by Alex Heard
No chance. “The meeting is adjourned,” Wright said. Then he got up and left.
As the gathering dispersed, Fischer heard ominous sounds from a spectator: “I never did believe I would see a thing like this in all my life, arguing and shaking fingers at the governor in public.” The meeting, he wrote, ended in “an angry and tense atmosphere.”
The tensions boiled over quickly. The FBI report said that about one hundred people, upset by what they’d just witnessed, followed some of the CRC delegates back to the Heidelberg. Later in the afternoon, a few unnamed delegates were walking through the hotel lobby when an “aged Jacksonian” decided he couldn’t take it anymore. He ran up and swatted them with a newspaper.
That was harmless, but by the end of the day on the 26th, three separate episodes of real violence had taken place. One of them, an attack against Aubrey Grossman inside his room at the Heidelberg, could have ended with serious injury or death.
The journalists in town reported these events in tune with their newspapers’ tones and political stances. Popham discreetly placed details of the attacks in the bottom half of a Times story. The Jackson Daily News thought it was all very cute: “Willie McGee Defenders ‘Mussed Up’ In Three Fist Fight Disturbances,” a typical headline said. And both the Daily Worker and the Compass made it sound as if severed human heads were bouncing off the pavement.
“Jackson streets began to look like violent wards of a madhouse,” wrote Harry Raymond, who, understandably, felt threatened by the presence of roving groups of anti-Communist vigilantes. Raymond was staying at the Robert E. Lee. Late in the afternoon of the 25th, he wrote, a friend called and “suggested I get out of my hotel room. He said: ‘They are coming up to get you.’
“My friend, a local white man, said he heard a group talking about getting the Daily Worker man. He insisted I go with him and stay the night under his roof, leaving my bag and typewriter in the hotel.
“Today I feel deeply indebted to this fine Mississippi citizen.”
Raymond’s counterpart at the Compass, Stephen Fischer, wasn’t as lucky. He and a group that included Winifred Feise and Sidney Ordower were at the Illinois Central station around 8:30 p.m. on the 25th, waiting to put the New Orleans women on a southbound train, when they were surrounded by what Fischer described as a band of twenty men, some holding wrenches.
“The train was announced and we filed out and walked up to the platform,” Fischer wrote the next day from New Orleans. “As we did, the men closed in, some shouting obscenities, others walking with determined silence. Some were drunk. Some were only 20 years old. Others were about 60. One threw a lighted cigarette which hit me on the cheek….
“About 20 of the crowd ringed me, forced me down the platform and closed in with blows and kicks. I blocked some, but not all. My greatest fear was being tossed under the train or forced off the platform.”
The women and Ordower were left unharmed. A few minutes into the attack, a policeman showed up, the men scattered, and Fischer and the women got on the train. Fischer was so shaken up that he took his Compass credentials and “flushed them to the tracks.” He had no doubt that the Compass series, along with the various editorial incitements in Jackson newspapers, had gotten him singled out for the beating.
Ordower was attacked later that night at the municipal airport, three miles northwest of the city center. He went there with John Poole, who had been in New Orleans working on a plea to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which failed. Ordower was heading back to Chicago; Poole was on his way to Washington to help with the final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
They traveled by cab from the Heidelberg, and they were met at the airport by what the Jackson Daily News described as “eight to ten men dressed in white sport shirts.” Ordower was pulled out of the car, beaten, and kicked, and Poole ducked a couple of punches. The police weren’t around to stop the assault, but the attackers voluntarily took off after landing a few blows.
Both incidents gave off a similar feel: They were well organized, and the violence was limited by the attackers themselves. Whoever was behind them knew when and where to find the CRC delegates. According to the FBI report, Grossman believed that Jackson police were tipping attackers off about their movements. After midnight on the 26th, Ordower called the U.S. Attorney’s office in Jackson to register a complaint along similar lines. Grossman followed up and demanded federal action and arrests. Nothing came of any of it.
