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

by Alex Heard

  Still, just because she was lying doesn’t rule out the possibility that the affidavit contained elements of truth. Willie could have told Rosalee a true account of what had happened to him—and how his ex-wife played into it—asking Rosalee to swear to the story in Eliza Jane’s place. But that’s the best possible interpretation for the deception. The worst is that he dragged her into a lie because it was his only chance of survival.

  As for the CRC, it’s hard to imagine they didn’t have some inkling the story was suspicious, but there’s no way to know. Whatever files Abzug and Poole kept on the case have not survived, and there’s nothing in the CRC papers about it. In the FBI file on McGee, buried in a July 25 report from the Washington, D.C., field office, there’s one hint that Abzug was worried about Rosalee’s veracity. An informant told the Bureau that McGee’s lawyers had presented a copy of Rosalee’s affidavit to U.S. attorney general J. Howard McGrath and Democratic National Committee chairman William M. Boyle Jr., “with the threat that it would be published unless they take some action on it.” But the informant also said Abzug was “fearful of publishing affidavit in present form for fear it may contain inaccuracies as to dates and places.”

  That could mean almost anything, though. Abzug may have merely thought the document needed basic fact-checking. Still, it would be a long time before the CRC went public with it: not until March 1951. From then on, even though the affidavit was full of false statements, McGee supporters would treat it as proof that Mrs. Hawkins had lied.

  The story Rosalee told began “back in 1936 and 1937,” when she said McGee and Troy Hawkins were both working at the Masonite plant in Laurel. This led to McGee’s getting hired to do yard work and housecleaning at the Hawkins home.

  “As far as I can remember, starting at least back in 1942, before Willie went into the Army, Mrs. Hawkins used to come to our house and ask for Willie,” Rosalee said. “The first time she came, she asked me where Willie was. I told her Willie wasn’t home and asked her what she wanted. She told me she wanted him to work in her yard.

  “That night I asked Willie, ‘What she want?’ So he tell me, ‘Next time she come, tell her to go away. She don’t want me to work in no yard.’”

  Willie’s departure for the army solved the problem until 1943, when he came back to Laurel and resumed married life with Rosalee. But Mrs. Hawkins quickly swooped in. Willie and Rosalee were walking home from the movies one night, around 10:30, when she came out of an alley and tried to force Willie to get in her car.

  “I got so mad I said, ‘What’s that!’” Rosalee said. “And I started to pull him away.

  “And Willie himself he told her, ‘Go ’way. This is my wife. I’m with my wife.’

  “So she says to Willie out loud, ‘Don’t fool with no Negro whores.’”

  Willie told Rosalee everything that night. How the affair had started and why he was powerless to end it. How Mrs. Hawkins was threatening to expose him to harm if he didn’t do what she wanted.

  “Down South, you tell a woman like that no, and she’ll cry rape anyway,” Rosalee said. “So what else could Willie do.” His first impulse was to gather his family and leave town, but “we didn’t have no money for Willie and me and the four children, all of us to go away. So Willie went away to California by himself.”

  Rosalee didn’t say how long he was gone. When he came back, homesick, the affair started again. Rosalee’s account said nothing about why Willie went to the Hawkins home on the night of the alleged rape—presumably, it was just another date—but she said it was common knowledge that Troy and Willette “had a big argument” that night and that Troy was seen “chasing her right out into the street at five o’clock in the morning—they say her husband was about ready to kill her that night.

  “So I guess to save herself from her husband,” Rosalee concluded, “she figured she would say she was raped and get Willie lynched.”

  Abzug filed McGee’s latest Supreme Court appeal on November 22, 1950, but even at this critical moment she didn’t mention Rosalee’s dramatic claims. In hindsight, that seems like a tactical blunder. But at the time, and in the context of what Abzug was asking the Court to do, it made sense.

