by Alex Heard
“[D]id you or not testify on one of the previous trials, ‘Well, if that is all you want I can take it?’”
“You mean that I said that to the Negro?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t say it to the Negro. I might have testified I said it, but at the time I was just thinking that.”
Poole started reading testimony from the earlier transcript, and right then he must have realized he’d made a mistake. At the first trial, Mrs. Hawkins had clearly said, “I thought, ‘Well, if that’s all I can take it….’”
Swartzfager pounced. “She said she thought that and that is exactly what her response was to this question, that she didn’t say it, [but]…thought it.”
At this, Mrs. Hawkins posed a question to Poole: “Do you have a wife?” He nodded. “That’s all I want to know.”
“Yes, I do,” he said, “and as a matter of fact I realize that the crime is awful, especially when perpetrated as this one is alleged to have been perpetrated, so I approach you, not with the attitude of embarrassing you at all, and I hope you understand that.”
Mrs. Hawkins didn’t seem soothed. She undermined Poole further by testifying that, contrary to the attacker’s orders, she had made a sound. “I cried out,” she said. “I don’t know how loud I screamed.”
Poole questioned her closely about the distance between bedrooms in the house, the volume of her cry, and how it was possible that neither her husband nor her two other children woke up.
“Listen, some day your wife…this might happen to her and if it does you can ask her all those foolish questions,” she said. “What did she do? How loud did she call? What did she say?”
Toward the end, questioned again by the prosecution, Mrs. Hawkins stated that her memories of that night weren’t always clear. But why would anybody expect them to be?
“[So] much happened, and so fast, and the first of December I came up here, and I don’t know how much dope I had taken,” she said. “I stayed in the hospital a week or two, and I was so frightened, I was frightened out of my wits, I had a terrible shock, and I don’t want to live, I don’t want to live. [W]hen I go places people look at me and say, ‘That’s the woman that negro man raped,’ and I can hear them say it.”
Deavours finished by asking, “You have told the truth, haven’t you?”
“I have told the truth,” she said, “and I think the truth is bad enough.”
The prosecution’s case had the same strengths and weaknesses as always: The circumstantial case was fairly persuasive, but nobody could identify McGee by sight and there was no physical evidence—unless you counted the bloody boxer shorts with no blood on them, which were pulled out of mothballs and displayed again.
Swartzfager tried to offset this with extensive testimony about McGee’s two confessions, the one he delivered verbally on the way back from Hattiesburg, and the one he signed in the Hinds County jail. Half a dozen Hattiesburg and Laurel law enforcement officials took the stand, among them Hattiesburg patrolman Hugh Herring, who, with patrolman E. C. Harris, made the arrest on November 3, 1945; Hattiesburg Police Chief M. M. Little; Laurel Police Chief Wayne Valentine; Laurel policeman Jeff Montgomery; and Luther Hill, who was the Jones County sheriff at the time of McGee’s arrest.
They presented a united front, saying that McGee had acted like a man with something to hide, and that he’d confessed to the rape without being coerced.
During this round of questions, for the first time, Poole and London started sounding as if they had something up their sleeves. London asked Herring if McGee had been cursed at, hit, or threatened with hanging before confessing. “No, sir, we don’t have no gallows there,” he said.
This feeling that something new was coming also pervaded Poole’s questioning of Valentine and Montgomery, who described the investigation of the crime scene and the circumstances of McGee’s confession.
Valentine said that when the police bulletin came from Hattiesburg, he drove over with Montgomery and highway patrolman Jack Anderson. There, McGee voluntarily submitted to a search that revealed the bloody underwear. On the way back to Laurel, he confessed to the rape under routine questioning.
London cross-examined, and he seemed especially interested in the details of the confession. “Now, chief, on the way back to Laurel, did you tell him where you were taking him?”
“Yes, I told him I was bringing him back to Laurel.”
“Did you tell him what you were going to do with him up there?”
“Well, I told him I was going to bring him back to jail.”
“Did you, while you were driving towards Laurel, tell him…that if he would confess, that you would take him to the Jackson jail instead of Laurel jail?”
“No, I did not.”
Poole kept it up with Montgomery, asking, “[E]ven if you had made some threats to Willie McGee, you would be somewhat embarrassed to admit it on the stand, wouldn’t you?”
Deavours objected. “You talk about deliberately and determinedly trying to insult an officer of the law, and officers of this court,” he said. “I never saw a more deliberate attempt at it.”
“Your honor, I am not,” Poole said.
“You just asked an officer of the law, ‘In order to save this case you get up here and swear a lie.’”
Collins rejected the question as improper, but Deavours kept fuming. “If you have no respect for yourself,” he said, “you ought to have some for the officers.”
In fact, Poole and London did think the officers were lying. After the prosecution rested, they called just one witness, Luther Hill, and then told Collins they wanted to put Willie McGee on the stand, for the limited purpose of examining whether the confession story, as described by prosecution witnesses, was admissible. Collins agreed, the jury was cleared, and McGee was brought in.
