by Alex Heard
He meant it. It was said that no session of the Mississippi legislature was complete without Sullens getting into a fistfight with an elected official. The most famous scrap happened in 1940, when Sullens was sixty-two, and it grew out of an old feud he had with Mississippi’s governor at the time, Paul Johnson Sr. In 1931, Johnson had run unsuccessfully for governor against Martin Sennett Conner (the winner) and Sullens’s preferred candidate, Hugh L. White. During the primary campaign, Sullens railed against Johnson so often that Johnson bundled his grievances into a libel suit, which the Daily News settled out of court, reportedly paying $18,000. During Johnson’s campaign in 1939, he bragged, “I’m still spending that buzzard’s money. I’m liable to be spending some more of it too when this campaign is over.”
The clash of the titans happened on the evening of May 2, 1940, in the lobby of an upscale downtown hotel called the Walthall, where Sullens lived in a penthouse. Johnson was in the lobby with friends, including one named Major G. W. Buck. Sullens was about to enter an elevator with his dog when the sixty-year-old governor—who was six feet three inches tall and 195 pounds—saw him, rushed past Buck, and smashed the back of Sullens’s head with a cane. “He jumped over me so fast I didn’t know what was happening until blood was shooting every which way from Sunday,” Buck told reporters.
Sullens turned and charged like a speared gorilla. “The editor whirled, knocked away the cane, and pitched the…Governor across a chair, smashing it, dropped astride him, landing furious rights and lefts in his face,” Time reported. “The embattled editor was hauled off, and trumpeting that it was ‘a cowardly attempt to assassinate me from the rear,’ was rushed to the hospital for scalp stitches. The Governor was put to bed at the Executive Mansion a block away.”
Sullens was a Democrat and a white supremacist, of course, but he held some unexpected views. He always hated Bilbo, who struck him as a low-class crook. He loathed Communists (“sneaking Bolsheviki”), but he also disdained the widely popular Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, writing once that its philosophical basis was little more than “flub-dub.” He worshipped Woodrow Wilson, partly because he had served under Wilson’s banner as an intelligence officer in Washington during World War I. (This was how Sullens picked up a nickname he cherished: Major.) He despised Herbert Hoover for supposedly being too liberal on race. Three days before the presidential election of 1928, the Jackson Daily News published a front-page cartoon showing an apelike black man chasing a terrified white girl off a cliff, with captions that said “Remember her at the polls!” and “Why the South is Democratic.”
By the summer of 1950, the Major, at seventy-two, was past his prime, a Santa-bellied figure with thin gray hair plastered down on a bumpy skull. But he was more than ready when the showdown with the CRC took shape. Within days of the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear McGee’s appeal, the CRC had sent out a call to “members of trade unions, church groups, negro people’s organizations and all Americans,” asking them to “write and wire Gov. Fielding Wright, Jackson, Miss., asking executive clemency for Willie McGee.” The response was impressive: By Wright’s own reckoning, he heard from 15,000 people before the summer was over. The weeks leading up to July 27 also saw an ominous flow of court maneuvers, blasphemous Yankee journalism, and rumors about mysterious CRC activity in Laurel and Jackson.
Some of McGee’s growing national support was little more than background noise, negated by its own shrillness. In the July 1950 issue of Music Business (“The Official Organ of the American Society of Disk Jockeys”), one broadcaster asked his fellow jocks to “boycott…or smash” copies of a popular Ella Fitzgerald song called “M.I.S.S.I.S.S.I.P.P.I.,” to convey their disgust with the state’s treatment of McGee. Though Fitzgerald was black and the song was an ode to the river, not to Mississippi’s racial caste system, its popularity was still unacceptable.
“There are some who will say we have no right in mixing up the legal lynching of a man with a song,” the writer argued. “In that case perhaps we should overlook the death and maiming of millions of Allied troops and write a love lyric to the melody of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles.’…”
Some of it had impact. Starting on June 14, the New York–based Compass started publishing its multipart McGee series. The articles were important because the Compass, unlike the Daily Worker, had a place in the mainstream, however tenuous. Its founder, Theodore O. Thackrey, had edited the New York Post. He launched the new “liberal crusading” paper in 1949 with a cash infusion from Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, a Chicago-based International Harvester heiress who, like Thackrey, had been a Henry Wallace supporter.