  The goal was to get a reversal of Harvey McGehee’s refusal to grant a writ of error coram nobis, leading to a new jury trial where the evidence would, at last, be presented. As any lawyer knew, it wasn’t the Supreme Court’s job to retry a case based on new evidence, so Abzug decided it would suffice to describe the allegations in general terms while explaining why she’d thought it necessary to follow the same strategy with the Mississippi Supreme Court. Thus, the appeal said that any sex Mrs. Hawkins had with McGee was “voluntary,” and that she’d lied on the stand. But it didn’t fill in the blanks, which reporters and Supreme Court clerks couldn’t help but notice.

  The Clarion Ledger said of the brief: “It is charged, without proof so far, that false testimony was presented against the Negro.” Louis Lautier, a Washington-based writer with the National Negro Publishers Association, gave Abzug’s argument careful scrutiny for an article distributed to African-American newspapers, and he seemed to guess what was left out—and what would come later. “Attorneys for Willie McGee…hint strongly in a petition for a review of the case that the prosecutrix was not ravished,” he wrote. “…[McGee] charges that the State knew the prosecutrix lied when she testified that the alleged ‘sexual intercourse’ which took place November 2, 1945, constituted an act of rape.”

  Supreme Court clerk Murray L. Schwartz, writing again for Chief Justice Vinson in an undated circulating memo, wrote, “[I]t should be pointed out that it now appears to be petitioner’s argument that the intercourse from which the rape charge arises took place voluntarily on the part of the prosecutrix….” As Schwartz explained, the Mississippi Supreme Court had denied the writ because the defense failed to present witnesses and evidence supporting its claims. In Abzug’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, she said there was a good reason for that: If she’d used her witnesses in front of McGehee, there would have been so much community hostility against them that they wouldn’t have dared testify again.

  “If [Willie McGee] had attempted to produce them at a preliminary hearing in the Mississippi Supreme Court, their identity would have become known and popular passion would have restrained them from testifying at the full hearing,” Schwartz wrote.

  As he noted, there were other claims in the appeal—Abzug argued that McGee had been denied equal protection because of the “gross imbalance between death sentences received by white men and Negroes for rape” and that the prosecution lied about how his confession was obtained—but the coram nobis claim was the central pillar.

  It wasn’t convincing to Schwartz, however, who recommended that the Court again deny the appeal. It bothered him that the defense was asking the justices to accept it on faith that the new evidence, whatever it was, warranted a fourth trial.

  “[I]t seems to me that…it was incumbent upon petitioner to indicate to the Miss. Supreme Court, and indeed to this Court, what his evidence is, to warrant the holding of a trial on the issues,” he wrote.

  “…Whatever doubts there may be as to the validity of this conviction, I do not see how it can be said that the failure to hold a hearing on the allegations of the petition was a denial of a federal right.”

  John G. Burnett, a clerk for William O. Douglas, agreed. “It seems doubtful to me that it would be appropriate for this Court to reverse and direct issuance of the writ solely on the basis of unsupported allegations,” he wrote in a memo dated January 11, 1951. “It may be true that community passions are at such a level that it would be justifiable not to present witnesses at these proceedings. But, absent evidence, the state court would seem in the best position to take judicial notice of such facts and excuse the failure to present witnesses.”

  Four days later, the Court declined to hear the case, and the optimism of 1950 instantly became the despair of 1951. In Jackson, Fred Sullens beat his
chest. In a January 17 Jackson Daily News editorial called “No More Interference,” he talked about McGee’s lawyers in the same insulting terms that had prompted Poole’s libel suit. “This should end the matter,” he wrote, “…from now on any lousy, conscienceless lawyer who seeks to defeat the ends of justice in the Willie McGee case should be branded as a public enemy and treated as such.”

  As word spread among McGee’s supporters, the seriousness of this setback was unmistakable. The Daily Worker was eloquent that day, publishing an editorial that mourned the outcome but promised victory down the road.

  “These judges fear the freedom-seeking, 14,000,000 Negro people trampled on inside the U.S. by the ‘white supremacy’ system,” it said.

  “The judges are a part of that system. They work to uphold it….

  “When they crush the liberties of the Negro victims, they also crush the liberties of the entire nation. Lincoln knew that this was the battle-line. We must know it, and act on that knowledge.”