Finally, after more than two years in which he’d said nothing at all in a public setting, the man at the center of everything walked to the stand and took a seat. With Poole asking the questions, McGee gave answers that sounded perfectly rational. Except that they described a parallel world where every fact was different, and where he’d been subjected to incredible violence.
“State your name, please.”
“Willie McGee.”
“You are the defendant in this case?”
“I am.”
“Willie, there is some testimony given that you made a voluntary confession to the crime charged against you—”
“It wasn’t voluntary,” he said.
McGee went on from there, saying he’d been beaten viciously from the moment he was arrested in Hattiesburg—by the officers who collared him; inside the Hattiesburg jail; in the highway patrol car on the ride back to Laurel; and repeatedly in Jackson, after he was transferred to the Hinds County jail.
In McGee’s version, he was minding his own business in Hattiesburg, about to head for the bus station to return to Laurel, when “two officers run up and grabbed me. I turned around and said, ‘What you all want?’, and they said, ‘What’s your name?’, and by the time I got ‘Willie’ out, he hit me. Mr. Hugh Herring hit me in the face there on the street, and he said, ‘You done ravished a white woman in Laurel,’ and he said, ‘You son of a bitch, we gonna break you negroes up that gone in the army from coming back here and raping White women.’ And I said, ‘I ain’t been in no army,’ and he took me back—”
“Willie, we want you to tell what happened in the automobile that you rode in to Laurel,” Poole said.
“Well, they got me…. You mean on the way from Hattiesburg up here to Laurel?”
“Yes.”
“They taken me out of the jail and started on the way up here with me, and just as we got in the heart of town, Mr. Wayne told me, ‘If you know what’s good for you, there’s two roads leading out of here. One leads to Jackson and one leads to Laurel, and the White people in Laurel would be mighty glad to get ahold of you. Fact of the business, all they want is to get their hands on you. [I]f you know what�
�s good for you, you better tell me you done it, so I can take you on to Jackson.’ And I said, ‘I didn’t do it.’”
McGee said that, while they beat him, the officers mentioned Howard Wash, the 1942 lynching victim. “Were you actually in fear of being lynched?” Poole said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Willie, did they inform you of any rights you had to have a lawyer?”
“They ain’t told me nothing, but just kept punching and hitting me in the face and in the side.”
McGee said he was beaten repeatedly with a “slapjack”—“Every time I looked around it was a lick”—but that it was the lynching threat that finally broke his will. “[T]hat’s when I told him I did it,” he said. “[T]hen he said, ‘Now, will you tell the sheriff the same thing when you get up there?’ If you don’t…he said, ‘Nigger, it will be too bad for you.’”
After McGee stepped down, the state started calling witnesses back to contradict his story. One after another, they denied abusing him. “I was so kind and courteous to that negro that I even gave him cigarettes every time I went there,” said Albert Easterling, the man who took down McGee’s written confession at the Hinds County jail. “I’ll tell you, here’s what you’ve got here. He is a smart negro, he writes as pretty a hand as you do, and I imagine he has been instructed by somebody to tell you these lies.”
Later, McGee was put on the stand once more, again with the jury absent. When asked about the written confession, which he admitted to signing, he told Deavours that he did so only after two weeks of additional beatings and confinement in a “hot box,” which he described as a cell “where they put you and sweat you nearly ’bout to death.”
As he put it further along in the questioning, “[Y]ou stay in that hot box, you sign anything.”
Collins supported the law officers on both the oral and written confessions, saying of McGee’s testimony, “I believe this is just a prefabricated story and I don’t believe a word of it.” The written confession was read into the record.
Late in the day on Saturday, the whole trial began to go off the rails. On pages 909–910 of the transcript, it appears to come to an abrupt halt before it’s officially over. There’s a routine exchange between London and Collins, followed by boilerplate language from the court reporter, followed by…nothing.
What happened? What happened was that Poole and London became frightened for their lives and fled the courtroom—and Laurel—before delivering their closing arguments. Years later, Poole told Spivak that he was tipped off on Saturday afternoon by a highway patrolman. “[He] came up to me and said, ‘Poole, I just want to tell you that a group of fellows over there are after you. Be on your toes. Just watch out. They’re not so much—they’re not after London so much as you. So watch yourself.’”
Poole was aware of the story that Troy Hawkins had brought a pistol into the courtroom at the second trial. During a recess, he went back to his hotel, stretched out on his bed, and thought about his predicament.
“[I] looked over the situation and realized what happened to Dixon,” he told Spivak. “What a situation they were in, and then a group of fellows after me. They’re a pretty vicious crowd down there. No friends. I got scared. We go back, report all these facts to the judge. We tell the judge we’re not going to argue to the jury.”
Poole asked the sheriff for a safe escort as he got ready to leave Laurel, but he refused. The sheriff did, however, show Poole and London a back exit from the courthouse, via the catwalk. And with that, the boys from Jackson exercised their last and best strategic maneuver: They jumped in their car and got the hell out of town.
eight
A RUMPUS OF REDS
When McGee’s third trial ended—with another death sentence—he was taken back to the Hinds County jail for a second long period of limbo. The first execution date, April 9, 1948, was stayed when Poole and London filed notice that they would appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. But that appeal wasn’t submitted for another eleven months.
