by Alex Heard
The fight was on, and it would cause a huge rift in the Democratic Party: the Dixiecrat revolt. One of its chief architects was a man who played a defining role in the McGee case, Mississippi governor Fielding Wright, who would eventually stand as Strom Thurmond’s running mate on the States’ Rights Party ticket that challenged Truman in 1948. In mid-February, after Truman delivered a speech about his legislative goals, Wright began mobilizing support for some kind of organized political response. At a conference of Mississippi Democrats held in Jackson on February 12, 1948—which 4,000 people attended—he and others passed a resolution that said Truman’s civil rights proposals violated everything held dear by “true white Jeffersonian Democrats.”
“Unless we repudiate such action we shall stultify ourselves,” he said. “On us should be the stigma of sacrificing principle for paltry gains, of choosing power and losing self respect, of seeking the end, no matter the means. That course we denounce.”
Without Fielding Wright, there might not have been a Dixiecrat revolt, and his place at the front of a guerrilla political movement was a surprise. Up until the late 1940s, his career had been about as beige as they come.
Wright was born in 1895 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a small Delta town forty-five miles north of Vicksburg. He attended the University of Alabama for two years starting in 1912 and then went back home to “read the law,” working at a small-town firm—with an interruption for overseas duty in World War I—until 1927, when he ran for state senate. When that term ended he won a seat in the state house, where he rose to the position of speaker by 1936. He left government in 1940 to join a Vicksburg law firm and came back to win a race for lieutenant governor in 1943.
He became governor after Thomas Bailey died of cancer in November 1946, and he won a term in his own right the next year, positioning himself as a low-key bureaucrat. His campaign literature provided lengthy lists of the useful things he’d done—“Helped provide School Lunch Program…Pushed financing of Statewide Forestry Fire Protection Program…”—and he looked the part: a genial, distinguished-looking man with graying hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
But Wright also had a hard edge, and on a separate issue—law and order as it applied to black defendants—he had already proved himself to be a stern judge, a fact that didn’t bode well for McGee. During his first, partial term as governor, he had been confronted with an emotional appeal in a capital punishment case that involved two African-American fifteen-year-olds, Charles Trudell and James Lewis, who were scheduled to die for the murder of their employer, a white sawmill operator named Harry McKey. Blanche Meiers, a middle-aged mother of eight from Oakland, California, mounted a personal crusade to save their lives, and in January 1947 she traveled by train to plead with Wright in person, an uphill quest that was covered as a human-interest story all over the country. Meiers said she was dying of “an incurable disease” and that saving the boys would be her “one last good deed before I meet my God.”
Normally, such meddling would have been greeted with scorn in Jackson newspapers, but Mrs. Meiers was hard to dislike. The Jackson Daily News ran a picture of her extending her arms for a Jewish-mother hug, under the headline PLEADS FOR NEGRO YOUTHS. The tone of the coverage was that she was well-meaning but misguided.
Wright agreed to see her, but before she arrived he traveled to the boys’ jail cell in Woodville, a tiny southwest Mississippi town near the Louisiana border. There, he said, they gave him a full confession and “glibly told of other crimes they had planned.” Though Wright’s mind was already closed to Mrs. Meiers’s words, he treated her with courtesy, and she reciprocated by praising his fairness. “Withhold your criticism of the governor of Mississippi,” she said. “He is a good man—the law is wrong.”
Local newspapers praised Wright for behaving like a gentleman while standing firm. “That was what Mississippians would have expected of any Mississippi governor,” said a Clarion-Ledger editorial. “…[W]e…congratulate His Excellency on his good judgment as well as his inherent instincts and manner.”
As promised, Wright didn’t relent. Trudell and Lewis were both electrocuted in July.
Prior to the Mississippi gubernatorial primary in the summer of 1947, Wright presented his case to voters at the Neshoba County Fair—a traditional proving ground for Mississippi politicians—not bothering to pretend he was a speaker in the grand tradition of Bilbo.
“He doesn’t get angry,” the Memphis Press-Scimitar reported, sounding disappointed. “He doesn’t rave and rant. He is not a flowery old-time orator. Wright simply stands before the people and talks quietly, telling them in simple terms what he has done and what he proposes to recommend….” Still, he threw off a few sparks. Late in the speech, without saying quite who he meant, Wright laid down a general warning to anybody—Truman Democrats, liberals, Communists—who would presume to interfere with Mississippi’s way of life.
“It is not necessary for me to call your attention to the crusade going on in certain sections deliberately planned and designed to place our state in a false light and hold us up to scorn,” he said. “…Certain pressure groups who do not approve of our philosophy and some who hate us because of our strong advancement in our economic condition are exerting every means to bring disunity, discord, and strife…. I have been battling these outside meddlers during my service as acting governor and since I became governor.”
Wright won easily, and his inaugural speech in early 1948 followed Truman’s 1948 State of the Union address by two weeks. Truman talked about civil rights again, so Wright made that one of his themes, denouncing the president’s civil rights committee and the likely “vicious effect” of its proposals. “Those of you who read and studied the report recognize in it a further and, I might say, the most dangerous step toward the destruction of these traditions and customs so vital to our way of life, particularly in our Southland,” he said. Mississippians had been good Democrats “when no other section stayed with that banner,” but their continued loyalty was not guaranteed. This legislation would end it.
