” Pyles said. “…[H]e excused himself on the grounds that his wife was sick.”
By the time the trial opened, a circuit judge from a different part of the state—John Stennis, who replaced Bilbo in the Senate in 1947—had taken over temporarily, and he quickly decided Laurel was too dangerous. At the start of the day’s proceedings on October 16, heavily armed state guardsmen were ordered to assemble inside the courtroom to form a protective barrier between McGee, 150 potential jurymen sitting inside, and a sizable number of muttering men who were outside but wanted in. Spectators were barred, but the Leader-Call said another 150 people were gathered on the other side of the courtroom doors, along with “scores” more on the courthouse lawn.
“I don’t like the idea of trying a case behind guns,” Stennis grumbled. He said he’d received reports about citizens making angry remarks in the presence of guardsmen. So he shut the whole thing down and sent it to Hattiesburg, a similarly sized pine-belt town thirty miles southwest of Laurel, in Forrest County.
Challenging the venue was one thing, but there was another line of attack that Pyles wouldn’t touch: McGee’s claim that he’d had consensual sex with Mrs. Hawkins, and that she started it. Contrary to some published accounts of the case, this allegation was not introduced at any of the circuit-court trials—in fact, it wasn’t made public until very late in the appeals process—but McGee definitely told his lawyers that the real story involved seduction, not rape. He conveyed this to Forrest Jackson in late 1945 or early 1946 in a statement that he either wrote himself or dictated to a fellow inmate in the Hinds County jail.
Pyles first talked about the statement in 1952, sharing its contents with a private investigator from New York who had been sent to Mississippi after the case ended by a law firm representing the Daily Worker. The investigator, whose name was only given as “Mr. Spivak,” was assigned to dig up new evidence that McGee’s affair story was true, because by then the paper had a potentially expensive problem on its hands: a libel suit for $1 million filed by Willette Hawkins in 1951 at the federal district court in Manhattan.
After the McGee case ended, Mrs. Hawkins hired the Jackson law firm of future governor Ross Barnett—one of the best in Mississippi—to pursue a libel action against the Daily Worker, claiming that it had defamed her by writing about the affair as if it were proven. Daily Worker editors and Communist Party officials realized with a gulp that the affair story was never argued before a jury, just alleged and denied during appeals, so they opened their own investigation. Spivak went to Jackson and Laurel for several days in June and July of 1952, where he spoke with at least four of McGee’s defense lawyers—Pyles, Breland, and third-trial counsel John Poole and Alvin London—and to Mrs. Hawkins’s preacher, the Reverend Grayson L. Tucker. The interviews survive as blurry carbon copies in the CRC’s files.
Spivak talked to Pyles on June 30 at his law office in Jackson. “I’ll tell you what the problem is,” he said as they settled in. “We’ve got a million-dollar suit on our hands as a result of the McGee case…. I’m looking for some leads about some information—about the lady in question whose honor has been impugned.”
Pyles knew about the lawsuit, so it’s surprising he opened up to a stranger who for all practical purposes was taping a deposition. But, to varying degrees, most of the lawyers spoke frankly about their experiences defending McGee. It was as if they relished the chance to show off their battle scars.
By that point, Pyles couldn’t remember whether McGee first gave the statement to him or to Forrest Jackson. But he thought he must have inherited it from Jackson, because throughout the pretrial and trial periods, Pyles was unable to get McGee to say more than a handful of words to him.
Why this resistance to his own lawyer? Pyles speculated that McGee had experienced so much stress and terror, and had bonded so strongly with Jackson, that he was unable to transfer his trust to another white attorney. “Forrest Jackson…had developed a good rapport with Willie McGee,” he said. “McGee somehow got the impression that I was part of the establishment that was attempting to take his life, and he refused to talk with me, to give me any facts, at all.”
Jackson told McGee he ought to have faith in Pyles, but it didn’t help: “[H]e did not tell me anything and I think it was out of fear, complete, paralyzing fear and distrust.”
Pyles decided to say nothing about the affair claim at the trial. As he told Spivak, to make such an accusation in a Mississippi court was extremely dangerous, but there was another problem: He couldn’t find independent evidence to support it. Pyles used two investigators of his own to poke around Laurel in search of fresh intelligence about this or anything else that might help McGee’s defense. One was Laurent Frantz, a white CRC attorney from Knoxville, Tennessee, who had been part of the anti-Bilbo push. Another was an African-American attorney from Mississippi named Dan Williams. Pyles and Breland also got research help from two Jackson colleagues, E. T. Calhoun and Tom Watkins. Nobody turned up witnesses about the affair.