  In Mississippi, Bessie McGee wrote the CRC from Laurel, plaintively asking, what now? “My hart is hurt after I saw what I did in the paper about Willie,” she said. “I aint been well at all. I rote Bella and I sent her Friday paper about [this] and I just want to no what are you all going to [do] now.”

  For several days, the CRC was unable to find Rosalee to let her know. Aubrey Grossman wanted her to come north again, to take part in public protests over the McGee and Martinsville Seven cases. She turned up in late January, writing three letters in quick succession, explaining that she’d taken the children to Lexington because they were upset by the bad news and saying that, yes, she would be glad to travel wherever they wanted her to go.

  “I was dead broke until i got to Jackson and found the money order from Lottie,” she wrote on the 24th. “[Y]ou ask me bout going to va. yes i will go where ever you wont me to go.”

  She didn’t make that trip, however, and she couldn’t have done much good if she had. The Martinsville Seven were dead within two weeks.

  Since taking over the CRC, Patterson had vigorously pursued his “mass defense” strategy in the McGee case and had been successful at bringing attention to a story that was overlooked before he came along. If he’d had his way, the CRC would have used the same tactics with several high-profile cases from that era, but there was a problem. The NAACP had control of many of them—including the trials of Rosa Lee Ingram and the Martinsville Seven—and its officials never relented about treating the CRC as a pariah organization.

  Patterson’s public reaction to this was confusion and hurt feelings. The CRC and NAACP were working for the same thing—racial justice—so why couldn’t they work together? But the NAACP may have been right to mistrust his intentions. In 1947, an FBI informant reported on Patterson’s attendance at a meeting of Communist Party leaders in New York. One issue was Communist strategy in relation to the NAACP, and Patterson said it had been decided that the goal was to infiltrate the older, larger group at the leadership level.

  “Informant stated that he learned from Subject [Patterson] that the strategy of the Party would not be to attempt to completely capture the NAACP but merely to guide its policies by electing Communists to the executive board of that organization,” said an FBI report from late 1947. “The same informant advised that on August 30, 1947 he had attended a meeting of the Negro Commission of the Communist Party and that Subject had presided as chairman. At this meeting it was decided that the Communist Party would send their people into the NAACP and prepare to put up a struggle to place trade union members on the NAACP executive board.”

  The Martinsville Seven case, which came to an end in early February 1951, is a good example of how the NAACP kept the CRC at bay. Early on, Patterson had attempted to get a CRC loyalist attached to the case, announcing in June 1949 that the group would provide a lawyer who would request a new trial for one of the convicted men, Francis DeSales Grayson. But Martin A. Martin, the NAACP’s chief lawyer for the Martinsville cases, announced that any association between the two organizations was out of the question. “Our firm and the NAACP cannot at this time be associated in any way with any organization which has been declared subversive by the United States Attorney General,” he said.

  Cooperation wouldn’t have worked anyway, since the groups had opposite views of the best strategy. Martinsville was different from the McGee case in one key respect: Many people, including people who wanted to save the defendants’ lives, believed that at least some of the men had raped Ruby Floyd—a conclusion later shared by criminal justice professor Eric W. Rise in his 1995 book, The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment. During its appeals, the NAACP didn’t argue the question of guilt or innocence; instead it argued that the men hadn’t received a proper trial or fair sentancing. In a letter to the Nation written after the case ended, NAACP lawyers explained, “The question of their guilt or innocence was not raised by us, for under the law a person is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty beyond all reasonable doubt after having had a fair trial. The NAACP has maintained that these men did not get a fair trial and that therefore the presumption of their innocence remains.”

  Patterson treated Martinsville as another sham rape charge. “The alleged victim was well known to be a prostitute as well as a mentally retarded person, and there was no evidence that a rape had taken place,” he wrote in The Man Who Cried Genocide. As in the McGee campaign, however, that claim wasn’t proven—it was only asserted, and in Ruby Floyd’s case, it seems especially doubtful that the CRC had it right.