This isn’t to say the Compass was starchy. Accompanied by urgent display type (“Wife Tells of Frameup,” “The Invisible Bloodstains,” “‘In Sweatbox You Sign Anything’”), the stories were every bit as emotional as anything the Daily Worker published. They relied on interviews with Rosalee and Bessie McGee to convey the CRC’s defense of McGee as it existed in the summer of 1950. There were no public allegations about a love affair just yet; those came later. Instead, the attack was aimed at the implausibility of Mrs. Hawkins’s story and the physical abuse of McGee at the hands of his jailers.
“A white woman says she was ‘raped’ while her husband and children slept nearby,” read an editor’s introduction to the stories that ran on June 15. “She says it was pitch dark and she couldn’t see who attacked her, but that it was a Negro.
“The place is Laurel, Miss., and the white woman’s statement results in the arrest of Willie McGee on Nov. 3, 1945. For 33 days, McGee is held incommunicado, beaten, starved, tortured. He signs a confession.
“…In yesterday’s installment, [Mrs. Willie McGee] related how McGee was arrested and how, after ‘confessing,’ he was nearly lynched. THE COMPASS is presenting her story exactly as she related it, without altering her simple but eloquent language.”
Patterson knew the timing was perfect for protest action, and he alerted CRC chapters about the need to step it up. “The Willie McGee case is really beginning to boil now,” he wrote on July 12 to the Detroit branch. “Harvey McGehee, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, has a letter in the [New York Compass] for Wednesday, the 12th…. He stated in the letter that he has been bombarded with telegrams, special delivery and air mail letters urging a new trial for Willie McGee. Well, this should be only the beginning. They should be literally deluged with this kind of material.”
For Sullens, red-alert time came with the CRC’s official mid-July announcement that activists from ten states would assemble in Jackson on July 25 to plead for clemency with Governor Wright. Patterson promised a delegation of seventy-five or so. The Reverend R. H. Harris, an African American who ran the CRC branch in Dallas, upped it, claiming that 1,000 people were on their way and that he was bringing a mixed-race group.
That day, the Major fired his opening volley, an editorial headlined “Communists Coming Here.” After brushing off Reverend Harris’s rhetoric as “gross exaggeration by a loose-lipped Negro,” he wrote, “For sublimated gall, triple-plated audacity, bold insolence and downright arrogance, this proposed invasion of the Capital City of our state by a gang of Communists truly passes all comprehension.
“These invaders are just as much enemies of the United States government as are soldiers fighting under the Communist banner in Korea—fighting with Russian arms and ammunition….
“[I]f any hotel in Jackson furnishes shelter for this motley crew,” he closed, “…then that hostelry should have the rooms they occupy thoroughly cleansed with the most powerful disinfectants.
“Carbolic acid and concentrated lye, combined with DDT, will hardly be adequate for the purpose.”
Abzug wasn’t happy about the protest plans, seeing them as a drag on her courtroom work. There was often friction between her and the CRC—in her oral history, she referred to the group’s members, only half-jokingly, as “lunatics” and “egomaniacs”—and she thought the clemency hearing was bad strategy. She’d
seen enough of the South to know that verbal harangues from New York weren’t going to help. “It was a very explosive case,” she said, “and they didn’t give a damn what I thought should happen or how it should happen, even though I broke my neck to put it together, in a very hard way.”
William Patterson had his own complaints, once writing of Abzug, “She knew her law. She was, however, strong-willed and egotistical.” The tension points to an important reality about McGee’s defense: For better or worse, two people were in charge. Lacking Samuel Leibowitz’s experience and clout, Abzug wasn’t able to dictate terms about the wise use of protest machinery. Patterson, with his long history as a street fighter, figured he knew best when to twist the knobs.
For Abzug, Emanuel Bloch, and John Poole, the courtroom challenge was immediate and daunting: saving McGee from electrocution on the 27th. Having been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, Abzug tried an unusual legal strategy, filing a petition for a writ of error coram nobis.
