by Alex Heard
The floor plan was important relative to something the CRC stressed many times: its claim that Troy Hawkins was sleeping in the “next room” when the rape occurred.
But that isn’t what Troy said in court. He testified that he went to sleep in the back bedroom after helping Willette with the baby. Unless Willette and Troy were both lying—which the defense, during appeals, claimed they were—he wasn’t in the next room, or even close. He was two rooms, three walls, and twenty-five feet away, making it much more believable that he could sleep through the assault.
It upset Sandra that such a basic detail had been distorted. If people wanted to attack her father’s testimony, why didn’t they start with what he’d said?
“What had happened, my dad was working at the post office, and he was on the late shift,” she said. “And he came in very late that night, maybe eleven, and he took a turn trying to get the baby quiet and didn’t succeed. Mother took the baby back and had a bottle. He had heated the bottle for the baby and they were trying to get her, you know, get her happy, and finally she quieted down.”
Sandra said the front shades to Willette’s bedroom window, which faced the street at a northwesterly angle, were raised a few inches that night. As she understood the story, the intruder drove by that morning, heading south, saw a light on, saw a woman, pulled over, and came back to the house on foot. He went around to the back side and broke the electrical line to the house. Then he came around to the side of the home facing northeast, toward the front, and crawled through a window next to the brick chimney’s exterior, which he used as a boost to get himself up and in.
I stared at the picture of the house. Was the window big enough for a man to crawl through? Looked like it. I kept staring, scribbling notes on the diagram until Susan reminded me that it wasn’t mine to write on. Sandra laughed and said it was OK; she had copies.
Granted, I was more obsessed than the average person, but there was something hypnotic about that picture and diagram. They were all that remained from the site of a small-town crime that, improbably, became famous around the world.
Sandra, Susan, and I spent a few minutes going over the floor plan before I turned to more general questions about the love-affair story. If I understood Sandra’s position, she thought the defense invented it as a way to get McGee off, correct?
“I absolutely do,” she said, her Southern accent brisk with conviction. “I think Bella Abzug and her attorneys made up the whole thing.”
That’s exactly what you’d expect a loyal daughter to say, but Sandra brought up points that couldn’t be explained away easily. One was that, for at least part of the time the affair was supposed to be roaring along, the Hawkinses weren’t living in Laurel—a fact that Willette had mentioned in passing the first time she testified. Troy took a wartime job in Evansville, Indiana, starting sometime in 1942, at Servel Industries, a plant that made airplane parts. Sandra hadn’t been able to work out the exact dates, but she felt sure she entered first grade in Evansville in January 1943. Dorothy was born there on February 24, 1944. Sandra’s memory was that the family returned to Laurel in November 1944, when her father went back to his old job with the U.S. Postal Service, where he’d worked until 1941. She and Ann both said the family didn’t have a car for the first year or so they were back. And all three daughters insisted that their mother never learned to drive. Later, two people who were not part of the family told me the same thing.
All of which clashes with how the affair story usually goes. In the written account McGee gave to Dixon Pyles in 1946, he said it started in August 1944. In affidavits given by Rosalee and Willie in 1950 and 1951, Mrs. Hawkins was clearly described as being a driver. She had a car parked nearby when she accosted them both on the streets of Laurel one night. She drove to a gas station once and left McGee a love note. She picked him up at night and drove him to a graveyard.
Did Sandra have the paperwork to back up her Indiana timetable? Some of it, though she’d experienced the usual frustrations of tracking down such things. The Indiana school records didn’t exist anymore, and she hadn’t been able to find out when Troy returned to his post-office job. However, the Laurel records indicated that she’d been in school there during part of the final six-week term in 1944.
The move back to Laurel also tied in with another important issue: Mrs. Hawkins’s sickly physical condition, which was mentioned during the trials.
“We came back to Laurel because she was not really well,” Sandra said. “She was very frail. A few weeks after she’d given birth to my oldest sister, she had an appendectomy, and the appendix ruptured and they didn’t think she would live. And so my aunt took the baby—my Aunt LaVera, who was always there for us. My mother was down for like six weeks—a long time. And she was always very, very frail, very thin, always trying to gain weight. She was about five-eight, and if she weighed 115, that was really good.”
We talked about the emotional fallout from the case. It was terrible all around, Sandra said, though it was a fixed part of Hawkins family history that Willette, ill though she was, had been mentally healthy prior to November 2, 1945. Afterward, it was like a switch had been flipped. She became a semi-reclusive chain-smoker who suffered migraines, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t keep food down, and was sometimes plagued by nightmares that caused her to wake up screaming.
Sandra said her father never stopped loving her mother and never gave up hope that she would recover. He moved the family to a country place west of Laurel in 1952, where Willette tried to pitch in with farmwork that neither of them was much good at.
“He tried to farm, but he didn’t know how to farm,” Sandra said of her dad. “I have to tell you this—everything he did, she did. When they built the house, she hammered as big as he hammered. Even though she was frail, she was thin, she got up there on that roof with him.”