It’s an open question whether they tried very hard. Pyles said he doubted that any Laurel citizens, of either race, would have talked or testified about a love affair between a black man and a white
woman, and it seems unlikely he would have called them to the stand, even if he had the goods. Many years later, he told an interviewer that, in retrospect, he found the affair story “hard to believe.”
“I’ll tell you why I never raised the story,” he told Spivak. “…[I]f you introduced this thing down there—that court room was packed—[it] would have started a riot, would have had no appreciable difference in the outcome of the jury. They wouldn’t have believed it…. Those people couldn’t have done otherwise and lived in that community. Of course, you don’t know how high that feeling gets. You’re from New York…. You don’t know how high a feeling can get in a community like that down there.”
“It was pretty…pretty explosive,” Spivak said.
“Oh, it was. Completely so…[T]here would have been a near riot in the courtroom, no doubt about that. Whenever you charge a white woman in the south with having sexual relations with a nigger in this part of the country, why, you better be God-damn sure.”
“I see.”
“We wouldn’t have lived to have gotten out of town.”
Spivak paused on that, to make sure Pyles meant it. “You wouldn’t have lived to have gotten out of town?”
“Well, if we had used that. Unless we would have had the facts absolutely. Then she probably wouldn’t have lived. They would have killed her.”
“…So, in other words, the situation was such that even if everybody believed that this was so, it just wasn’t wise to introduce it.”
“[You] couldn’t have—and lived.”
“So [you] followed the procedure that it’s best to forget it?”
“Well, there was no evidence to back it up. There was just his words and him in a state where he couldn’t testify. The only way we could have brought it up was in cross-examination of her. In an atmosphere like that, why, they would have chewed us up like cotton.”
Dan Breland—who, unlike Pyles, didn’t relish talking about the case—made similar points with Spivak, calling the trial’s atmosphere “very frightening.” If McGee had talked about interracial sex in court, he said, “[H]e probably wouldn’t have got off the stand. He would have been killed there.”
“And the lawyers with him?”
“Yeah, that’s sure,” Breland said. He returned to this theme later, saying that if he and Pyles had known what they were getting into, “money couldn’t have hired us” to take the case.
“Was it that much of a danger?”
“Yeah. We’re lucky we got out of it.”
There was another angle to McGee’s story that never became public knowledge, even after 1951. As Pyles explained to Spivak, McGee claimed the affair was tied into an elaborate murder plot. He said Mrs. Hawkins had told him she was pregnant with his child and had pressured him to kill her husband, so she could collect what Pyles described as “a fifteen thousand dollar double indemnity” life-insurance policy that Troy had taken out.
“Her husband had what?” Spivak said.
Pyles told him again. Spivak asked if he knew which company wrote the policy.
“I don’t know what company it was.”
“Indemnity policy…and she wanted McGee to—”
“She wanted McGee to kill her husband so that she could get the thirty thousand dollars; and that, in place of paying him any money, that he could have sexual intercourse with her.”
While Pyles kept talking, it occurred to him that he might have the original letter—he’d handed some of his McGee files over to the lead third-trial lawyer, John Poole, but not all—so he looked around until he found it. The statement, written in childish handwriting, filled three sheets of yellow tablet paper.
“Now, here, I don’t know whether Willie wrote this or not, but here is a statement that came down into our hands and we were told it was written by Willie,” Pyles said. “It shows—tell[s] you the whole story—gives you everything. I think it’s his own writing.” He started reading it into the tape recorder.
Willie McGee, born November 4, 1915, at Pachuta, Miss. Came to Laurel, Miss. at four years old. Went to school at Laurel until I got to 7 grade and got married 1935 to Eliza Jane Payton in Laurel, Miss. Have four children. Lived with my mother in Laurel until worked for McRae Service Station, 1936 to 1937. Worked at Eastman Garden [Gardiner] Company until cut out and went to work for Masonite in 1938 and quit then. Went to work in 1939 with Bethea Grocery….
That was the style throughout: conversational, rambling, moving through time in sudden leaps. McGee mentioned other jobs and moves—he went off to New Orleans for a while, worked on the riverfront, then returned to Laurel in 1941 to work at Bethea again—after which there was a gap of several years and a confusing section in which he seemed to say he’d enlisted in the army but was discharged because of “something on the brain.” By that point, suddenly, it was 1944.