Grossman’s turn came on Wednesday. He was still at the Heidelberg, where his day began with a 9 a.m. visit from an official delegation that included Governor Wright, the Jackson chief of police, and the chief of the state highway patrol. Wright strongly suggested that Grossman get out of town. Grossman told Wright he had legal business to attend to and demanded law enforcement protection while he did his job.
He didn’t get any help, and everything changed in a flash that afternoon. In Washington, Justice Harold Burton had spent the morning reading written arguments filed by McGee’s attorneys and by the state of Mississippi. Abzug and Poole presented oral arguments in Burton’s chambers starting around noon, opposed by R. O. Arrington, Mississippi’s assistant attorney general. Poole argued that the recent violence in Jackson and the intimidation he received in Laurel were proof enough that a new trial was needed.
“[Poole] spoke with emotion as he related, again and again, how tense feelings in Mississippi [are], and how it has grown worse in recent weeks after incitement by the Jackson Daily News,” wrote the Compass’s Katherine Gillman. Abzug went next, arguing again that the defense had new evidence. When presented at a new trial, it would prove that the prosecution had purposely lied about the facts of the case.
Burton listened quietly, taking notes on a legal pad in a precise, tiny script. These show that Abzug and Poole revealed a little more about their new information than they had done in Mississippi. “[Petitioner]…claims newly discovered evidence that McGee had previously had relations with the prosecutrix and is not guilty,” Burton wrote.
He made the call at 1:05 p.m., Eastern time. “No criticism of the courts of Mississippi [is] intended by the decision I am about to make,” he said. “But the ends of justice shall best be served by granting a stay of execution until the request for a writ certiorari is disposed of by this court.”
A telegram went out to Mississippi attorney general John Kyle within minutes. In short order, news of the stay made its way around Jackson. Rosalee McGee was with Percy Greene when she heard. She and a couple of CRC people, both white, walked to a cafe and made a phone call to Laurel—probably to Bessie McGee. Later, a policeman came in and warned them that they shouldn’t be sitting at the same restaurant table.
That afternoon, Grossman was in his room when he heard a knock on the door. Whoever it was said “Western Union,” and he bought it, opening the door to yet another traveling beatdown. “[E]ight men pushed in and immediately started attacking me,” he told reporters later. “All but the well-dressed leader were swinging black jacks—police blackjacks.” He said he was roughed up for ten minutes (“I was a bloody mess—bleeding from a half dozen cuts on my head”) when the men stopped of their own accord and left.
Who did it? The Jackson papers were in a mood to applaud, not investigate, and the left-wing papers couldn’t do anything but howl from afar. The most detailed information shows up in the FBI report. Whoever compiled it—the agent just calls himself “this writer”—was either personally present for, or had sources at, all the major events that week. He and his associates gathered newsworthy material that was never published anywhere.
The agent attended the coram nobis hearing before the Mississippi Supreme Court, summarized the clemency hearing in the capitol building, and reported on the attacks at the train station and airport. When news broke about the stay, he was moving around on the streets downtown and inside the Heidelberg lobby. There, he saw unmistakable signs of trouble—and he named names, but they remain blacked out.
“Througho
ut the morning and early afternoon…[I] observed——, the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Jackson, Mississippi, accompanied by two or three men, in and out of the Heidelberg Hotel.——had also been observed by the writer and——at both the Supreme Court hearing…and the Governor’s hearing….
“At approximately 2 p.m. on July 26, 1950,” he went on, “the writer observed two men, both of whom were strangers, go up to the Desk Clerk at the Heidelberg Hotel and ask if AUBREY GROSSMAN were registered at the hotel. When told that he was, the men inquired as to his room number, which they wrote down on a slip of paper, and immediately left.”
This agent had a hands-off attitude about the CRC delegation: His only job was to monitor the activity of suspected Communists. Still, his attitude at this moment seems awfully cold-blooded. For all he knew, he had just witnessed the first step in a murder plot. But he chose to believe what he’d been told by an informant on the 25th: The attacks were “movie” fights that were probably “staged by the CRC delegates themselves for propaganda purposes.”
