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

by Alex Heard

  A. D. Beittel, president of Alabama’s Talladega College, an African-American institution founded after the Civil War, said he’d been in Europe in 1931 and saw how the Scottsboro case was used to “defame the United States by people who were not cordial to our country.” The same thing would happen with the McGee case, he warned, this time in Korea and all over Asia. “Since nothing will be gained by the execution…and something may be gained by commuting the sentence,” he wrote, “I respectfully request you to extend mercy to the prisoner and see that he is not put to death on this doubtful charge.”

  With the CRC delegates gone, Jackson and Laurel slowly quieted down as combatants on both sides applied bandages, declared victory or vowed revenge, and looked ahead to the next round, which would happen at the U.S. Supreme Court. In Washington, Associate Justice Harold Burton got his own bag of letters about the stay, mostly notes of gratitude from McGee supporters. Many seemed to think his decision indicated a personal preference that, this time, the Court do something to give McGee his freedom.

  “Being a white woman, and knowing the terrible prejudices against the negroes in the south, I was heart-broken when I thought that a man must go to his death because of the color of his skin,” wrote a Bronx woman named Mrs. Ray Dee. “Not being able to do much in his behalf, I was happy to hear that a man of office had at last had the courage to speak out….

  “Thank you again for the great democratic action you have taken, and may God bless you.”

  Burton heard from detractors too, who crudely attacked his judgment and patriotism. “Let me state this question, Sir,” wrote A. W. Hendrix, a Mississippi native living in New Orleans. “If your wife, or mother, or daughter had been raped by a nigger—who knew better—how sir, would you feel? I have no hesitation in saying you have committed a travesty of justice in your arbitrary action, taken in the case of Willie Magee—an honestly and legally convicted rapist of one of our women.”

  “Hurrah for you and Robeson,” said a curt telegram sent by a Texas man named Gordon Allen. “You are without a doubt the number one and two red in the country.”

  Congressman William Colmer of Mississippi, whose district contained Jones County, denounced the CRC in the Congressional Record, along with the “‘do-gooders,’ fellow travelers, and left-wing press” who were devoted to “fomenting discord and disunity between the Negroes and the white people of the South.”

  In the North, the words were flying just as furiously that summer, in part because there had been a victory in another much watched legal-lynching fight: the case of the Martinsville Seven. In that one, which NAACP lawyers were defending, seven young black men in the town of Martinsville, Virginia, had been convicted of the January 8, 1949, gang rape of a thirty-two-year-old white woman named Ruby Floyd. All were sentenced to death, and, as in the McGee case, they’d been kept alive only through state and federal appeals. On July 26—the same day Burton issued his McGee stay—there was an encouraging Martinsville development when the NAACP persuaded a city judge in Richmond, Virginia, to stay the executions while he examined a petition they’d submitted for a writ of habeas corpus.

  These two temporary wins, happening so close together, inspired the Daily Worker and the New York Compass to proclaim that final victory was in sight. “They couldn’t get away with their ‘legal’ murder of Willie McGee and the framed seven Negroes of Martinsville, Virginia,” a Daily Worker editorial said. “No. The world of the KKK lynchers and their rotten judges and governors is not exactly what it used to be when the murder of a n—r, either with or without benefit of a ‘jury trial’ was just routine.”

  To the Worker, both cases had taken on transcendent significance. They were of a piece with a revolutionary movement against white domination and colonialism that was beginning to sweep the world. “All Asia is aflame as the colored peoples in Malaya, Indo-China, the Philippines, [and] Indonesia act to throw off the ‘white supremacy’ lynch terror. Africa seethes like a volcano as the black man’s anger and revolt mutters like coming lightning and thunder.”

  In the Compass, Ted Thackrey kept his comments closer to home, but he was jubilant too. “It is a late hour and the victory by no means complete—but United States Supreme Court Justice Harold Burton advanced the cause of democracy around the world when he granted a stay of execution to Willie McGee, Negro,” he wrote. “Justice Burton’s action assures a Supreme Court review this fall of McGee’s arrest and conviction….

