The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South

by Alex Heard

  During this trip, Abzug met with Pyles in Jackson, failed to change his mind, and then drove to Laurel alone to ask the local district attorney for the names of qualified defense lawyers. Whoever she spoke with—she didn’t give a name—told her there wasn’t a person in town who would help her, so she hustled back to Jackson to try her luck there. Pyles, alarmed, told her he’d been getting calls “all day long that there’s this white, woman lawyer traveling to Laurel…. It’s a wonder you’re back safe.”

  “Well, here’s where I am,” Abzug said. “Can you help me get a lawyer?”

  “No. I don’t know anybody who would take this on.”

  Abzug decided to find her man the old-fashioned way, by walking around downtown Jackson, knocking on doors. “I literally went from building to building where lawyers were housed,” she said. “…Most people weren’t in the least interest[ed]. In fact, they thought I was a crazy person.”

  She finally succeeded thanks to a tip she’d gotten from a brother-in-law who had told her about a young, Jewish Mississippi attorney and army veteran named Alvin N. London. A dapper, dark-haired Hattiesburg native, London was a recent graduate of the Ole Miss law school. His office was on North Congress Street, just a few blocks from Pyles’s building. Abzug went in and told him she needed to assemble a new courtroom team for Willie McGee—immediately. As she recalled:

  He said, “I have some guy I think would do it.” I said, “What about you?” He said, “Well, I could work with him, but I’m not really a trial lawyer.” His name was Poole, and Poole was a hard-drinking, swearing young man who had lost a leg, I guess it was in World War II. He was a very big drinker and Southern kind of personality, almost stereotypically, and I got these two guys involved in the case. That meant that I’d have to spend a great deal of time with them, in detail, because they didn’t know much about anything, to be truthful. So I retained them and I went back to New York, and I kept telling them what kinds of actions we would have to take.

  Most people know Abzug from her heyday in the 1970s as a congresswoman and feminist. When she served in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1971 and 1977, she was in her fifties, and it was then that her iconic look became familiar all over the world: floppy hats, sacklike print dresses, and a broad, angular-featured face that could appear joyful or menacing, depending on what she was worked up about.

  But Abzug was only twenty-six in early 1948, a young labor lawyer who had been a member of the New York Bar for less than a year. She dressed differently then, wearing fitted dresses and suits, gloves, and smaller, pinned-on hats—the standard workplace getup for women of that era, designed to increase her chances of being taken seriously in the male domains of union halls and law offices.

  She looked different too. The Slavic features Bella inherited from her parents—first-generation immigrants from Russia named Emanuel and Esther Savitzky—were softer in her youth. “I was all Oriental and gorgeous then,” she told New York magazine in a 1977 profile. “I wore a size eleven.” She was kidding around, but it was true: One friend told an interviewer that young Bella looked like Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment. After her college graduation, she briefly held a job modeling fashion turbans in a display window at Macy’s. Stalking around downtown Jackson, she must have cut a surprisingly exotic figure.

  One thing that didn’t change, from earliest youth on, was her get-out-of-my-way personality. Born Bella Savitzky on July 24, 1920—the same year women got the vote—she grew up in the Bronx, in a financially strained but happy household supported by her father’s endless hours of work at a Hell’s Kitchen butcher shop he owned, the Live and Let Live Meat Market. Emanuel died when Bella was thirteen. Her other important role models were Esther—an “all mother” figure, she said, who supported her in everything she wanted to do—and her grandfather, an ancient and loving Orthodox Jew named Wolf Tanklevsky, who used to babysit Bella and take her to synagogue.

  “[H]e would be very proud of the fact that I could read Hebrew and he would show me off to all his cronies,” she recalled. “But the minute the services started I was placed in a segregated area, because in our religion women and men are separated by what we call a mechitza, which is a curtain. Many people have suggested that it was in those early days, behind the curtain, that I probably first got my ideas of feminism….”