In a legal context, the phrase means “the error before us.” It refers to a rarely used plea, derived from English common law, in which a lawyer asks that a case be reopened on the grounds that significant mistakes occurred during earlier trials and judgments, usually owing to incompetence, fraud, or suppressed evidence. Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyers filed a coram nobis plea in 1927, but the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts rejected it, calling the doctrine “obsolete.” It was used during long-after-the-fact appeals in cases involving Alger Hiss’s perjury conviction, Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, and Japanese internment during World War II. But in 1950 coram nobis wasn’t recognized in federal procedures, a position that remained in place until 1954.
In the McGee petition, filed in the Jones County Circuit Court on July 21, his lawyers argued that virtually everything about the first three trials was a sham. They recapped the familiar list of problems: the mob atmosphere, the all-white juries, the third-trial rush job, the coerced confession, and the threat of violence that prompted Poole and London to leave town. They didn’t spell out the affair allegation, but they hinted at it, saying that prosecutors had used “perjured testimony as to the essential charge of rape….” This testimony “was submitted by the complaining witness with the knowledge that it was false and that she was not raped by the defendant….”
The meaning of that was murky. Was this Dixon Pyles’s old argument that Mrs. Hawkins’s “failure to resist” amounted to legal consent? Or was it something new?
A story in the Laurel Leader-Call tried to read the tea leaves, saying the argument was thought to be based on McGee’s claim that he’d worked as a yardman in the Hawkins’s neighborhood, and on his assertion that he “met and knew the ravished woman long before the night of the rape.” But that too was unclear.
Paul Swartzfager’s answer, filed the next day, denied all the major claims, including things that were obviously true—one being that the case generated angry emotions among the Laurel public. It had, and on the 21st—when Poole and Bloch traveled to Laurel to submit the petition’s paperwork—it did again.
In subsequent sworn statements, Poole and Bloch said they tried to file their petition at the Jones County Courthouse just before noon, after coming down from Jackson by car. The circuit clerk said they would have to deliver it themselves to Judge Collins, who was sitting on the bench in Hattiesburg. They made the trip, weren’t able to find Collins, and drove back, getting additional runarounds in Laurel. Poole finally reached Collins by phone at his home, and the judge set a time for argument on the petition: 9 a.m. the next day.
According to Poole, as he and Bloch left the courthouse, he was approached and attacked by Troy Hawkins. “He was very angry when he saw me and called me ‘a dirty son of a bitch,’” Poole said. “Almost simultaneously he lunged at me in a threatening manner, but I was able to side step him. He then swung with his right hand at my face and I successfully ducked this blow.”
Poole climbed into the car with Bloch and tried to drive away. Hawkins got in his car too, and to Poole this was a sign that he intended to “follow me and cause trouble.” Poole and Bloch got out of their car and tried to get assistance from Laurel officials, including Mayor Carroll Gartin, who refused them. Poole said Gartin was hostile, telling him “he would not believe me on a stack of bibles,” and that Poole was on his own.
Eventually, Poole and Bloch made it out of town. Back in Jackson, they conferred with Abzug and decided it wasn’t safe to return. Poole called Collins on the morning of the 22nd, asking that the hearing be moved out of Laurel. Collins said no.
Poole then called Governor Wright, who agreed to an impromptu hearing on whether Poole deserved state protection in Laurel. Poole, Bloch, and Abzug met with Wright and other officials, asking for a state escort. They were denied again, and they didn’t go back to Laurel the next day.
In Laurel, Collins dismissed the petition for “lack of prosecution,” and a Jones County judge named B. Frank Carter swore out a statement saying that Poole was lying, that he’d seen Poole and Hawkins cross paths at the courthouse and nothing happened. Back in Jackson, Laurel officials countered with an aggressive play of their own. Gartin, Swartzfager, Albert Easterling, and E. K. Collins filed a petition with the Mississippi State Bar Association to have Poole disbarred for consorting with “subversive and Communistic elements.”
