by Alex Heard
“[Their] background is not the sort to produce the usual stodgy comments of the ‘British Visitors Find America Wonderful’ school,” the Post said in an introduction. “Instead, the…forthcoming stories need only musical scoring to make them a latter day Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.”
Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in the summer of 1940, became a combat aviator, and was killed in late 1941 during a bombing flight. By then, Jessica was living in Alexandria, Virginia, with her ten-month-old daughter, Constancia. In time, she found a government job as a typist at the Office of Price Administration, where she met Robert Treuhaft. She transferred to San Francisco in early 1943 and became involved with the CIO-affiliated United Federal Workers of America, her way back into the realm of politics. Treuhaft followed a few months later, and they married that summer.
Jessica wasn’t very active politically in Washington, but there was already an FBI file on her, opened because Unity’s and Diana’s misadventures had put the Mitfords in the glare. In the FBI’s early assessment, the agents didn’t see red. They saw red, white, and blue. “She is said to be liberal in her political philosophy and sympathetic with Russian experiment, but loyal to Democratic principles and proud of her connection with United States Government,” said an internal report from April 1943.
Not quite. Put off by “[t]he boring and oppressive American preoccupation with material comforts,” she felt the old pull of radicalism. In the fall of 1943, Jessica and Bob were secretly invited to join the Communist Party. That same year, she signed up. It didn’t take the FBI long to notice. By February 1945, there was a new entry in J. Edgar Hoover’s “Confidential Security Index Card File,” labeled JESSICA LUCY TREUHAFT…COMMUNIST.
Mitford and the Bay Area Three hit the road the same day Abzug and Coe went before Judge Mize. One early stop was Needles, California, where they spent two hours knocking on doors and speaking with local NAACP members and preachers, including an old black minister named J. M. Caddell. (Caddell told them he was raised in Newton, Mississippi, which he called “a good place to be from.”) A few people promised to write letters, but the editor of the town newspaper brushed them off, saying, “Not local news.”
Mitford filed stories at every stop for the Daily People’s World, making the best of what she had. Her Needles dispatch began with a brisk, mission-accomplished lead: “This small railroad community of 1,000 persons, located in the heart of the Mojave desert, is going to make its contribution to the nationwide campaign to save the life of Willie McGee.” Parsed, it didn’t mean much, but it was in tune with the spirit of the trip: Whatever happened, press on.
The most important stop before Jackson was St. Louis, a rallying point for the CRC’s gathering army of white women. But as Mitford soon learned, there would be no army. Aubrey Grossman came out from New York to deliver the disheartening news that only a handful of people were heading south.
“‘Where are the others?’” Mitford asked. “[Grossman], not in the least abashed, explained there were no others—we four were the whole delegation, the generals and soldiers of this great nationwide call to action…. Nor was there any blueprint, or plan of campaign…. We should have to develop our plans on the spot when we arrived in Jackson, and he would do his best to get other women to join us there.”
Mitford was exaggerating, but only a little. A group shot taken in St. Louis shows a few other people who made the trip—three women from Chicago and Milwaukee, a white male preacher from New York—and there was a separate group of women who had been deployed from Detroit, Memphis, and other cities.
By any measure, they were an outmanned platoon, bound for Jackson at a tense time, just as word was spreading about McGee’s shocking claim of a love affair. On March 12, the Daily People’s World poured fuel on the fire by publishing a sensational story based on Rosalee McGee’s affidavit. Calling the affair and frame-up a “story of sick horror,” the paper said Rosalee “stated that Mrs. Willimetta Hawkins, the alleged white victim who claimed she’d never met McGee before, had in fact forced McGee to maintain a reluctant relationship with her dating back to 1942.”
The women made it to Jackson in a couple of days and got rooms at the local YWCA. Their routine consisted of door-to-door canvassing, with all precautions taken and proprieties observed. “We drew up strict rules of conduct,” Mitford recalled. “[N]ever venture from the Y except in pairs; work from early morning until sunset but never after dark; wear hats, stockings, and white gloves at all times.”
Before long, their presence twitched the antenna of Fred Sullens, who decided their numbers were closer to 150 than 15 and took great interest in their most mundane doings. A Jackson Daily News story reported on the activities of “two bare-legged Chicago women” who paid a call to “three indignant Jackson housewives.” The intruders waved a printed copy of Rosalee’s account of the affair and ordered the Jacksonians to read it. “The three women gasped when they read ‘Mrs.’ McGee’s ‘filthy’ letter,” the report said. “One horrified local housewife told the crusaders she knew the Negro woman never wrote that typewritten sheet of lies….
“‘I got so mad at ’em my hair was standing up on end,’” one woman said. “I told them that’s just what the Russians were using to stir up trouble in our country.”
Jackson mayor Allen Thompson issued a statement denouncing the mysterious callers. “He suggested that homeowners should ask them away and if they persisted in staying the Jackson police department is willing to co-operate,” the Jackson Daily News reported on March 16. “The action came after a meeting in City Hall Saturday morning attended by the city prosecuting attorney, city attorney, police officials and others.”