  Bella was a gifted talker, and, naturally enough, she became a student leader. At Hunter College—then the all-women’s campus of New York’s City College system, which she attended from 1938 to 1942—she was elected student-council president in her junior year. The late 1930s to early 1940s were turbulent times on New York campuses, and her role involved a mix of corsage-and-tea activity (helping organize the Hunter College “Biennial Carnival”) and serious, often radical, undergraduate politics.

  Bella was active in the American Student Union, an organization formed in 1935 as a merger of existing groups for students who were Socialists or Communist sympathizers. She said she was neither, even though she was “recruited” by everybody from the Socialists to the Stalinists. She described herself as a nonaligned progressive with healthy doubts about the American way.

  “Certainly it was clear to me that our own system had never been that great,” she said. “…I thought socialism was an interesting philosophy that should play itself out, if it could happen. I was never a Russophile…although I’ve been accused of being that, historically, all the time. People are always saying that, because I took certain progressive positions, which may or may not have coincided with positions the Soviet Union took.”

  Among Bella’s stances on issues of the day: She supported the anti-Fascist Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War; opposed aid to Great Britain before the U.S. entry into World War II (at the time, many left-leaning students were more concerned about British imperialism than Nazi aggression); and spoke out against the Rapp-Coudert Committee, a long-running attempt by New York State to find and crush “subversive activities” in New York schools and colleges. Bella was also part of a huge ASU contingent that went to Washington in early 1940 to voice opposition to any American involvement in the war.

  One controversial issue from those months was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland, which happened in late 1939, three months after Hitler and Stalin shocked the world by signing a nonaggression pact. On this, Bella was in tune with the party line pushed by American Communists: strong support for the Soviets, on the grounds that conquering Finland provided an essential buffer against potential invasion from the anti-Communist West. A popular party slogan about Britain’s and Finland’s plight was “The Yanks Are Not Coming,” and in late February 1940 Bella proposed the creation of “The Yanks Are Not Coming” clubs on the Hunter campus.

  “[T]he youth of America cannot be misled by fine slogans and stimulating horror stories,” she was quoted saying in the student newspaper, the Hunter Bulletin. “…We [demand] that all loans to Finland and money for rearmament be used to alleviate the misery of the unemployed in America, and to extend NYA, WPA, housing and Social Security programs.”

  Bella got her first taste of bad press when a pair of New York Post reporters wrote about Hunter in March 1941, saying that her political stands branded her as “a campus pink.”

  “Among those who have generally followed the Communist line in her college activities is Bella Savitzky, 20,” the story said, alongside a picture of Bella smiling and banging a gavel. “…Bella denies that she belongs to the Communist party; she admits that she is anti-British, but says that is because she is a Zionist.”

  Bella denounced the article in a signed comment on the front page of the Bulletin. “Any statements as to my political opinions were pure fabrications,” she wrote. “Any implications as to communist affiliations or leanings are completely unfounded.” Half a century later, she was still irritated by that article, calling it “a bunch of half-baked, half-truthful ideas about me….”

  After college, Bella visited an aunt in Miami, where she met her future husba
nd, Martin Abzug, an aspiring writer from New York who published two novels before going into finance. They married in 1944. She went to law school at Columbia between 1942 and 1944, which, by definition, made her a pioneer. There were only a handful of women in her class; Harvard didn’t graduate its first female law students until 1953. Compared with Bella’s glowing memories of life at Hunter, law school sounded unpleasant: a prolonged exposure to the attributes she resented in many men.

  “The faculty…did not treat us well,” she said. “They were condescending…they were scoffing, and they did not make it easy for us to function in law school.” Once again, though, she excelled. She became an editor on the Columbia Law Review, an experience she remembered as “a form of torture” that, nonetheless, was “good training in research” and “how to write a good brief.”

