by Alex Heard
“They didn’t take five or six men and say, ‘Here, son, pick one out and tell me if that’s the man that did it’?” one defense lawyer asked.
“They didn’t do that, did they?…They just brought one man in there, and they had already told you they had the man that raped the little girl, and they wanted you to come up and identify the man that raped the little girl?” The boys said yes, that’s how it had been.
Yarbrough’s court-appointed defense attorney was Jack Deavours, a Laurel fixture who had prosecuted the Ouida Keaton case and who would serve as a special prosecutor during Willie McGee’s third trial. The rape victim was called to the stand, despite Deavours’s objection that she was too young to qualify as a competent witness. With the jury out and the girl standing in front of the witness chair, answering quietly and gesturing, District Attorney Homer Pittman asked, “Where do bad little girls go who tell stories?”
“To the bad man,” she said.
“Where do good little girls go?”
“To heaven.”
“Apparently frightened, the witness was slow to answer questions propounded by the district attorney,” the Leader-Call reported, “but under his gentle phrasing of the queries she was led to tell of the evening of the alleged attack, and then pointed at Yarbrough when Pittman asked her to show the jury her attacker.”
Deavours objected, noting that Pittman had pointed at Yarbrough three times when the jury was gone, cueing the girl about who “the bad man” was. After being overruled by the judge—McGee’s old nemesis, Burkitt Collins—he didn’t try to cross-examine her.
Court-watchers figured Deavours would use an insanity defense—records showed that Yarbrough had spent time in mental hospitals—but instead he stressed procedural points, which he later used in an unsuccessful appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. The evidence was circumstantial, he argued; it was dark when the boys saw the man and the girl; and the police never got the blood sample looked at. The three child witnesses had been coached and the girl’s testimony was vague. All she said was that the man took her into the woods and laid her down.
On the stand, Yarbrough denied committing the rape, after which Deavours asked questions that had only one possible function: to arouse sympathy. “The defendant…told the jury that he was an ex-soldier and was at Pearl Harbor when that place was attacked,” the Leader-Call reported. “He said that immediately following the battle he became highly nervous and was treated for a nervous disorder in several government hospitals before being discharged.” Surprisingly, the tactic failed. After deliberating for two hours, an all-white jury found Yarbrough guilty on March 11, 1947. In another break from the usual pattern, the prosecution asked that the jury give him the death penalty.
It’s possible this was done for show, but it doesn’t sound that way in the trial records and newspaper reports. During his closing argument, County Attorney Albert Easterling clutched his lapels, raised his voice, and delivered a speech demanding that Yarbrough be electrocuted. Pointing at Yarbrough’s wife, who was sitting beside him at the defense table with one of their children, Easterling said this family tableau was staged to generate pity that Yarbrough didn’t deserve.
“Easterling turned toward the accused man during his plea to hurl scorching and scathing denunciations which reverberated…through the courtroom,” the Leader-Call reported. “‘Oh, yes, Yarbrough,’ he thundered, ‘you’ve got your little wife and baby with you today—but where were they on last December 6—where were they when you took that little negro girl into the woods and raped her?”
The jurors were sufficiently appalled to find Yarbrough guilty, but they would only go so far. Whether they were motivated by doubts about his sanity, a racist belief that a white man should never be executed for raping a black female—even a child—or something else, they opted for a sentence of life in prison. Unlike McGee, Laverne Yarbrough would be spared.
In 1947, McGee wasn’t on anybody’s list of newsmakers. The second-trial verdict was reported in postage-stamp-sized articles here and there, including PM, the liberal New York–based paper edited by Ralph Ingersoll and funded by Chicago millionaire Marshall Field III. The Times either didn’t hear about McGee or wasn’t interested, because it didn’t publish anything.
He was driven back to jail in Hinds County, and nothing more was heard from him for the next fifteen months. Later, there would be jailhouse letters—written by him and widely publicized by the CRC—but those didn’t start arriving until 1948, and there were only a smattering until 1950, when he began to write often. For a long time, his mother, Bessie, was the sole public voice of the case, and what she mainly did was send letters to the CRC, which the group sometimes used in press releases. From her home on Elm Street in Laurel, she politely beseeched them never to forget her boy.
“Just a few lines to let you hear from me,” she wrote on December 9, 1946. “[T]his leaves me doing very well at this time and hope that you are the same. My son Willie he is sintuns again to the chair. But he got a apeal and I do want you all to do all you all can for him.”
Several months later, in July 1947, she mentioned a new figure in Willie’s life, a woman who evidently had been visiting him in jail: “I got a letter from Rosa and she say Willie was Better I sure was glad to hear that.” This is the earliest surviving reference I found to the existence of Rosalee McGee in connection with Willie.
Dixon Pyles and Dan Breland filed a notice of appeal ten days after the verdict, but they didn’t submit it until August 6, 1947. It was a fat document of 157 pages, a fourth of them summarizing the second-trial testimony, which at times boiled down in a strangely flat way.