Wright moved quickly. In early February, John Popham was on hand in Wakulla Springs, Florida, to hear him urge fellow members of the Southern Governor’s Conference to start thinking about a formal break with the Democrats. By the end of the month, the first Jackson meeting had been held; another was scheduled for May. On the eve of that one—a bigger affair that attracted delegates from other Southern states, including Strom Thurmond—Wright delivered a statewide radio address in which he told Mississippi’s black population to stop dreaming hopeless dreams: Segregation would never end.
“If any of you have become so deluded as to want to enter our white schools, patronize our hotels and cafes, enjoy social equality with the whites,” he said, “then kindness and true sympathy requires me to advise you to make your home in some state other than Mississippi.”
As if Truman didn’t have enough to worry about in the summer of 1948, he also faced strong opposition on the left, led by Henry Wallace, FDR’s longtime secretary of agriculture and his vice president during World War II. With FDR’s blessing, Wallace was dumped from the 1944 Democratic ticket in favor of Truman. He served as Truman’s secretary of commerce but was fired in September 1946, because his public statements on such issues as the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and atomic secrecy were well to the left of the Truman Doctrine, which the president had laid out in a March 12, 1947, speech that called for the United States to support governments around the world that were fighting Communist encroachment.
Later that year, in a September 12 speech at Madison Square Garden called “The Way to Peace,” Wallace counseled against a postwar military alliance with Britain, said that only the United Nations should be trusted with atomic bombs, and argued that an overly aggressive stance against Soviet Russia was a mistake. “‘Getting tough’ never bought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers,” he said. “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will ge
t.”
For good measure, he brought up the 1946 lynchings in Monroe, Georgia, saying that Americans needed to solve their own problems of “prejudice, hatred, fear, and ignorance of certain races” before they could hope to set an example for the world.
Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was furious that Wallace had sounded off about foreign policy, as was Truman. “He is a pacifist one hundred percent,” he wrote of Wallace in his diary. “He wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politboro…. The Reds, phonies and the ‘parlor pinks’ seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.”
Wallace resigned under pressure on September 20, and Truman had another full-fledged rival to contend with. By the winter of 1947, Wallace was the declared presidential candidate of the new Progressive Party, a group that would have lasting significance to the McGee case. In 1950 and 1951, when the case broke out and started to become well known, it didn’t happen solely because of the Communist Party and the CRC. The groundswell of support for McGee, which seemed to come out of nowhere, also occurred because Wallace people rallied around, seeing McGee as a cause that could bring a new level of mainstream attention to the emerging issue of civil rights.
seven
THE ODDS AGAINST SMILING JOHNNY
In early 1948, McGee won a second reversal from the Mississippi Supreme Court, which led to a third circuit-court trial within weeks. This time, the state judges reversed the decision only grudgingly, in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that was announced on December 8, 1947, when Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP won a unanimous decision in Patton v. Mississippi.
The case’s central issue was the same one Dixon Pyles raised in his appeal of McGee’s second conviction: exclusion of blacks from jury lists, grand juries, and trial juries, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection requirement. Patton was filed first, so it reached the U.S. Supreme Court when the Mississippi Supreme Court was still considering McGee’s appeal.
Eddie “Buster” Patton was a young black man from Meridian who was accused of killing fifty-three-year-old J. L. Meadows, the white owner of a roadhouse. Meadows was found dead behind a counter on the morning of February 11, 1946, the victim of a blunt-instrument beating that left bruises and cuts all over his head, face, and body. Patton, who’d worked for him at one time, was arrested and questioned for eight hours. He confessed, though the prosecution decided not to use his admission of guilt, apparently anticipating a challenge over whether it had been beaten out of him. The case consisted of circumstantial evidence gained during the confession and physical evidence in the form of footprints, found outside the nightclub, that allegedly matched Patton’s shoes. The trial lasted only a day; Patton was found guilty in eighteen minutes and sentenced to death.
The grand jury and trial jury were all white and all male. The county, Lauderdale, was at least 35 percent African-American, but there hadn’t been a black on a nonfederal jury there for as long as anyone could remember. Just as Pyles later did, Patton’s lawyer, a local named Lonnie Broadway, put officials on the stand who admitted as much, testifying vaguely about two or three unnamed blacks who might have been placed on jury lists in the past but didn’t serve.
The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Patton’s appeal, saying the problem wasn’t exclusion but a shortage of blacks who met the voter standards spelled out under Mississippi law—among them, the ability to pay a poll tax and to read and interpret sections of the state constitution. The justices knew that those rules, in place since 1890, were there to deny blacks their voting rights, but they pretended to believe the system was run fairly, resulting in a natural mathematical imbalance that explained why none was ever selected.