There were differences between this lull and the one that followed McGee’s second trial in 1946. Now that McGee had testified in circuit court, his days as a man of silence were over. He started sending letters to CRC officials in New York, who released them for use in the Daily Worker and in CRC press releases and fund-raising letters.
Dozens of these letters survive in the CRC’s archived papers. Probably because the jailers inspected them before they went out, their content often consisted of simple expressions of gratitude. Many are undated. The first with a clear time stamp is from April 20, 1948. It was addressed to Joseph Cadden, a CRC staffer who had sent McGee a letter and a small amount of money.
“I dont No hardly what to say,” McGee wrote. “[F]or one thing I do really aprechate it and I prays that some day to meet some of the many friends that have been so nice to me…. [I] do believe from the depths of my heart that you all are doing your best for me your kindness shall never be forgotten.”
Before long, though, Willie and Bessie both started sounding worried. The CRC had brought Bessie up to New York after the third trial to give speeches about her son, the case, and the CRC, but after she got back to Laurel she stopped hearing from them.
In a June 1948 letter to Abraham Isserman, she wrote, “My Dear Counsel…. This leave me not feeling well at all. I been sick ever since I left from up there. I am sorry I did not get to see you before I left to come home, but I do want you to write me at once and let me know what about Willie’s trial…. Will you please don’t stop working for Willie. He ask me to writ you all and tell you all to do all you all can for him, so I will close looking to hear from you soon.”
Isserman wrote back, telling her the appeal was under way, but the McGees weren’t mollified. In a letter written in August, Willie expressed two worries: Some of his mail was being withheld by the jailers, and he was in the dark about what his lawyers were doing, because they never came by.
“[I] wont to see my lawyer and i can’t get them to come to see me,” he said. “[T]hey been to see me one time since i been back over here. would you please write them and have them to come to see me.” Just over a month later, nothing had changed, and he became insistent: “I want you all to have My Lawyers to come over here.…I have sent for them and cant get no results at all.”
The CRC hadn’t abandoned McGee. As Isserman said, Poole was working on the state appeal, which didn’t require the defendant’s input since it didn’t involve trial-court preparation. Poole checked in with Isserman in late April, updating him about the appeal and a side development: He and London had decided to sue the Jackson Daily News for libel.
On March 10, 1948, the paper had run an editorial thrashing them both for representing McGee. Called “One Defense Cut Off,” the item was primarily a diatribe about an accused black murderer named Arthur Moore, a sixteen-year-old who had reportedly confessed to killing an insurance collector named J. L. Dean. With an eye on the third McGee trial, which had wrapped up on March 6, the editorial complained that, no doubt, Moore would be the beneficiary of similar interference from up north. “It is now quite in order for the National Association for the Protection of Colored People and the Civil Rights Congress to hire some lousy and conscienceless lawyers to defend this red-handed murderer, as they are now doing in the Willie McGee case in Laurel,” it said.
“Undoubtedly,” Poole told Isserman, “you can well understand the effect of such an editorial, in view of the prejudice of the South on racial matters.” Soon he filed a $100,000 suit in the federal district court in Jackson. It would prove to have serious consequences down the road.
The CRC had problems of its own, including politically motivated legal attacks against its leadership, which grew out of HUAC’s 1947 report labeling the group a Communist front. In April 1948, CRC chairman George Marshall was found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide HUAC with records from one of the CRC’s precursor groups, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. A federal ju
dge in Washington, D.C., later sentenced him to three months in jail.
Isserman had his hands full too. In addition to the McGee case, he was about to become embroiled in a huge federal trial involving officials of the Communist Party USA. In July 1948, at the federal district court in Manhattan’s Foley Square, prosecutors indicted twelve top-tier party leaders under the Smith Act, a measure from 1940 that made it unlawful to advocate forceful overthrow of the U.S. government. The indictments were short on specifics, but federal officials promised to unravel a sprawling conspiracy by men dedicated to “destroying the Government of the United States by force and violence.”
Unlike the McGee case, the Smith Act trial was a national story from the moment it began, with a July 20 roundup at the Communist Party offices on East Twelfth Street in New York. “Six FBI men walked quietly into…the ninth floor of Communist headquarters,” the Times reported in a front-page piece. “[The agents] showed their badges and merely said, ‘You are under arrest.’”
Among the six were William Z. Foster, chairman of the Communist Party USA and a grand old man of American radicalism; general secretary Eugene Dennis; Jack Stachel, a national board member of the party; and John Williamson, also a board member. Others were arrested in the next few days, including Daily Worker editor John Gates and Gus Hall, the party chairman in Ohio. Southerners undoubtedly noticed that two of the twelve defendants were black: New York City councilman Benjamin Davis and national board member Henry Winston. To them, this supported the view—frequently voiced by commentators in the South—that calls for civil rights were nothing more than the leading edge of a Communist plot.