Sandra said her mother always refused to see a psychiatrist, and that the only medical attention she got was counterproductive. “The doctors would give her all these tips on trying to sleep. They gave her sleeping pills. Then they said the thing for you to do is drink beer at night. That might relax you.”
“And they were trying to get her to gain weight,” Brad called from the couch, referring to the beer.
“Then they tried to…uh, they told her to take a drink of bourbon to, you know. Anyway, she became addicted to alcohol.”
I didn’t know if she meant in the immediate aftermath of the assault or over the long haul. “So she was an alcoholic?” I asked.
Sandra didn’t think so. She and her sisters were sure their mother had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, which is very common among victims of rape. If she sometimes drank too much, it was a way of dealing with that.
“And this whole thing ruined her life?” I asked.
“It ruined her life. Not only…everybody’s.”
I was already aware of what sparked Sandra’s interest in the case, but there had to be a deeper drive to keep her going. Brad, along with one of her two sons, had questioned whether it was smart to get into something like this so late in life. Aside from family members, almost nobody knew this aspect of Sandra’s story. In this town, where she lived for forty-six years, she had confided in only two friends.
“Nobody talks about it but family,” she said. “My son just recently…. I told him you were coming, and he said, ‘Are you sure you want to revisit this?’ I think Brad’s probably of the same mind.”
“But it’s like you’ve been revisiting it anyway,” Susan said. “You’ve been compelled to keep revisiting it.”
Sandra nodded and said, “Her voice needs to be heard before I die.”
Of all the characters in the McGee story, nobody has gotten rougher handling from journalists and historians than Mrs. Hawkins, including all those white males—policemen, sheriffs, jailers, prosecutors, jury members, judges, and politicians—who put McGee through the wringer, abusing him physically and mentally and sending him to the electric chair without so m
uch as a blink of regret.
Others have come in for criticism, certainly, but Mrs. Hawkins has endured as the starring rogue. The Daily Worker set the tone, comparing her to Potiphar’s wife and calling McGee “a slave in the kingdom of jimcrow.” In 1951, a day after the execution, the paper published a front-page article that declared, “Willie McGee was murdered because the white woman who had forced an illicit affair upon him for more than four years suddenly shouted ‘rape’ after the whole town discovered the story.” Mrs. Hawkins sued over this passage, but that part of the story was barely covered.
Meanwhile, if you search online and in libraries today, you’ll find the essence of the Daily Worker’s charge amplified all over the place. In one Web biography of Bella Abzug, readers are told that McGee was “ludicrously charged with rape by a white, ‘married’ Southern slut who had him intercoursing her for years. When married Willie finally refused to continue the regularly-scheduled performances, she falsely yelled ‘rape!’” In a 1979 paper titled Rape, Racism, and the White Women’s Movement, a writer named Alison Edwards said that McGee’s accuser, “Wilametta Hawkins,” was “a woman whom people in Laurel, Black and white, all knew had been having an affair with McGee for a long time.”
Similar examples turn up in several nonfiction books. Gerald Horne’s history of the CRC, Communist Front?, treats McGee’s affair allegation as proven and asserts that, during the second trial, “Mrs. Willett Hawkins” made “passes at the district attorney throughout…given the nature of the charges, this should have impeached her credibility irrevocably in a normal trial, but did not here.”
In A Fine Old Conflict, Jessica Mitford’s 1977 memoir, she wrote that McGee was convicted “despite persuasive evidence that his accuser had long been his mistress.” Hazel Rowley’s 2001 biography of novelist Richard Wright, a Mississippi native who took an interest in the case from his expatriate’s home in Paris, served up an inaccurate detail about how Troy Hawkins learned the truth: “[Mrs. Hawkins’s] husband, a traveling salesman, had come back early, and it was then that the white woman accused McGee of rape.” Putting a different spin on the same moment, Phillip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown says that when McGee “finally broke with Mrs. Hawkins in early 1945…Troy Hawkins learned of the affair. After a ferocious spat between husband and wife that spilled out into the street in front of their house, Mrs. Hawkins called the police and said she had been raped by a black man with kinky hair.”
If Mrs. Hawkins did everything people say she did, she deserves the attacks. She was a figure of such ruthless, efficient command-and-control that she somehow accomplished all of the following: started the affair to satisfy her own desires, kept it going against the will of the man she’d targeted, and channeled an entire city’s anger onto him once they were caught. Her husband went along quietly because, presumably, he couldn’t bear the shame of being cuckolded by a black man, so their elaborate fiction was his only way out.
Law enforcement officials went along because…well, that part was harder to figure. If the “whole town” knew the truth, how did Mrs. Hawkins manage to persuade police, prosecutors, and judges to engage in a conspiracy to make her look like the victim instead of the predator? The best explanation I could come up with was a variation on Senator Bilbo’s Take Your Choice theme: White men of the South believed it was literally impossible for a white woman to have sex with a black man by choice. If Laurel officials were that deluded, then perhaps they would have done anything and everything to protect Mrs. Hawkins’s reputation.
