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

by Alex Heard

  Most of the family was back together by 1936, when Dillard’s father relocated to Pachuta—the area where Willie McGee’s people were from—to farm as a sharecropper. Dillard lived there through high school, and his family was so bedraggled that he had to endure regular humiliations in grade school.

  “My main memories of this time are of the real discrimination and total rejection of the Dillards,” he wrote, “…. since we were much poorer than anyone else in the community and were continuously harassed, insulted, and abused by adults and other children…. There were occasions when an adult, supposedly a friend of mine, would pull down my pants in public to show that I didn’t have any underwear.”

  Dillard made a lot of himself, graduating from Mississippi Southern in 1953, serving as a navy pilot, then earning a law degree from Ole Miss, and later becoming a district attorney in Laurel, the Mississippi commissioner of public safety, an assistant attorney general, and a chancery judge. When he was first setting up in Laurel in 1960, he was assigned to defend a black man named Willie Stokes, who was accused of murdering a white woman who ran a small store, stabbing her with a butcher knife. Dillard said there wasn’t much doubt that Stokes was guilty, so the best he could hope for was to save him from the death penalty. He pleaded for mercy, based on Stokes’s poor, rugged background and lack of education.

  It didn’t work. Stokes was executed in 1961 inside a gas chamber at Parchman, the state of Mississippi having retired its electric chair in 1955. For years, Dillard was haunted by a moment toward the end of the trial when Stokes—who was so frightened that he urinated on the floor in the courtroom one day, and who barely spoke to Dillard the entire time—asked him what he thought was going to happen. Dillard told him: No doubt about it, he was going to be found guilty and sentenced to death.

  “He thought a long time and finally asked what he could do,” Dillard wrote. “Searching my heart and soul, I told him I didn’t know of anything he could do except pray about it. I was astounded by his answer, which I remember clearly to this day. He said, ‘I don’t know how to pray.’ He continued, ‘I lay in my bunk tossing and turning all night in my cell trying, but no one has ever taught me how to pray, and I just don’t know how to do it or what to say.’”

  I met Dillard early in the morning at the Elite Café, a diner in downtown Jackson where he goes most days for breakfast with a group of retired judges, lawyers, and assorted cronies who make up what’s called the Weaver Gore Coffee Club.

  Those guys—including Gore himself, a white-haired attorney who is a well-known figure in Jackson legal circles—were in the back of the restaurant, which was long and narrow. I was up front in a green vinyl booth with Dillard, who was dressed in a brown, tweedy jacket, blue shirt, red tie, and a pin that said SALUTE ME I VOTED.

  Also present was Dorothy Hawkins, who had come to the city for the day but wouldn’t be going to Laurel. I’d invited her because I thought she’d want to hear Dillard’s opinion about the third McGee trial. Before coming to Mississippi, I’d sent him the transcript, asking him to make notes and tell me what he thought of the evidence.

  He thought McGee was clearly guilty. He mailed me seventeen pages of legal-pad notes explaining why, but the short version went like this: He was sufficiently convinced by the circumstantial evidence—and so unconvinced by McGee’s love-affair alibi—that he decided McGee made up the affair to save his neck. One page of notes contained a list called FACTORS CONTRA CONSENSUAL.

  Time—5:00 am is out of the question—especially since he had been out all night drinking and gambling.

  NO WAY with young child @ 2 yrs old in bed with her, two daughters in adjoining room with husband in the rear bedroom.

  All evidence indicates she was having her period and no consensual sex would be arranged at such a time.

  If consensual no such vulgar language would have been involved. Also in some location where they would not have been recognized.

  If consensual he would have claimed this in an effort to save his life.

  He entered and exited through a window; if consentual, would he not have entered through the door?

  When I looked at his list, I felt bewilderment, not clarity. The problem is, you can take most of those points and extract opposite conclusions from them. Consider the third one. Suppose Willette and Willie had arranged to meet in her bedroom that night. Now suppose Willette’s period hadn’t started when they’d set up the date, but that it did start just before he arrived. Could that have been why McGee reportedly told her, “You lied to me”?