The agent was at a downtown post office when he heard, at 3:55 p.m., that a woman staying in a room near Grossman’s had called the police to report a disturbance. When detectives arrived, they found Grossman staggering around in the hall, “very bloody, waving a table lamp in his hand.” Before long, the hotel physician looked him over, after which he was then taken by ambulance to the Baptist Hospital, where he was X-rayed and treated. Cuts over his left eye and on the right side of his head were patched up.
The FBI agent still seemed to think it was a put-on, that Grossman had smeared blood on his face to hype his injuries. But the report indicates otherwise. As Grossman tried to defend himself, he backed into the bathroom for what, as far as he knew, might be his last stand. The agent was told that “there were handprints in blood on the wall” and that the bathroom “was smeared up very much with blood spots on the walls, bathroom fixtures, etc.”
As the agent reported, there was one other outbreak of violence that week. Around midnight on Wednesday, a gun battle broke out that involved an attack by Klansmen on a white citizen of Jackson. It happened several miles north of town on a rural route called Pocahontas Road. Neither the local papers nor the FBI figured out who was behind it. The agent’s best guess was that the attacks on the CRC delegates spilled over into late-night celebrations, drinking, and a need to find somebody else to rough up.
Leonard R. Walters, a truck driver for a concrete company, told police that, right around midnight, he heard a racket in his front yard—“It sounded like a war out there”—and he looked out through a screen door to see hooded men setting up a cross. They were firing pistols and calling his name, so he yelled back, asking what they wanted. They wanted him to go for a ride. He refused. Suddenly, his neighbor, a carpenter named O. L. Bradley, came charging out of his house, letting the intruders have it with a pump shotgun.
“The outlaws fled through a cornfield,” the Jackson Daily News reported, “and Bradley then got an old Japanese rifle he had in the house and continued to fire at the fleeing bed-sheeted group.”
Bradley felt sure he’d hit somebody. He told law enforcement officials that he saw one man go down before running off. Later, a mechanic named R. L. Sheppard showed up at a Jackson hospital with pellets in his left eye, left hand, forehead, and face. He denied knowing who shot him or why. A car was shot up too.
It seemed likely that Tom Flowers, the rival of Lycurgus Spinks for control of the local Klan, had something to do with all this, since he was a more effective leader. But he assured the Jackson Daily News that this was probably the work of an outlaw Klan faction, or of outright imposters. “We don’t do business that way,” he said.
eleven
A LONG, LOW SONG
In Laurel on July 26, law enforcement officials were able to get McGee safely out of Jones County and back to Hinds—barely. On the 27th, he wrote Patterson from the Hinds County jail, describing his latest trip to the edge.
“They are all hot, mad feelings are running high here,” he said. “I was nearly mobbed Wed. when they brought me from Jones Co. jail. Was knocked down. There was a crowd there. We have to run out the jail to the patrol car. They like to get me, just lucky that I jumped in the floor of the back of the car. Was hit several times before the patrol could pull off. I can’t explain to you on paper but I was just lucky that through God I am alive today. I was in a serious place Wed. It all happen so suddenly.”
McGee wasn’t exaggerating. The Laurel Leader-Call ran a front-page story, frankly reporting that he was nearly seized and lynched. “His removal from the jail here was the first time that he has actually faced death from mob violence,” the story said.
The court order sparing McGee arrived in Laurel at 11:32 a.m., and word got around fast. “Small groups began to assemble within the courthouse vicinity and before 1:00 o’clock more than a hundred men had reach[ed] the area,” the Leader-Call said. “They were bitter and there was much talk against the Civil Rights Congress and the Communist Party…. ‘Go to Washington,’ one man said, ‘and tell them you are a member of the Communist Party and they’ll give you the dome to the Capitol.’”
More ominously, two women moved through the crowd in mid-afternoon, expressing “bitterness and anger” that justice wasn’t being served.