WILLIE MCGEE (Tr. Vol. II, P. 417–419)
The appellant was placed on the stand. He was bodily carried by sheriff’s deputies. His head was held down and he had a wild expression in his eyes…. [T]he appellant did not answer a single question, nor did he make any response except peculiar noises.
Pyles raised six points. The first would turn out to be the most significant: that McGee was deprived of his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection because of race-based jury exclusion. He also pushed the insanity argument; said McGee should have been granted a change of venue to someplace far away; challenged the legitimacy of his confession; and went into great detail on the “consent” angle, arguing that Mrs. Hawkins’s failure to fight back meant that the sex was not against her will.
That was a hopeless line of attack, certain to offend any Mississippi judge who looked at it. Here and there, Pyles thought better of a particular phrase and drew a line through it, as in this passage: “The record reveals that the prosecutrix is a rather tall woman and at the time was 32 years old, in full possession of her mental faculties, and of normal strength.” Elsewhere, he pointed out that she was half an inch taller than her attacker, not mentioning her wispy build.
The state’s response was short and simple: Read the transcript. Mrs. Hawkins submitted to McGee because she’d been overpowered and threatened with death. “The sordid and revolting details of this crime will not be set out,” wrote Greek L. Rice, Mississippi’s assistant attorney general, “but a reading of the testimony of Mrs. Troy C. Hawkins, prosecutrix…fully establishes the crime of rape.”
In 1947, the case that grabbed the headlines happened 500 miles away from Laurel—in Greenville, South Carolina, a textile-manufacturing city in the northern part of the state. It centered on a lynching that, this time, was not overlooked by major newspapers. The Times treated it as important news from the start, sending John Popham to cover it when the accused lynchers went on trial in May.
The Greenville case stood out for a couple of reasons. One was that local law enforcement, aided by state officials and FBI agents, mounted an aggressive investigation that led to multiple arrests, confessions, and indictments. Another was the staggering numbers involved: Thirty-one men eventually went to trial. The defendants were blue-collar Greenville men—almost all of them taxicab drivers—
who were accused of seizing, beating, stabbing, and shooting a twenty-four-year-old African-American murder suspect named Willie Earle. It was, and would remain, the largest lynching trial in U.S. history.
The incident started on the night of February 15, 1947, a Saturday, when a middle-aged Yellow Cab driver named Thomas Watson Brown was robbed and stabbed on the job. Company dispatchers said Brown had picked up two “negro fares” that night, and that nothing more was heard from him until he was found around 10 p.m., still alive and lying on a roadside near the town of Liberty. (Brown survived until just before noon on Monday.) Pickens County sheriff Waymond Mauldin said he suspected Earle because investigators found tracks and identifiable heel prints leading from the cab to the spot where Brown lay, and from there to the home of Earle’s mother, about a mile from the crime scene. Earle was arrested on Sunday, allegedly in possession of a bloodstained pocketknife.
Whether Earle did it or not quickly became moot. He was taken for safekeeping to the county jail at Pickens, a small town twenty miles west of Greenville. The jail was an old and vulnerable structure manned by a sixty-two-year-old turnkey named J. Ed Gilstrap, who lived there with his wife and daughter. Before dawn on the 17th, a mob of at least three dozen men—most of them traveling in taxis—drove to Pickens and demanded that Gilstrap hand Earle over. He didn’t resist, saying later, “They had shotguns and I danced to their music.” He said he didn’t recognize any members of the lynch party.
Earle’s body was found in the country on Monday morning, laid out on frosty ground near a livestock pen. He’d been brutalized before being killed with a shotgun blast to the head. “The tissue of Willie Earle’s brain was left hanging on the bushes,” said a report in Time. “The lynchers went back to Greenville and drank coffee.”
The lynching caused a furor in South Carolina and beyond. The state’s new governor, Strom Thurmond, a World War II veteran and former judge who’d been in office less than a month, sent a state constable to Greenville County to investigate and issued a statement promising justice. “Such offenses against decency, law and the Democratic way of living will not be tolerated by the law abiding citizens of this state,” he said. “Mob rule is against every principle for which we have so recently sacrificed so much, and we expect to combat it with the same determination.”
At the White House, Thurmond’s action was noted approvingly as a sign that Truman’s statements about race were having an effect. “The President may be interested to see how his Civil Rights Committee is taking him off the hot seat,” David K. Niles wrote in a memo. “Day before yesterday there was this brutal lynching in South Carolina. They immediately moved in on it.”
FBI agents were sent in to aid locals in the roundup and questioning of some 200 suspects and potential sources. Twenty-six men signed confessions, and several identified a man named Roosevelt Carlos Hurd Sr., a forty-five-year-old cab driver, as the person who finished Earle off. He denied it, saying he “heard” guns being fired but didn’t have one himself. “When I seen they were going to kill the Negro, I just turned around, because I did not want to see it happen,” he said.
Despite the usual complaining about federal involvement in anything, Thurmond got good reviews in many Southern newspapers, though these often carried an antifederal undercurrent that foreshadowed problems at the trial. “The law is on its throne in Greenville County, South Carolina,” said an editorial in the Atlanta Journal. “Something is being done about a lynching. This fact is worth many thousands of words of argument in Congress against a federal anti-lynching statute.”