  Though I no longer put any credence in the affair story—I couldn’t get past the huge discrepancies between the two versions McGee delivered—I was still unable to accept that the prosecution presented a case that proved his guilt beyond a doubt. To me, there wasn’t enough evidence, then or now, to be sure either way. But, obviously, I thought it was wrong that he died for the crime of rape, given the unequal sentencing practices of the time. On that score, there was no getting around the terrible unfairness of the sentencing, compared with the 1946 Laverne Yarbrough child-rape case.

  Before long, Dorothy had to take off, and Dillard and I had to climb into his car and head south, so we said our good-byes. On the way down, rolling along in his smooth-riding Cadillac through towns like Magee and Collins, I brought up yet another rumor you hear about Mrs. Hawkins: that she made a pass at, and possibly had an affair with, Paul Swartzfager.

  Dillard didn’t know anything about that, but he had trouble imagining Mrs. Hawkins engaging in an affair. “This woman only weighed ninety-two pounds,” he said. “You know, a woman that didn’t weigh but ninety-two pounds wouldn’t be very sexually attractive.”

  I said that photographs I’d seen made Mrs. Hawkins look almost anorexic. He nodded and said, “I don’t see how a ninety-two-pound woman could hardly have all those babies.”

  On Saturday, May 5, 1951, Abzug filed an appeal at the federal district court in Jackson, asking for an injunction against McGee’s execution on the grounds that Mississippi’s conduct amounted to a violation of his federally protected civil rights. Several hours before this, she and Coe had had an early morning meeting with Governor Wright inside his executive offices in the capitol, where they made a final plea for clemency. This meeting was the end of the line for Coe. In a letter to Abzug written before he went to Jackson for the hearing, he told her he had reserved the right to decide when “my duty was done” in the case. Now, he said apologetically, that time had come.

  Both appeals were long shots, since Wright and Sidney Mize, the federal judge who would hear Abzug’s plea on Monday, both seemed determined not to allow any more delays. From Abzug’s perspective, it didn’t help that the CRC had decided, once again, to organize a public protest to coincide with her efforts. The CRC didn’t have any choice—it was now or never for such gestures—but Abzug had to spend part of her day dealing with the consequences: the mass arrest of forty-two people, including a large group of out-of-state white women and a smaller group of black male union members from Memphis.

  “Without consultation with me…they sent down this delegation of…people, who immediately got arrested,” she recalled. “I was outraged by that, because at that point, who was going to get [McGee] out? I had to…and I had to interrupt what I was doing to call up the attorney general and say these people had a right to petition, they had a right of speech, and you had no right to arrest them.”

  During their meeting with Wright and other state officials, Abzug and Coe touched very gingerly on the affair claim—merely alluding to it as “testimony and evidence [that] has never been heard.” Instead they put more emphasis on their lingering doubts about McGee’s confession and the racial bias of Mississippi’s sentencing practices.

  “[L]arge numbers of the citizens of the Nation believe that Willie McGee is not deserving of the punishment which hangs over him,” they wrote. “Rightly or wrongly (and we submit rightly) they feel that if he were a white man, he would not be doomed t
o die.”

  Wright met every one of Abzug’s arguments with counterarguments, questioning the very premise of her plea. Was she asking for clemency because McGee was innocent, or because Mississippi’s sentencing for rape seemed unfairly applied?

  “We submit that there is some doubt,” she said, “and as long as there is doubt we believe there should be clemency.”

  “Why didn’t you take that same line when this case was painted to the world in…lies?” he said. Attorney General J. P. Coleman was aggressive too, asking why the defense had ignored the fact that the Hawkinses were living in another state during some of the years the affair supposedly took place. He also said that Masonite’s payroll records, which he said he’d had examined, contained no evidence that McGee worked there at the same time as Troy Hawkins.