  “His action will have the effect of erasing some of the grave damage already done in the McGee case to our pretensions of a democratic system in which all men are equal before the law….”

  It would indeed, assuming the Supreme Court decided to hear the case—a big assumption, since the justices had twice declined to do so. In the interim, as the Worker and Compass both appeared to forget, the Court’s makeup had barely changed.

  In Mississippi, it was a period of paybacks. One thing the FBI missed during its July surveillance was that a black maid at the Heidelberg, a woman named Raberthe Hanks, had put herself at personal risk to protect Aubrey Grossman from the beating he received—and then lost her job as a result. Nobody knew about this at the time, including Grossman, but in early 1952 he got a letter from Hanks, who described what had happened.

  “I am a poor Negro woman who was working at the hotel where you was beat up in the year 1950,” she wrote. “I was fired because I would not turn over to the manager of the hotel…the key [to give] the leader of the gang that beat you. He has not been fired. But I can’t get a job anywhere in Mississippi.” Hanks said she’d moved to the Delta looking for work—no luck—and had come back to Jackson, where she tracked down Rosalee McGee to tell her story. She hinted that perhaps she, like Rosalee, could travel north to speak before crowds. “[I]f can do any good, please notify me at the above address for I am willing to come to New York but I has no money,” she said.

  As for McGee, the July disturbances prompted his jailers to retaliate by cutting off his visitation rights. Rosalee wrote Patterson about this on August 1, 1950.

  Well I feel very bad today because I can’t even visit Willie now. And I know he needs some clothes and cigarettes…. They got him in the death cell with two white men. One of the Negro trustees slip out and told me what the jailer said about me and I told Mr. Greene and he told me not to go over there.

  The jailer said if I ever come over there, he was going say something to me so he could beat hell out of me and lock me up. He said if it had not been for me, the CRC never would have come down here and that he was going to keep me and my mother-in-law out his jail….

  Everybody tell me you should leave here, but I feel with McGee here my job is not done and if I began to run, I can’t fight. And if I die about the truth, I won’t feel hurt at all….

  Mr. Patterson, I want each and every one to know that I do thank them for helping me and I am going to fight until all Americans are free from Jim crow system. I have learned that Willie’s life is not the only one that is in danger. And I am going to fight not for one but for all. We never know who may be next.

  Rosalee wrote frequently in the weeks ahead as her situation deteriorated. On August 22, she reported that she was broke, having worked “only five days since I been back” to Mississippi from her Northern trip, and that she’d been bedridden with pains in her side. The CRC lost track of her in September, but she wrote several times in October, saying she’d been out of town dealing with the September 19 death of “my oldest sister.”

  Rosalee didn’t name the sister or say where she went to be with her, but she mentioned that this woman had looked after her children when she was away on her CRC travels. Seeing shadows, she speculated that her sister might have been murdered to interfere with her CRC work. “[T]hey say the Doctor kill her so [my children] wouldn’t have no place to stay when I am away. The Doctor gave her shot and cort a stroke….”

  Rosalee also had a problem with Percy Greene, publisher of the Jackson Advocate, whose support of
McGee apparently ended with the July incidents. She described her conflicts with him in several letters, but they boiled down to two things: She accused Greene of withholding money the CRC had sent to her through him, and she said he was harassing her about the foolishness of staying involved with Communists.

  On October 24, she wrote, “I went to see Mr. Greene, to the one I thought was my friend and I hate to say this but he turn me out so cold I was just like a lost sheep from the fold. But I want you all to no that I didn’t get the money and I am not going to do what he told me. Commie or whatever the peoples was, I know that save my husband life.”

  It’s hard to separate fact from fiction in these letters—there’s another one in this period by Gracie Lee McGee, supposedly mailed from Laurel. But, overall, there’s a consistency to the tone and details. Rosalee was having a hard time getting by: She still appeared to be taking care of real children, and she still believed in McGee and the CRC’s larger mission.