The trial started on May 12, drawing reporters from all over the country, including African-American journalists and correspondents with the wire services. Life was there. So was the New Yorker, which sent Rebecca West, a British writer known for her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a classic travelogue about life in the Balkans before World War II. West had seen plenty of rough stuff in her day—she covered the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker—but the Greenville trial got under her skin. During closing arguments at the eight-day proceeding, she listened as defense attorney John Bolt Culbertson flatly stated that Earle got what he deserved. He’d murdered a white man, and whether he died vigilante-style or at the state’s hands, he had to go. “Willie Earle is dead,” he declared, “and I wish more like him was dead.”
“There was a delighted, giggling, almost coquettish response from the defendants and some of the spectators,” West wrote. “…A more disgusting incident could not have happened in any court of law in any time.”
The judge, a former Washington and Lee football player named James Robert Martin Jr., wanted convictions and had good reason to expect them, since so many men had confessed. But the defense lawyers planted the idea that the confessions were unethically procured with “Trojan horse” trickery by the FBI agents, many of whom were Southerners. (Supposedly, they’d told the defendants they would never be convicted by a white jury, so why not talk?) Martin ruled that each man’s confession could be used against him but not against the other defendants as part of a conspiracy charge. He dismissed the charges against some defendants and reduced the charges against others, leaving the total on trial for murder or conspiracy at twenty-eight.
Since nobody denied that Earle had been lynched, the defense’s case rested on appealing to the jury’s belief that the killing was justified. Culbertson, a labor lawyer who was known locally for his relatively liberal views, drove this home during a closing argument that compared Earle to a rabid dog. “You might shoot a mad dog and be prosecuted, but if a mad dog were loose in my community, I’d shoot the dog and let them prosecute me,” he said. His colleague Thomas Wofford played on local resentments about the FBI’s role and the presence of “northern press.”
Popham wrote that the defense lawyers pulled out all the stops in their emotional appeals, making references to “King Solomon’s wisdom, the Book of Deuteronomy, tortures of the Middle Ages, Civil War devastation of Southern homes, the atomic bomb, and Northern publications and radio commentators” to support their argument that the accused were the victims of what one lawyer called “the incurable malady of meddler’s itch.”
When it came time to release the jury, Judge Martin ordered them to remove such thoughts from their minds. The trial was about illegal punishment administered by a mob. They were not to let “any so-called racial issue to enter into your deliberations.”
The jury came back after five hours and handed over their verdict: not guilty for all twenty-eight defendants, on ninety-six counts of murder, conspiracy, and accessory before and after the fact. With a light rain hitting the courtroom windows and black spectators looking down glumly from a segregated balcony, Judge Martin turned to the jurors, told them their service was over, and walked out. “As the roll-call of acquittal was completed,” a United Press reporter wrote, “Hurd…jumped on a chair and shouted, ‘Justice has been done—I feel the best I ever felt in my life.’”
President Truman had a bad case of meddler’s itch himself, even though 1947 wasn’t a good time to start picking fights. He’d inherited the presidency instead of winning it, the economy was still in a postwar funk, and he was getting raked by critics on both the right and the left as his public opinion numbers plunged. The 1946 congressional elections had been a disaster, with Democrats becoming the minority party in both the House and Senate for the first time since 1928. Politically, he was seen as a lame duck who could easily be defeated in 1948. A popular Republican joke of the time asked, “What would Harry Truman do if he were alive today?”
Despite his weakness, Truman kept making moves that seemed certain to alienate Southerners. On June 29, he gave a major speech on civil rights at the Lincoln Memorial, appearing alongside Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White before delegates to the annual conference of the NAACP. Speaking to a mostly black crowd of roughly 10,000 in the same setting that Martin Luther King Jr. would use sixteen years later, he made a promise to act.
“I should like to ta
lk to you briefly about civil rights and human freedom,” he began. “It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to insure that all Americans enjoy these rights.
“When I say all Americans,” he added, “I mean all Americans.”
The speech didn’t get into specifics, but those followed in early 1948, after the October 1947 release of To Secure These Rights, a landmark document detailing the injustices facing black Americans. In it, Truman asked for several legislative remedies that were poison pills for Southern congressmen, including abolition of the poll tax, anti-lynching legislation, and the creation of a permanent federal civil rights commission.
The report’s brief section on lynching described the murders of Willie Earle, John Jones, and the Malcoms and Dorseys. “[L]ynching is the ultimate threat by which his inferior status is driven home to the Negro,” it said. “As a terrorist device, it reinforces all the other disabilities placed upon him. The threat of lynching always hangs over the head of the southern Negro; the knowledge that a misinterpreted word or action can lead to his death is a dreadful burden.”
The Southern backlash was instantaneous. “Forty-nine South Carolina legislators denounced this program last week as ‘repugnant,’” the Times reported. “In a similar criticism, Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi proposed that the Solid South withhold all its electoral votes to make possible the election of a ‘distinguished southerner.’”