Through the years, there’s been only one prominent dissenter about Mrs. Hawkins: Susan Brownmiller, the feminist, rape expert, and author. In a chapter from Against Our Will called “A Question of Race,” Brownmiller focused on lynching and legal lynching cases that involved charges of interracial sex and rape, with a lengthy examination of the McGee case. She interviewed Abzug in person in 1973, pressing her about the question of proof. How did Bella know the affair really happened?
“I placed my own investigators in town,” she told me one afternoon in her office. “The affair…was common knowledge among blacks and whites.” Then why hadn’t she put McGee or his wife on the stand? “No jury was going to believe it. Challenging the word of a white woman just wasn’t done. The strategy was to depend on a lack of concrete evidence. Nobody believed you could win an interracial rape case in a Southern court. You could only win on appeal.”
To Brownmiller, there was reasonable doubt in both directions. “Willametta Hawkins never wavered,” she wrote. “She had been raped, she said, but she could not identify her assailant. For this she was vilified and harassed by leftists who smeared her in print as an oversexed and vengeful white witch.” She noted that McGee never wavered, either, though on this point she made a small factual error. She was under the impression that he “kept his silence to the end” regarding the affair. In fact, he had plenty to say about it, insisting to reporters on his dying day that it had happened.
Brownmiller’s take was worthy of serious consideration, but it got lost in a flurry of controversy caused by her analysis, in the same chapter, of the Emmett Till case, a 1955 lynching that shocked people all across the nation and around the world. Till was a fourteen-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives near the Delta town of Money, Mississippi. Showing off to some other black kids one August day, he allegedly “wolf whistled” at a white female storekeeper named Carolyn Bryant. Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, heard about it, kidnapped Till from his uncle’s home that night, beat him, shot him, and threw him into a muddy river with a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin pulley tied to his neck. Both men were acquitted by an all-white jury, and though they later confessed everything to a journalist, they were never retried.
Brownmiller condemned the killers, but as she pondered Till’s wolf whistle, she also saw a youth who—in a foolish attempt to impress his friends—made a gesture that Bryant might well have seen as threatening.
“We are rightly aghast that a whistle could be cause for murder but we must also accept that Emmett Till and J. W. Millam [sic] shared something in common,” she wrote. “They both understood that the whistle was no small tweet of hubba-hubba….” Rather, “it was a deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her.”
That’s quite a leap: Till was a kid whose whistle (assuming there was one) should have earned him, at most, harsh words from his uncle. Inevitably, there was a backlash. In her 1981 book, Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis—the famous Black Panther turned professor—said that Brownmiller’s “provocative distortion of such historical cases as the Scottsboro Nine, Willie McGee and Emmett Till are designed to dissipate any sympathy for Black men who are victims of fraudulent rape charges.” The more nuanced part of Brownmiller’s stance—that Mrs. Hawkins’s whiteness wasn’t, by itself, proof that she’d lied about McGee—got lost in the din.
As I studied the McGee case, I started over with basic questions about the affair. If, as Abzug said, it wasn’t brought up during the circuit-court trials, when was it publicly discussed for the first time? And when was it proved?
The books and articles I already had—along with new ones I found, including a legal analysis published in the Journal of Mississippi History by a pre-law student named Craig Zaim—didn’t hold the answer, and I never saw anything that qualified as proof that Mrs. Hawkins was lying. Somewhere, somehow, it simply became accepted that she was, and this got cloned when writer B came along and used writer A as a source. The sources weren’t always quoted accurately either. For example, in a 1992 book called In Spite of Innocence, a study of wrongful executions, Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance E. Putnam listed McGee as someone who could be considered officially exonerated. But one of their main sources for that was Carl Rowan, who wasn’t sure McGee was innocent.
The newspaper clips I had were far from complete, but I as
sumed I would eventually find that the affair story debuted in the Daily Worker. That was correct, but I was surprised to learn that this didn’t happen until very late in the game: in early March 1951, when both the Daily Worker and a Bay Area paper called the People’s Weekly World ran stories about it.
The other interesting thing was that both papers attacked Mrs. Hawkins long before the affair story entered the picture, but from different angles. For several years, the Daily Worker’s charge was that her account of the rape simply sounded like hogwash—they just couldn’t yet say why—and so they assumed she was lying.
In a story published on December 12, 1945, soon after the first trial, McGee was already being described as the “Negro victim” of “a one-day ‘trial’ for ‘rape.’” By early 1946, a National Federation for Constitutional Liberties press release labeled “Two Minute Justice” served up what would become the standard line for casting doubt on Mrs. Hawkins’s testimony.
“Thirteen witnesses, including [McGee]’s alleged victim, appeared against him,” it said. “Their story was that he had entered the woman’s home at night, assaulted her while at her side in the bed was her small child, and in the next room her husband slept. It was not shown why any of the thirteen witnesses made no attempt to stop the assault. It was not shown either why the woman herself did not cry out or her child, and thus awaken her nearby husband.”
That summary raised one nonissue—witnesses like Tal Porter, George Walker, and Paul Britton weren’t in a position to “stop” anything—and introduced two inaccuracies. Troy wasn’t in the next room, and Mrs. Hawkins did explain why she didn’t cry out: The attacker said he would kill her child if she made a sound.