  After law school, Abzug took a job with a prominent labor-oriented law firm, Pressman, Witt & Cammer, whose partners would all become boldface names in the battles over alleged Communist subversion that unfolded after the war. Harold Cammer was a founder of the National Lawyers Guild, which had been labeled a Communist front by Congress and the Justice Department. Nathan Witt was a former secretary of the National Labor Relations Board. During the 1948–1949 hearings and trial of Alger Hiss—the State Department official accused by former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers of having passed secret information to Russia during the Roosevelt administration—Witt was accused of conspiring with Hiss. Best known of them all was Lee Pressman, who had briefly been a Communist when he worked for the Department of Agriculture in 1934, but who publicly recanted that part of his past in 1950. During subpoenaed testimony before HUAC, Pressman corroborated Chambers’s claim that a Communist cell had existed inside the Agriculture Department.

  Abzug seemed to hate Pressman, who embodied everything that annoyed her: arrogance, condescension toward women, and personal disloyalty. “I never liked the guy,” she said. “Never, ever. I thought he was arrogant, I thought he was self-centered…. He went before the Un-American Activities Committee and accused his dear friends, whom I worked for…of having been in a Communist cell with him. He was a traitor. People never talked to him after that, and they stopped bragging about him. But I knew him for what he was: crap. Absolute crap. Listen. You can tell in a man’s attitude toward you. He treated me like I was a piece of nothing.”

  For different reasons, Abzug wasn’t very impressed with John Poole, the young lawyer she hired to run the defense at McGee’s third trial. In her oral history, she dismissed him as an alcoholic who was out of his depth and “fancied himself as a person who could argue a big, important issue like this….” Only with Alvin London’s help, she said, was she able to get him to “think clearly” about what he had to do.

  She was right that Poole had a drinking problem—it’s mentioned in an FBI report from 1950—but her assessment seems far too harsh, and it overlooks traits that these unlikely partners had in common. Like Abzug, Poole was smart, hardworking, and energetic. More important in this instance: He was headstrong enough to do the job. By 1948, not many lawyers were willing to take on the risky, thankless chore of defending Willie McGee. Abzug wouldn’t. She said it was out of the question for her to try the case herself, because, as a “white, Jewish woman lawyer from New York,” she wouldn’t have had a chance.

  The assignment wasn’t any easier for Poole and London. The fact that they were Southern males wasn’t an advantage, because they were perceived as traitors to their own culture. They were even younger than Abzug—Poole was twenty-five, London only twenty-three—and they had almost no experience. They were handling divorces and wills when Abzug invited them to take on a challenge that must have seemed nearly impossible. London, who was interviewed in 1952 by Spivak, the investigator representing the Daily Worker, frankly admitted that, if he had it to do all over again, he wouldn’t.

  “It was quite an experience,” he said. “It was one of those things I would give a great deal if I had never been in.”

  Poole’s full name was John Riley Poole Jr. He grew up in Jackson, where he attended Central High School and Millsaps College, just like Dixon Pyles. As Abzug correctly recalled, he was missing a leg, but this wasn’t from a war injury. He lost it in a 1936 train-hopping accident that happened in Dallas, Texas, when Poole was only sixteen. He and a friend had run away from home and were heading to California—a fact that says a lot about Poole’s youthful personality, which was sometimes too adventurous for his own good.

  Poole grew up on a street in the Bailey Avenue neighborhood, in what was then north Jackson, in a small house about a half mile from the downtown rail yards. His father, John Sr., worked for the Illinois Central. Poole had six brothers and sisters, some of whom were already grown and gone when his mother, Ada, died in 1936. A sister named Mildred took care of the family, keeping house and proselytizing for Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s Church of the Foursquare Gospel, the Los Angeles–based evangelistic crusade that had been growing steadily since its founding in 1927. Poole was almost drawn in himself. Though he rejected religion as an adult, he was a devoted Bible student back then, and for a while he dabbled with the idea of becoming a Foursquare minister.