There was no justifiable reason to interfere with the canvassers. They were talking to people about a court case, which was their right—just as it was the right of homeowners to either listen, laugh, curse, or slam the door. The dialogues must have been strange, though. By and large, the members of the White Women’s Delegation didn’t know any more about McGee’s guilt or innocence than the people they were lecturing. They were pushing a party line, which they accepted without question because they believed in the cause and the political system behind it. Most of their listeners embraced a party line too—Southern orthodoxy on race relations—so it wasn’t an easy sell.
Mitford approached the task with characteristic gusto. As she had done in Needles and St. Louis, she kept a careful tally of how the pro-McGee arguments were received:
Hostile (we don’t want outsiders, etc.): 12
Listened to us but wouldn’t discuss their own opinion: 8
Convinced of McGee’s guilt, but willing to listen: 7
At first convinced of his guilt, but changed mind on the basis of our discussion: 5
Convinced of his innocence, but made no commitment to act: 7
Pledged action, talk to neighbors, write Truman, Gov. Wright: 4
Mitford also collected anecdotes that she used in her reports and, years later, her book. A female teacher visiting Jackson for a convention told her, “I’ve always been skeptical about this rape business. I’m convinced it is almost impossible to rape a woman if she really doesn’t want it.” Another woman claimed it was widely known that the CRC people who were injured in 1950 had beaten themselves up with a lamp. An anonymous woman told her, “I lived for many years in Laurel, and still have friends there. It is common talk in Laurel about this relationship between Mrs. Hawkins and Willie McGee.”
In her newspaper stories and in A Fine Old Conflict, Mitford attributed the anecdote to the director of the YWCA, who was not named, but who was described as a narrow-minded Southerner. As Mitford told it, she kicked the White Women out of the Y once she realized what they were up to.
Mitford may have taken some literary license with this character: The Y’s director at that time was a Canadian named Jean MacGillivray, who was born on Prince Edward Island, and whose parents were immigrants from Scotland. Mitford’s “Director” uses the word “N
igras” and talks about traveling to Laurel frequently, where old friends told her it was common knowledge that the relationship between McGee and Mrs. Hawkins “had been the talk of the town for years.” This point matters because, for all the door-knocking Mitford did, “the Director” is the only person she found who said anything concrete about the affair.
In the end, the bare-legged women did their job and made a statement, but their overall results symbolized the hopelessness of changing McGee’s fate by knocking on doors. One day, Mitford and company walked into the office of Dr. W. D. Hudgins, pastor of the huge First Baptist Church in downtown Jackson, an important establishment bastion. His response didn’t show up on her tally sheet, but it was memorable all the same. “Hudgins,” Mitford said, “screamed and ranted at us to get out of the state.”
What did it all add up to? Nothing you could easily calibrate, but the grassroots activity came to something. As the FBI file on the McGee case shows, CRC chapters all over the United States and its territories—from Philadelphia to South Bend to Denver to Portland to Honolulu—were meeting about McGee during these months, taking small actions that got people thinking and talking. Nationally, the CRC organized a protest vigil in Washington and extensive speaking tours by Rosalee. In March, April, and May, she appeared in several cities, including New York, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.
When McGee faced execution in July 1950, one measure of his support was the flood of letters and telegrams sent to Governor Wright. Something similar happened again. On March 15, the day that Supreme Court justice Hugo Black heard stay-of-execution arguments from Abzug, Coe, and Vito Marcantonio, he took the unusual step of publicly berating the American people for sending him so many messages about McGee. He had gotten a five-inch stack of telegrams and letters, and he wanted it understood that he didn’t make decisions based on emotional pleas. “I am not compelled to read these and have not and will not,” he said. “It is a very bad practice. There is no defense for it except ignorance on the part of the people who did it.”
Like Justice Burton, Black kept much of the correspondence, and it’s hard to believe he didn’t read some of it. One letter came from Newton, Mississippi—J. M. Caddell’s old hometown—and it was written by a white out-of-state doctor named Walter D. Jensen, who was there doing federal tuberculosis-eradication work. Dr. Jensen thought McGee was probably guilty and deserved prison time, but not death. He reminded Black that “no white rapist was ever executed in Mississippi” and then walked him through details of a little-reported 1949 case in Houston, Mississippi.
“On the 2nd of July, 1949, a drunken trio, two men and a soldier on leave…drove out of town and on a narrow country road caught up with a negro family in a lumber wagon, a man and wife and four children,” he wrote. “The negro stopped to let the car pass as the road was very narrow…. One of the men got out of the car, and went over and crushed the negro’s head with a bumper jack. All they got for that was a supposedly life sentence. They will be out in three or four years….
“I believe in equal justice for all, but Southern justice is mighty hard to swallow. I am sending this letter via Baltimore, through a nephew, for fear that it might be intercepted. Please do not divulge my name.”
Black’s file also contains newspaper clippings about McGee from the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan. Somebody mailed them as an example of how debate about the case had taken hold at a typical campus, far from Mississippi. The Daily covered McGee, or printed letters about him, more than a dozen times in March, April, and May. A campus-based Ad Hoc Student Committee to Save Willie McGee was created in early March to persuade students to send cards and letters to “Washington and Mississippi officials.” Rosalee spoke in Ann Arbor that month, at an event the Daily described as a “stormy rally.” Typical of the divide on many campuses, young progressives squared off against young Republicans, arguing about the merits of the case and the demerits of McGee’s Communist defenders.