  Floyd was a Jehovah’s Witness who often sold used clothing and vegetables in black neighborhoods. According to her story, she was out trying to collect an unpaid debt on some clothing—accompanied by an eleven-year-old African-American boy named Charlie Martin—when they came across a group of four young black males gathered near a stretch of railroad tracks. When they passed by again after finishing their errand, Floyd said, she was dragged into a stand of woods and raped, first by the four men who originally spotted her, and later by three more who came along when they heard about what was going on. That evening, according to Rise, she turned up at the door of a woman named Mary Wade, “clad only in her shirt, sweater, and a torn slip.” She had scratched arms, tangled hair, and, said Wade, “her thighs were rubbed red-like.”

  There were other witnesses as well. Charlie Martin testified that he saw four of the men attack her. Josephine Grayson—the wife of defendant Francis DeSales Grayson—was walking along the tracks with another woman when Floyd staggered out of the woods, fell into her arms, and begged for help. She didn’t get any, and Floyd was shortly dragged back into the woods by a defendant named Joe Henry Hampton.

  After all the men were found guilty in April and May 1949, the NAACP’s lawyers tried a variety of appeals—including a failed appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, based on Virginia’s discriminatory application of the death penalty for rape. As Rise explained in The Martinsville Seven, Martin A. Martin drew on various studies to press this claim, including one that showed that “93 percent of the men executed for rape in thirteen southern states between 1938 and 1948 were black.” In early 1951, however, the Court declined to take the case. The same arguments were also used, without success, in McGee’s appeals.

  Shut out of the courtrooms, the CRC made its contribution in the streets. In late January, it helped organize a “mass pilgrimage” designed to persuade Governor John S. Battle or President Truman to stop the executions. In Washington, CRC-affiliated writers like Dashiell Hammett and Howard Fast took part in a “death vigil” in front of the White House. The picketing went on for several days, around the clock, and was carried out in frigid temperatures. Patterson was there, escorting Mrs. Grayson and her children.

  The protests had no effect. On Friday, February 2, defendants Joe Henry Hampton, Booker T. Millner, Howard Lee Hairston, and Frank Hairston Jr. were electrocuted in Richmond. On Monday the 5th, they were followed by James Hairston, John Clabon
Taylor, and Francis DeSales Grayson. Among the public mourners was a 900-person mixed-race group in Richmond, who carried floral wreaths to the state capitol. There were vigils in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Harlem.

  The Daily Worker mixed its words of mourning with turbulent imagery (“From their funeral pyre shot up a flame so high it was seen around the world”), while Time, offended by the Communists’ use of the case for propaganda, reflexively sneered: “The Communist calliope swung into high…. Moscow trotted out its tame intellects…. The radio of the Chinese People’s Government broadcast an appeal to stay ‘this barbaric sentence.’”

  In those days, events like this often inspired protest poetry, and the bard of the Martinsville case was a man named Walter Lowenfels, a Daily Worker contributor who wrote a haunting piece called “The Martinsville Chant.” Lowenfels was moved by the sight of Mrs. Grayson, trudging back and forth on the picket line.

  Singing her long, low song to its final end in silence

  as she marched on the vigil the last day in front of the

  White House lawn

  and her eyes tightened closer and her dark face settled like

  an Aztec mask

  and her body drooped lower and the last sound

  parted from her like the living heart ripped warm out

  of the living sacrifice in the temple stones of America.

  Reviewing the case in the New Leader, writer Henry Lee Moon criticized the CRC for sullying the protest efforts but was more offended by mainstream journalism, which gave surprisingly little coverage to the case. “If there were not a deliberate conspiracy to suppress the story there was certainly widespread unconcern over it, as though the sacrifice of seven lives for a single crime which involved no loss of life were an everyday occurrence,” he wrote. He called it a “ghastly spectacle” that could only encourage anti-American sentiment abroad. “Not only the Communists,” he said, “but millions of others must ask why the death penalty for rape is reserved exclusively for Negroes.”