  Poole had a wilder side, running around with a group of neighborhood guys who called themselves the Bailey Avenue Gang. They weren’t a “gang” in the modern sense—though Poole said later that they were “a pretty tough bunch,” with some of them winding up in reform school—and it’s unclear why Poole decided to raise the bar on his misbehavior and hop a freight to California. He talked about the accident that cost him a leg to a Jackson newspaperman roughly a year and a half after it happened, but never wrote anything in depth himself. His three daughters, Beverly, Carolyn, and Donna, only remember fragments of what their parents told them about it.

  Poole told the Jackson reporter that he and two friends decided to head for California one summer, getting as far as Dallas before they decided to turn back. He was groggy when one of his friends told him a freight train was coming. “When I hopped to my feet, I saw it was going too fast,” Poole said, “but it seemed like something just made me try for it anyhow. I guess I was still half asleep. I didn’t quite get a good hold on the rungs when I grabbed, just enough to jerk me off my feet. It threw me under the boxcar.”

  Poole’s right leg went under the steel wheels and was nearly severed below the knee. His friends carried him to the train station. From there, Poole was rushed off to a hospital, where his leg was amputated, and where he stayed for several weeks. He later said the incident straightened him out for good, and it was during that period that he vowed to get serious about schoolwork, because he’d decided he wanted to become a lawyer.

  By the time he was seventeen, in 1939, Poole had also bounced back enough to compete in the ring as an amateur boxer. That year, he was profiled in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, in an article headlined “Odds Against Smiling Johnny Bother Him Not One Little Bit.” It told the story of how young “Johnny Poole” had thwarted his disability to become a capable lightweight fighter. A captioned photo (“Laughs Off Handicap”) showed him looking boyish and all-American—big ears, huge smile, handsome eyes, and a cowlick—dressed in the long cotton boxing trunks he wore to hide his wooden leg.

  As the article explained, Poole was determined to compete in a sport, and the basic leg movements of boxing—shuffling, hopping, planting weight—were feasible on his artificial limb. “Despite the unsteady foot work,” the Commercial Appeal said, “Johnny hits hard…. Two good limbs would make him even more powerful with his punches.”

  When you look at Poole’s youth, a consistent theme is this desire to keep striving. During his years at Millsaps, which he attended from 1941 to 1944, he was a joiner—manically so. Among other activities, he took part in the debate club (serving as president), the Millsaps Singers (tenor), the International Relation Club, the Empyreans (a social club), and Pi Kappa Delta (for speech-competition students).

  In 1944, he ran for
student-body president, using his crowded list of extracurricular activities as its own selling point. “LEADERSHIP MERITS LEADERSHIP,” his campaign literature said. “LOOK AT THE RECORD. John has proved that he is an efficient leader. He is president of the PRE-LAW CLUB, president of the DEBATE CLUB, and president of the ECONOMICS CLUB. Under his guidance, these clubs have taken on new life.”

  Poole lost the race, and the 1944 Millsaps yearbook hinted at a price to his overactivity. He was mentioned in an article about campus big shots, but it was noted that he’d “resigned all of his offices in the honoraries in order to study.”

  In the summer of 1947, just after Poole’s graduation from Ole Miss law school, he ran for office again, taking the bold step of entering the Democratic primary for a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives. He lost, but that wasn’t really the point. Emmett Owens, a friend of Poole’s who knew him during the Bailey Avenue days, says he ran for the publicity, as a way of announcing himself as a new face in town.

  His decision to defend McGee probably had multiple motives. Owens says he needed money, like Pyles, but his independent streak must have been part of it. “My dad was not a follower,” says his daughter Beverly, a longtime Jackson lawyer who was born just four months before Poole took the McGee case. If it was attention he wanted, he got it: Defending McGee eventually made him famous (and infamous) all over the state. But his youngest daughter, Donna, a professionally licensed counselor who lives in Springfield, Missouri, doesn’t believe he did it just for the notoriety. For the past few years, she’s been working on a memoir about her father; in her manuscript, she argues that Poole’s decision to defend McGee involved fundamental beliefs.