Jackson had gotten a paint job since Sullens took his first doubtful look in 1897. By 1950 it was a rapidly growing city with a metropolitan-area population of 142,000. The influx came mainly from in-state immigration and the baby boom, as people of both races left farms and small towns to benefit from an expanding urban economy. In an early 1950s report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Jackson-based reporter Kenneth Toler assessed the growth with pride, harking back to the Civil War ransacking as he wrote, “The chimneys of destruction…have become the smokestacks of a new industrial empire.”
That was a stretch. Jackson never became an industrial center on the order of Memphis or New Orleans, but there had been significant development, which Toler illustrated with upbeat statistics: Retail spending had quadrupled since 1940; several new hospitals and schools were under construction; and “195 diversified industries [are] now operating in the manufacture of about 300 different products.”
Downtown Jackson was an attractive, orderly grid bordered by State Street to the east and Mill Street to the west. Pascagoula Street to the south and High Street to the north formed a rough rectangle that contained most of the city’s hotels, public buildings, churches, and stores. Much more so than today, central Jackson in 1950 hummed with businesses. On Capitol Street alone—the half-mile-long main commercial drag, which ran east to west past the antebellum governor’s mansion—there were five movie theaters, more than a dozen places to eat, and at least eighty clothing and jewelry stores.
Two blocks north of the mansion stood the state capitol building—called the “New Capitol” to distinguish it from the Greek Revival “Old Capitol” that it had replaced in 1903. Its architectural style was similar to that of the U.S. Capitol, scaled to about half the size. One of its most striking features is a central interior dome that rises to 180 feet, its arches illuminated by hundreds of fat, round lightbulbs that cast a warm glow on plaque-mounted depictions of “Blind Justice.”
Elsewhere downtown, rising over everything, were several landmark office buildings and hotels, including the eighteen-story Tower Building (an art deco structure renamed the Standard Life Building in 1952); and “Jackson’s first skyscraper,” the ten-story Lamar Life building, completed in 1925 and built under the watch of Christian Welty, an insurance company executive and the father of Eudora Welty. The most notable hotels were the Edwards, the Heidelberg, the Robert E. Lee, and the Walthall—each with at least 200 rooms. Blocky buildings that jutted above low-slung downtown stores, they were emblems of a time when every city worth its salt had central lodgings that functioned as one-stop business and leisure depots. Heidelberg stationery from that era boaste
d of “Night club dancing and broadcasting in the sky…South’s most beautiful ladies’ lounge, see the mural…Garage capacity 500 cars, none other like it.”
“An asset to…Jackson, the Hotel Heidelberg offers the finest in hotel convention facilities and hospitality and comfort to its guests,” said the author of The Story of Jackson, a civic history published in 1951. “The entire organization reflects the true hospitable spirit of the city….”
It was all strictly segregated, of course. Only a few blocks from the New Capitol, west and northwest, stood a separate district of relatively plain—and sometimes ramshackle—residences, businesses, and churches. Its namesake thoroughfare, Farish Street, was the main artery of African-American life in Jackson. Between 1948 and 1951, Rosalee McGee lived at three different addresses in the Farish Street neighborhood, which was also home to Percy Greene’s weekly newspaper, the Jackson Advocate.
Greene had been involved in the CRC’s anti-Bilbo campaign in 1946 and was still serving as the go-between for its dealings with Rosalee. (She reconnected with him right after her return from Washington.) But he seemed to be losing his taste for the McGee cause, at least publicly. Greene was no radical to begin with—he was the go-slow type, closer in spirit to Booker T. Washington than William Patterson—and he was rattled by the coming of the CRC because its Communist ties were politically dangerous. In an Advocate editorial published a few days before the clemency hearing, he held out a stiff arm for all to see, writing that the CRC “is not going to do any good for the case of Willie McGee, and it would be just as well if all the delegates planning to come to Mississippi would stay at home.”
July 25, a Tuesday, was a bright, hot, humid day in Jackson, with a possibility of afternoon thunderstorms and a 100 percent chance of midday shouting. City officials were flexing as if an army of Visigoths were coming. Police Chief Joel D. Holden canceled all vacations and days off, while American Legion posts in Jackson and Laurel pledged to help maintain order against any “subversive and communist individuals.” Governor Wright issued a statement letting the CRC delegates know they’d better behave. He dismissed their pleas in advance as “lies and propaganda.”