To support this, the Mississippi judges skipped any analysis of the rigged voting laws and made the scarcity of black voters their starting point. Based on testimony at Patton’s trial, they estimated that roughly a dozen blacks would qualify as potential jurors. Comparing that with the larger number of qualified whites (roughly 5,000), the justices concluded that this translated to “about one-fourth of one per cent negro jurors,” a ratio of –400 to 1. They imagined a hypothetical case in which county officials called in men for a jury pool of one hundred. Given the imbalanced ratio, they said, the presence of even one black juror would have been statistically unfair to his white counterparts.
“[T]he sheriff, had he brought in a negro, would have had to discriminate against white jurors, not against negroes—he could not be expected to bring in one-fourth of one negro,” the opinion said.
The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled as far back as 1880 that jury exclusion based on race was unconstitutional. There was no blanket way to enforce this in the South, but over the years the Court had reversed cases in which glaring violations occurred. With Patton, it served notice that Mississippi’s number games weren’t convincing, and that, by definition, unbroken decades of all-white juries “created a very strong showing that…Negroes were systematically excluded…because of race.” They dismissed the state court’s logic with an especially scornful word: “unwisdom.”
Patton didn’t magically end Mississippi jury exclusion, but it couldn’t be ignored in the short term. Two months later, on February 9, 1948, the Mississippi Supreme Court, citing Patton, reversed McGee’s second conviction in a 4–2 ruling. The majority’s terse opinion wasn’t nearly as long as a heated dissent by Justice Harvey McGehee, who insisted again that, as long as there were so few qualified black voters, it was unreasonable to expect that many or any would be chosen during the blind selection process required by law.
This series of events earned McGee his first mention in the New York Times, because Patton meant that his third trial would, one way or another, require the presence of blacks on a jury. Three local black men—Claude Arrington, Dr. T. J. Barnes, and T. D. Brown—were selected for the eighteen-man grand jury that indicted McGee on February 18, 1948.
Their presence was a modern milestone, and the Laurel Leader-Call gave them front-page coverage on February 17, complete with a photograph and a headline that said, “Jones County Makes History.” Black jurors had served in Mississippi during and after Reconstruction, but the McGee jurors were reported to be the first placed on a Mississippi circuit-court panel of any kind in the twentieth century.
The trickier question was where, exactly, their names had come from. They were drawn from an all-white list that had been created months before the Patton decision. And yet, suddenly, there they were, in an instant turnaround that wasn’t easy to explain. “It is considered unusual that the names of three negroes were drawn from the jury box,” the Jackson Daily News reported on February 16, “since there is such a small percentage of negroes qualified for jury service….”
It seemed more than unusual, and a question presented itself: Had the grand-jury process been tampered with? If so, how and why?
Somebody other than Dixon Pyles would have to figure that out, because he dropped the case. Any interest he had in McGee as a cause was outweighed by the negatives of getting in deeper. In an interview years later, he called it a simple cost-benefit question, saying “the pressure on was so great that I wanted a good deal more money than the people who were backing Willie McGee wanted to pay.”
Pyles didn’t elaborate, but he faced two obvious problems: anti-McGee sentiment in Mississippi and anti-Red rumblings in Washington. By this point, it was part of the public record that he’d been working with the CRC, a group that the House Un-American Activities Committee had attacked in early 1947, just nine months after it was formed, as a Communist front.
“Having adopted a line of militant skullduggery against the United States with the close of World War II,” the report began, “the Communist Party has set up the Civil Rights Congress for the purpose of protecting those of its members who run afoul of the law.”
McGee wasn’t discussed. At the time, HUAC was more interested in the CRC’s support of pe
ople like Gerhart Eisler, a New York–based Communist, originally from Germany, who was accused of being a Soviet spy. But Pyles’s name appeared on a list of CRC expenditures at the end, which showed that he’d received $1,750 in legal fees and expenses. For what, it didn’t say. And though this was just a fine-print mention, it probably would have been noticed by one of the most vocal HUAC members: John Rankin, a wild-eyed Democrat who had represented northeast Mississippi’s First Congressional District since 1921.
Having Rankin on your tail wasn’t something any Mississippi lawyer would want. Like Bilbo, he was a racist and anti-Semite who held grudges and loved fights. He was especially vehement on the subject of Communism, which he seemed to think was a Jewish conspiracy of ancient lineage. “Communism is older than Christianity,” he declared on the House floor in 1945. “It is the curse of the ages. It hounded and persecuted the Saviour during his earthly ministry, inspired his crucifixion, derided him in his dying agony, and then gambled for his garments at the foot of the cross.”
Pyles’s departure was a serious problem for the CRC, and Bella Abzug made her first trip to Mississippi to persuade him to stick with the case. Abzug discussed this journey in a series of oral-history interviews she did in 1995 and 1996 with Columbia University, where she graduated from law school in 1944. She didn’t say when she first got involved with McGee or when she went south, but it appears she came into the case at the suggestion of Abraham Isserman, a CRC lawyer she knew from the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild—an organization that often defended left-wing clients under attack by state and federal governments—and that she’d worked on the drafting of McGee’s second appeal. Her Mississippi trip must have happened around the second week of February 1947, after the Supreme Court’s reversal and before the third trial.