  “I was working at two places but one of the lady wanted me to work all day for one dollar and a half and some old clothes,” she said in one letter. “…I’m not going to be a dog for no one when Willie have been facing death for 1,829 days…. I don’t have dime but I am willing to suffer and wait for Willie.”

  McGee started sending letters again in August, usually to Lottie Gordon, thanking her for the CRC’s support and the care packages she sent. Months later, when Christmas came around, Gordon arranged to have gifts sent to Willie, Rosalee, and the kids. Rosalee put together a wish list from the four McGee children, and Gordon sent along two winter coats, a football, a cap, and a watch. Willie asked for a modest creature comfort: pajamas.

  “I wear a medium size pajama suit,” he wrote in late November. “I not a very big man at all.” They arrived in time, and he wrote Gordon a thank-you note on December 26. “[T]hey was just right,” he said, “and I like them.”

  Another person who suffered setbacks that summer was John Poole. His conduct in the McGee case had angered powerful people in Mississippi, and they started coming after him in a way that left no doubt they were in it for the long haul.

  The opening move was the disbarment action filed on July 22 by various Laurel officials. Their petition to the Mississippi Bar Association charged that Poole was unfit to practice because he was “aligned with and employed by subversive and communistic elements.” They also alleged unscrupulous conduct for making false charges and filing false motions. Here, they were referring to Poole’s claim at the third trial that the prosecution had tampered with the grand-jury selection process, and to the unacceptable manner, in their view, in which he’d pursued the question of whether Mrs. Hawkins had “consented” to the rape.

  Dixon Pyles had poked the same sore spots—why hadn’t he been attacked? There were two main reasons. First, Pyles got out of the case before people paid much attention, while Poole was in the thick of it at the worst possible times: during the third trial and the CRC’s “invasion.” In addition, Poole’s libel suit—which eventually went to trial before a federal jury in Jackson—guaranteed the long-term wrath of people like Fred Sullens.

  The libel trial happened prior to the CRC protests, in late June 1950. It wasn’t transcribed and it received little coverage—even in Jackson newspapers—but it was a full-blown proceeding, complete with testimony that took up two and a half days. Jurors heard from Sullens, from Laurel officials like Judge Collins, and from fifteen character witnesses who spoke up for Poole. He had sixty-five supporters lined up, but the presiding judge, Sidney Mize, called that number “undue” and told his lawyers to pare it down.

  Poole was kept on the defensive throughout—the trial was really about him, after all. Under oath, he admitted to taking money from the CRC but said he was working for a client, not an ideology, and that his right to do so should be unquestioned. “I just took their money to defend a man and I would take yours,” he told Tom Watkins. “I think it is entirely two different things, if I take money to go out and try to overthrow the government, and another thing, to defend a man.”

  Poole was attacked for questioning the grand-jury process and for smearing Mrs. Hawkins. When Sullens took the stand, he said that, for these and other reasons, he proudly stood by his editorial. “Clarifying his meaning, he said he meant by ‘lousy’ not that Poole was ‘lice-infested’ but was ‘sub-standard or below par,’” the Jackson Daily News said in its story about the trial. “Regarding the word ‘conscienceless,’ he said that any lawyer ‘who would willfully besmirch the name of a woman who had been through dire tragedy’ is ‘conscienceless.’

  “‘I meant that then, and I mean it now,’ he declared.”

  For Poole, the problem—as always—was the jury: a panel of white men whose attitudes about race, women, and Communism were the same as those of McGee’s trial jurors. After deliberating for four hours, they ruled on June 29 that no libel had occurred.

  The next day, in a triumphant Jackson Daily News front-page story, Sullens said the victory was not his alone. “The invasion of Southern courts by Northern interventionists bent on saving the lives of proven Negro rapists was repudiated here…by a Federal Court jury,” the article began. “…The jury in effect…backed the right of the Jackson Daily News to continue to interpret the news fearlessly and courageously.”