The key moment came at 3:45, when Deputy Sheriff Preston Royals went into the jail by himself to fetch McGee. From there, Royals took him to the courthouse by way of the catwalk that connected the two structures on their second floors. With most of the crowd unaware of their position, they went down the courthouse stairs, out the west entrance, and into a state automobile parked on Fifth Avenue. That side of the courthouse wasn’t completely empty, though, and McGee was hit by a man’s fist as he ran to the car.
“If the blow had knocked the negro to the sidewalk it appears almost certain that he would have died by lynching,” the report said.
With the execution stalled, Laurel’s leaders channeled the town’s anger into a mass meeting held that night, a response to the alien forces that were causing the delays. Some 300 people gathered inside the courthouse to hear speech after speech by businessmen and city officials who wanted to follow the recent example of Birmingham, Alabama, which had passed an ordinance that mandated fines and jail time for anybody who was a known Communist.
“I am not in a speaking mood tonight, I feel so strongly about this situation,” said Mayor Carroll Gartin. “As Mayor, I favor an ordinance to keep communists out of Laurel and the state of Mississippi.”
“The situation is more serious than you think,” said County Prosecutor E. K. Collins. “This is more than just the trial of Willie McGee.” He said the stay happened because of foreign pressure on the State Department, and he urged people to write their congressmen and senators.
In Laurel on August 8, speaking to 2,000 people at the civic auditorium, Governor Wright added to the local sense of outrage, excoriating President Truman, hinting that he might run as a States’ Rights candidate for president, and calling the CRC delegation “the nastiest group you ever saw.”
Wright liked to believe McGee’s supporters were, to a person, wily Communists with cynical agendas, but it wasn’t true. The best evidence for this is the flood of letters, telegrams, and postcards sent to him in the days and weeks before the clemency hearing. They were mailed from all over the United States and several foreign countries, sometimes written in inscrutable languages. One was addressed to “Gowerner Friedling Wright, Jack-On Stan Missisipi U.S.A.”
Harvey McGehee got another thousand or so cards and letters himself. Publicly, both men refused to acknowledge that this correspondence had any significance. Nonetheless, Wright—or somebody in his office—took the trouble to save much of what came in. Stored at the state archives in Jackson, the letters fill twenty boxes. If you take a look through any random stack, it’s evident that the CRC had succeeded in making McGee’s case resonate with a broader audience than Communists and fellow trav
elers.
Some of the letters were indeed insults from the left. Carl and Anne Braden, Louisville, Kentucky-based leftists who would figure prominently in the McGee case later, opened with this: “Sometimes you people in Mississippi act like you don’t have good sense. You are always picking on some poor person who can’t defend himself. You make the rest of the world think that all Southerners are a bunch of Hitlers.”
But most were appeals from people who wanted Wright to give serious thought to what was about to happen. A disproportionate number came from the New York area, often inspired by the Compass stories.
“I have been reading a series of articles on Willie McGee’s case, and my blood was deeply chilled, to see how justice was served to him,” wrote a Manhattanite named Edgar A. Walker. “…The case has absolutely no foundation, nor substantial evidence to prove that McGee raped Mrs. Hawkins…. How could a jury accept such an incredible story?”
Addressing his remarks to “Governor Fielding Elliot,” Lewis Fulton, another New Yorker, said, “I don’t believe in ‘Northerners’ meddling in the affairs of ‘Southerners.’…But in the situation confronting the world today, no person with any feeling towards the human race can not but feel that a most terrible injustice has been framed up on Willie McGee…. Justice must be done! GRANT A STAY OF EXECUTION!”
Some Southerners spoke up too. Emily Miller Danton, a Mississippi native who was the director of the Birmingham Public Library and whose father, Thomas Marshall Miller, had served as Mississippi’s attorney general in the late 1800s, wrote, “From what I can learn of the Willie McGee case, this man has been convicted and sentenced on slight evidence, and a confession secured by torture. I beg that you will stay the execution of that sentence until you personally are convinced, not only that this man is guilty of the crime charged, but that he has had a fair trial, and has not been convicted because he is a Negro.”