  Coe tried a high-minded approach, telling Wright that he should avoid putting himself in the historical position of Pontius Pilate, which was exactly what would happen if he washed his hands and said, “‘The courts did it, not I.’”

  “When I make my decision, I’ll assume full responsibility,” Wright assured him brusquely.

  During the hearing, Laurel mayor Carroll Gartin read a statement demanding an end to the defense’s stalling tactics and its attacks on Mrs. Hawkins. “As though she has not already endured enough suffering at [McGee’s] bestial hands, his friends now try to cast a stench of dark suspicion about her,” he said. “The filth and foulness of such obscenity is a dastard insult to the name and honor of a Laurel wife and mother who…is fine and noble and pure.”

  When Wright announced his decision on Monday, he agreed: There would be no clemency.

  At around 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, just as this hearing was getting under way, roughly two dozen women gathered at a street corner in front of the capitol, dressed like they were going to play bridge. Jackson police arrived and told them to disperse, but nobody moved. The women’s leader was twenty-six-year-old Anne Braden, the Louisville-based leftist who had insulted Governor Wright by mail in the summer of 1950. Now, addressing a dozen highway patrolmen and police, she announced her group’s intent: “We’re going to the hearing.”

  “No you’re not,” said L. C. Hicks, chief of the highway patrol.

  “You’ll have to quit gathering…. We’ve had enough trouble with this case, and we’re not going to have any more.”

  After about ten minutes, the women were arrested—the charge was conspiracy to obstruct justice—and taken to the city jail. Separately, the cops started rounding up blacks, including a group of “well-dressed Negro men” who were seen standing in front of the Robert E. Lee hotel. In all, there were forty-two arrests of people who weren’t doing anything but assembling.

  Local and national newsmen headed to the jail to find out who they were, even though the police weren’t in the mood for a media scrum. Photographers from the Jackson Daily News and Life had their cameras confiscated temporarily, an action Fred Sullens raised hell about. The women were CRC members or sympathizers who had responded to another clarion call, and they had come from all over the United States—New York, New Jersey, Michigan, California, Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina, among other places—representing church groups, unions, and progressive organizations like the Bronx Women of Peace and the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs. Local reporters wrote about them as if they represented an exotic new species of female.

  “One of the most attractive women of the group identified herself as Miss Elaine Parun,” the Jackson Daily News reported. “…‘I represent the Greenwich Village (New York City) chapter of the Civil Rights Congress,’ she said. She looked ‘Bohemian,’ as the Village folks are commonly expected to look.”

  The hubbub continued for a few hours, while the women sang anti–Jim Crow songs and griped about the jail food, which included boiled turnip greens. “I can’t eat that slop,” one woman said. “Can we send out for something?” Abzug and Coe made a deal with officials: The women would plead not guilty and be released, with the understanding that they would leave the state immediately. The men were harassed and threatened, but nothing came of it—all of them left town safely, primarily by train.

  The weekend’s other big protest happened a thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C. On Sunday afternoon, McGee picketers, including William Patterson, marched back and forth in front of the White House. At the Lincoln Memorial, a mixed-race group of union members and war veterans—many of them Communists affiliated with the International Fur and Leather Workers Union—gathered for a larger demonstration and protest vigil. Three groups of a dozen or so men—all wearing white T-shirts that said FREE WILLIE MCGEE over their suits—chained themselves in a circle around the huge support columns at the top of the memorial’s steps. “Lincoln freed the slaves,” they chanted. “Truman free McGee.”

  The novelist Howard Fast, who was there, watched hundreds of people come by to take in the spectacle. “They stood there, and most of them left as they had come, in a curious silence that was threaded through with wonder and doubt,” he wrote later. “[O]nly one person, a soldier, asked why all this fuss over one life? Then we walked together into the shrine where Lincoln sits and the boy seemed confused and regretful over what he had said. Another visitor answered the young soldier: ‘Sometimes, one life becomes a symbol of a million lives.’”