  The loss was a crushing blow to Poole, a young lawyer who, according to a federal judge and jury, had been proved to be “lousy and conscienceless.” This, coupled with the fallout from the CRC’s Jackson protests, made him finally decide he’d had enough. On August 16, he withdrew as McGee’s lawyer, distancing himself from the CRC in a statement released to the press.

  “I am not a member of the Civil Rights Congress, and I am not associated with it in any manner whatever,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I strongly object to the actions of its members when they were in Jackson.”

  Unfortunately, Poole was past the point where he could just walk away. In Laurel, Albert Easterling called his statement a transparent act of appeasement, saying, “He is in direct peril as a result of his own acts and with more zeal and fervor we shall press our charges against him.” As it turned out, Fred Sullens wasn’t finished with him either.

  William Patterson was heading for legal problems himself, ones that would torment him for years. At issue was the oft-argued question of whether an organization like the CRC, a politically active nonprofit with Communist members, had a right to keep its records private. Committees like HUAC had long used Congress’s power to punish people for contempt—with penalties ranging from fines to jail time, all duly litigated in federal courts—as a tool to pry information from suspect organizations or to put their leaders in jail.

  On August 3 and 4, Patterson was called before the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities, which ordered him to hand over CRC records, including the names of people who contributed to the group. He refused. In the process, he made a Georgia congressman so angry that their exchanges nearly ended in a brawl.

  During Patterson’s second day as a witness, he maintained that the committee’s harassment was keeping him from doing his real job: defending the civil rights of people like Willie McGee and Rosa Lee Ingram, a black woman from Georgia who was serving a life sentence, along with two of her sons, for the 1947 killing of a white man named John Stratford. Ingram said Stratford had tried to molest her and that one of her sons struck him in self-defense. As Patterson knew, all three were originally sentenced to death, and during his testimony he denounced the case as a legal lynching. This angered Henderson Lanham, a sixty-one-year-old congressman from Rome, Georgia, who was the committee’s acting chairman. He said the state of Georgia had never lynched anybody and called Patterson a liar.

  “The state of Georgia tried to lynch nine men in the Scottsboro case,” Patterson shot back. “Georgia is a state of lynchers.” He misspoke—as he certainly knew, Scottsboro happened in Alabama. But he’d made his point, which he stood by. “A black man has no rights that a white m
an is bound to respect in Georgia,” he said.

  “You’re a liar,” Lanham said. “If any state is fair to niggers, it’s Georgia.”

  Patterson stared at him a moment, seething, and then said, “You’re a liar too.”

  That did it for Lanham. Shouting “Black son of a bitch!” he jumped out of his chair and ran toward Patterson with his fists clenched. Two capitol policemen stopped him and dragged him back to the committee-room dais, where, according to a report in the New York Compass, “he paced back and forth repeating the epithet four more times….”

  The Compass story was accompanied by a Ted Thackrey editorial that apologized for quoting the congressman’s foul language before reminding readers, in a somber tone, what this incident exposed: American fascism at its worst. “Have the apostles of Hitler become so bold that no lover of democracy is left in the House with sufficient courage and decency to denounce them when their acts are clear and indulged in as House officials?”

  Apparently so: Lanham was never penalized. Months later he wisecracked that, if he had it to do over again, he would have called Patterson a Communist SOB instead. Patterson was cited for contempt of Congress in late August. In November, he was indicted in federal district court in Washington. For the rest of the time that Patterson worked to keep Willie McGee alive, he would also have to fight to keep himself out of jail.

  The bomb that never dropped during the Jackson invasion—which Abzug hinted at when she pleaded before Justice Burton—was an affidavit by Rosalee McGee, which had been put to paper in Washington on July 25. As sworn statements go, it’s a strange one, since large portions of it can’t be true. The central premise is that Rosalee was married to Willie—living in Laurel and helping raise their four children—during the crucial years in the early 1940s when, according to this version, his affair with Mrs. Hawkins got going. But Rosalee was living in the Lexington and Durant areas at that time, married, for however long, to George Gilmore Jr.