McGee said the affair started in August of that year, but that he had encountered Mrs. Hawkins before then. Once or twice in the past, he said, as he walked through her neighborhood, she had acted friendly and tried to get him to come inside her house to do chores.
Every time she would see me she would smile and pick on me. She would call me her jitterbug. So one morning…as I passed her house on South Magnolia she called me and I went up to her porch and she asked me to come on in and I went on in. She told me she had wanted a little work that she wanted did so [she] asked me what would I charge to wash windows and wax the floors. Then she said that seem like I was afraid of white folks. I told her I was not. She said to me you must be, you must be. You act like you are ready to run. So she caught hold of my arm and pulled me up to her. So I caught around her and kissed her. And she said to me, Do you want to love me? And I said: My, oh—yes. And she walked on back in the bedroom and laid across the bed and I pulled my pants down and got on her…. This was on Saturday morning, one morning in August. Cannot give the exact date but it was in August 1944.
Abruptly, without providing dates, McGee said, “I left Laurel and went to Nevada for a while.” When he came back—he didn’t say when—Mrs. Hawkins presented him with shocking news. “I went to see her one night and she told me that she was in the family way and that I had done it,” he said.
According to McGee, the murder plot was hatched at this moment. He claimed that Mrs. Hawkins was in love with him and wanted them to run away together. “She said that she would get the insurance money and we’d go to California together and get married,” he wrote. The plot fell apart, McGee said, only because he didn’t want to do the killing. He left Laurel again and went to California, and then came back sometime in 1945, at which point the insatiable Mrs. Hawkins started badgering him again.
In this part of the statement, McGee sidetracked into logistical details about how the affair worked. Sometimes he would sneak into the back of the Hawkins home, with Troy either out of the house or in the front room, asleep. Twice, Mrs. Hawkins picked him up on the street and drove him to a “Negro cemetery” where they had sex in her car. Twice she showed up at a service station where he worked—“Mr. Joe Newson Service Station in Laurel,” he said. He quit that job because he was scared her carelessness would get him in serious trouble.
Everything came to a head in October and November of 1945. McGee said he went to Mrs. Hawkins’s home on a Wednesday night—October 31—to borrow $20. “She got at me again about killing her husband and I told her I would be back Thursday night and would do it,” he said.
McGee admitted that on Thursday he drank, gambled, lost his company’s money, and then parked his truck near the Hawkins home—just as the prosecution had sketched it at the first trial. But all similarities ended there. The prosecutors said he crawled through a window and took Mrs. Hawkins by surprise in the dark. McGee said she was eagerly awaiting his arrival. He scratched on a window screen and she let him in the front door, thinking he was there to murder Troy. But he told her he wasn’t prepared to do it.
“So she began to fuss,” he said. “She told me that I was not doing a th
ing but lying. I told her I did not have to lie. She asked me was I going to love her and I kissed her and hugged her…. She even unbuttoned my overalls for me and we got into bed. And when I started to get up I told her I wanted some money. She got angry again and began to raise sam. She said that I was taking her money, me and my Negro whores having a big time. But she went on in the back room and got me $5.50. It was $4 in bills, $1.50 in halves.”
The rest of the statement was repetitive, so it may be that McGee wrote it down twice. But there were a few new tidbits: He claimed there were three “Negro witnesses” who saw him and Mrs. Hawkins at a roadhouse one night, and that his wife found and tore up a picture of her that he secretly kept at home. In all, he estimated, they had sex “over a dozen times.”
McGee never spelled out the cause-and-effect of why his failure to murder Troy led to his arrest. He didn’t seem to be sure, but said Mrs. Hawkins had told him once that “you are going to do what I say or something is going to happen to you bad.”
“I didn’t know just what happened after I left,” he wrote. “I don’t know whether [Troy] heard me or she told him or not….
“She tried to force me to kill Mr. H.,” he reiterated. “She seem that she was plum insane. She told me she did not care anything about him any more…. In the beginning she told me to never tell no one about our plans. I tried everything to get rid of her but she being white lady I had to do what she said…. She told me that I was the one who got her in pregnancy. She kept me worried at all times.”
Dixon Pyles doesn’t get much stage time in existing accounts of the McGee case. Writers like Carl Rowan and Jessica Mitford tended to skip details of the circuit-court trials in favor of higher-profile years like 1950 and 1951, when the verdict was under appeal and Bella Abzug was overseeing the defense.