“[Mark] Sandground accuses the people on campus who are sponsoring the movement to stop the execution of Willy McGee of being ‘agitators, rabble-rousers, and plain Communists who are trying to destroy our freedom,’” two students wrote that month. “Why must everyone who believes in sticking up for the underdog be labeled a Communist?”
Unlike Burton, Black didn’t leave behind any notes about his decision-making process, but the result was the same: He decided to stop the wheels of execution and take one more look. He ordered a stay on March 15.
Sullens was furious, calling Black a bad lawyer and worse judge in an editorial titled “Justice Again Ravished.” Mathew Bernato, a private investigator from Philadelphia, wrote Black directly, saying that McGee was “a three time loser on previous appeals to the Supreme Court.” Despite this fact, he said, Black gave in to the very pressure he said he would ignore.
As they had done in 1950, supporters of the stay seemed to think Black’s move was a vote of confidence in McGee. “[T]he Civil Rights Congress claims to have new and most important evidence,” Howard Selsam, a resident of New York, wrote in a letter to Black. “…Is there to be no way in which this evidence can be examined? Are the authorities of Mississippi to be allowed to send McGee to death simply because they want to and do not want to examine any new evidence that might prove his innocence?”
Selsam should have known from high-school civics that the Supreme Court didn’t conduct trials. The same can’t be said of Michael B. Creed, whose handwritten note read, “Mr. Justice Black: Thank you for saving Mr. Willie McGee. I hope he can soon go home to his wife + four children.” Michael was eight and a half.
In 1950 and early 1951, nearly six months passed between Burton’s stay and the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear McGee’s appeal. This time, the process took only eleven days. After hearing arguments on March 20, the Court discussed the case in conference, aided by two clerk memos—one leaning toward taking the case, one leaning against. John G. Burnett, William O. Douglas’s clerk, told the justices that “the main question is whether petitioner, through his affidavits, has made out a sufficient case on the charge of knowing use of perjured testimony to warrant a full hearing” by a U.S. District Court. He reviewed the facts and the new evidence: the affidavits from Willie, Rosalee, and Hettie Johnson.
Johnson’s story didn’t sway him. Apparently unaware that Johnson said she fled Laurel after being threatened, he indicated that the defense should have called her when it had the chance. He was more interested in the allegations made by Rosalee and Willie, which, to his mind, were detailed enough to be compelling, but also to raise a question: Why hadn’t the defense found other witnesses to back up their stories?
“The prosecutrix and her husband both testified they had never seen petitioner prior to the alleged rape,” he wrote. “If this was perjury as petitioner claims, it would not seem difficult to establish…. There should be some record to show that petitioner and the husband worked together. Since petitioner has very active counsel, it is difficult to understand the failure to produce such evidence.”
Writing for Chief Justice Vinson, Murray L. Schwartz saw the issues the same way, but the stakes now gave him pause. “One of the difficulties with this case is that it has to deal with highly improbable alternatives,” he wrote. The prosecution’s version of events had convinced three juries, but it bothered Murray that “[t]he husband and two other children” slept through McGee’s break-in and forcible rape.
“On the other hand, it is petitioner’s theory that because he had had intercourse with the prosecutrix on other occasions, she made up this rape story to get even with him,” he wrote. “But it seems most improbable that she would have picked the night and hour she did, without knowing definitely that he would not be able to show an alibi….
“The disposition of the case is not assisted by the many times it has traversed the courts,” he concluded. “Neither is it helped by the facts that the only affidavits o
n the perjured testimony point are by petitioner and his wife, the most interested parties for his continued living. But this is a capital case, and it would seem that there is merit to petitioner’s argument that he is entitled to a full hearing.”
The Court didn’t agree: On the 26th, it denied certiorari for the fourth time. This didn’t mean that McGee’s supporters were giving up. April would see new court actions, marching in the streets, and a rising level of clamor about McGee that, more and more, began to spread internationally. But the situation was becoming bleaker by the day. Barring a miracle, Willie McGee was going to die.
thirteen
SORROW NIGHT
I went to Laurel again on Election Day 2007, with a friend I’d made during my visits to Mississippi: a retired judge named W. O. “Chet” Dillard, whom I’d met through Ed King, the civil rights veteran who shared a house with Todd Pyles.
Judge Dillard, who lived in Jackson, was a funny, energetic, old-school gentleman who was generous with his time and knowledge, which was drawn from an amazing stock of life experiences. Born in 1930, he’d grown up in a dirt-poor white family that was driven to the brink by the Depression. In Clearburning, a book he wrote in 1992 that combines his life story with commentary about civil rights episodes from the 1960s, he recalled how, at age three, he and two older brothers were sent off to a Baptist orphanage because his father was broke, his mother was seriously ill, and his parents’ only choice was to give up the smallest children or watch them starve.