  McGee was taken from the Hinds County jail around 6 p.m. on Saturday, for what was supposed to be his last trip to Laurel, but he didn’t make it all the way. News of Abzug’s civil rights appeal prompted Attorney General Coleman to have him brought back to Hinds County for safekeeping until the matter was resolved.

  Details of this aborted trip, reported in Jackson papers, made it obvious that law enforcement officials were worried about a last-minute lynching. The group accompanying McGee was a strong-arm contingent that included Jones County sheriff Steve Brogan; deputies George Oalman, A. R. Tillman, and Tony Parker; and highway patrolmen Bud Gray, Willis Obre, and J. C. Puckett. When they were called back to Hinds, they were in a small town called Raleigh, which was on a roundabout route to Laurel. They were avoiding obvious roads.

  That day, reporters and photographers had gotten a quick look at McGee before he was taken away. Clad in the blue shirt of his “pajama suit” and a pair of khaki pants, he responded good-naturedly to sarcasm from Brogan and Oalman. Brogan told McGee he was looking a little thinner than the last time he’d seen him.

  “Yessir, I ain’t been eating too good here,” McGee said. “The food just didn’t agree with me.”

  “I guess they didn’t feed you like we did the last time we had you in Laurel,” Brogan said. “That meal cost us nearly $4.”

  “We know how to feed you down in Laurel,” Oalman said. “You like ’taters and ’possum, don’t you, Willie?” McGee laughed and agreed that he did.

  At the same time, McGee served notice that he wasn’t going quietly. Asked if he had any additional statement to make, he said, “I ain’t got anything to say now, but I’ll have plenty to say later on. That is, if you’re there then.”

  During these final days, he started writing his last letters. In one dated May 3, he’d written to Rosalee, who was in Detroit, under the wing of its very active CRC branch. His usual optimism was starting to sound like resignation. “I love you with all my heart do believe me darline,” he wrote. “Oh yes honey give my regards to all and remember where ever you be [or] what ever come [or] go I shall always stand by you.”

  In a note written on Monday, May 7, he became fatalistic. “Dearest Wife: I no you have done everything there is to do and I apraciate you courage,” he wrote. “Don’t worrie honey take care of the children…. I am going away but don’t give up the fight you have started. I know you want. I am so glad to no I have some one that will stand by the children. Yours truly husband Willie McGee.”

  On Monday, while Judge Mize listened to Abzug’s arguments—which lasted from 1 to 7 p.m.—McGee spent a couple of hours with reporters, starting in mid-aft
ernoon, when Life photographer Robert W. Kelly was allowed time to shoot portraits. After that, McGee sat down in a rocking chair in a hallway of the jail, smoking and giving an unfiltered version of what he still said was the truth about Mrs. Hawkins.

  The Clarion-Ledger didn’t print McGee’s statement, which he’d prepared with advice from Abzug. The Jackson Daily News did—Sullens’s news sense apparently overrode his distaste for McGee’s comments. The paper later got sued for this by Mrs. Hawkins, in an action that was eventually dropped.

  In his statement, McGee reiterated the details of his February affidavit, saying that Mrs. Hawkins had lured him into an affair and then refused to let him out. “Taking my life doesn’t end such things as have been existing, will be existing till the end of the world,” he said. “There is a lot more things that causes me not to get a fair decision about this—solely because I am a Negro; this is a white woman….

  “A lot of folks, a lot of men, think they know a woman and don’t. They find it hard to believe that Mrs. Hawkins would just hold on and not let the truth be known.”

  Mize threw out the civil rights claim around 7 p.m. Even before he had ruled officially, McGee was en route to Laurel. Brogan took charge of him at 6:30; they were on the road within ten minutes.

  “McGee was visibly nervous but his disposition and speech was not affected,” the Clarion-Ledger reported. He’d gotten a telegram from Father Divine, a black evangelist based in New York, and he was quietly singing a hymn to himself called “Farther Along,” which begins, “Tempted and tried, we’re oft made to wonder, why it should be thus, all the day long.”