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

by Alex Heard

  Quickly, the officers took him down the elevator and into a waiting vehicle. “As the car pulled away,” the story said, “McGee slumped between two officers on the back seat, holding tight to a cardboard box of personal belongings.”

  For Dillard and me, the first stop in Jones County was the Laurel Country Club, where we’d arranged to meet William Deavours for lunch. Deavours, who was in his late seventies, was the son of Jack Deavours, the prosecutor who worked with Paul Swartzfager Sr. during the third McGee trial. A friend of Dillard’s was going to be there too—a local businessman who asked that I not use his name, so I’ll call him Warren Tabor.

  The club was almost deserted, smelling of cleanser and old wood, and we wandered around randomly until we found the men alone in a side dining room, a silent space with a plush, leaf-print rug. Deavours, a balding, clear-eyed man, was dressed in tan slacks and a blue plaid shirt. Tabor had plenty of hair left, thick limbs, and a cheerful, slightly weary-looking face. He was more of a talker.

  It was generous of Deavours to agree to the lunch. I figured he didn’t want to be here; like many people affiliated with the prosecution side, he tended to assume that discussions of McGee couldn’t lead to anything good. Still, I was disappointed when he said he didn’t know much. Deavours was twenty-one and serving in the navy when the execution took place, and he said he hadn’t ever discussed it at length with his father.

  “Was your dad hired by somebody to help on the case?” I asked at one point.

  “I don’t know how the connection came about,” he said genially.

  “Do you remember, at the time, if you were aware of the claim that there had been a love affair between McGee and the woman?”

  “I never even heard that.”

  “The whole time? Had you heard of it before I mentioned it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did your father ever talk to you about the case?”

  “Sometimes it would come up in the course of a conversation. But as far as discussion of it from start to finish? I don’t think he ever did, not with me.”

  I pulled out a picture of the Lincoln Memorial protesters. Deavours said he had no idea the case had caused so much commotion up north, nor did he care. “If they’d done that around here,” he said, “everybody would have had a good laugh over it.”

  Dillard threw out a lifeline, recalling where he was the night of the execution—something I’d forgotten to ask him. He was a student at Southern that year, a member of the Pike fraternity, and he was hanging around with some frat brothers who debated whether they should drive up to Laurel and catch the scene at the courthouse.

  “Back in those days, you know, it was public,” he said. “But they got to checking, and they said the crowds was such that you couldn’t get close to the courthouse. So we laid up there and…somebody broadcast the whole thing on the radio. So we laid up there and listened to it like a soap opera, you know.”

  “I was there,” Tabor said suddenly. “What impressed me was that big old generator producing the power that run the electric chair.”

  “They had a mobile electric chair, didn’t they?” Deavours said.

  “That traveled?”

  Tabor didn’t hear him, so he went on: “And I stood over there in the yard of city hall, across the street from the courthouse, listening to that big generator. ’Course, I was more interested in the crowd than anything else, just to see who was there. Some folks I was amazed to see there, and some I expected to be.”

  Later, I asked if it was an interesting thing to have witnessed. “I wouldn’t call it that,” he said very seriously. “I was somewhat ashamed of being there. When I grew up, my dad did his best to have me in the right spot, and I would have debated whether or not he thought that was the proper place to spend any time. I was there with a lot of misgivings.

  “But it was public property,” he concluded somberly, “and I had every business being there standing if I wanted to.”

  The men remembered it right: The execution was broadcast live, and there was a “traveling” electric chair in use. In 1940, the Mississippi legislature changed the way executions were handled. Up until then, prisoners were hanged in the county where they’d been convicted. The new legislation codified the switch to electrocution, maintaining the tradition of holding executions in counties rather than at the state pen at Parchman. To that end, Mississippi commissioned a Memphis company called TriStates Armature & Electrical Works to build a portable chair.

  It was used the first time in October 1940, in the south Mississippi town of Lucedale, to execute an African-American man named Willie Mae Bragg, who had been convicted of murder. The Clarion-Ledger ran a picture of Bragg as the current took his life. “At the extreme right are the hands of Executioner Jimmy Thompson at the switch,” read a caption. “Note Bragg’s hands gripping the chair and his neck bulging in death’s throes.”

  The old chair, minus some of its straps and hardware, is now on display in the lobby of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers’ Training Academy, a facility ten miles southeast of Jackson. It’s a surprisingly simple-looking thing with a flat seat bottom, an upright plank on the backrest, and a notched brace where the backs of a prisoner’s calves would fit. What’s left of the skull-piece electrode sits on an armrest, a combination of padding and wire cable shaped into a crude circle.

  Tabor wasn’t inside to see the death scene. Like most people, he was outside with a crowd of spectators whose numbers I’ve seen estimated at anywhere from 500 to 1,500. Everybody was white and most were adults, but not all. Some people brought their children, and some kids just pedaled in on their bikes. At least one boy climbed a tree for a better look. Most people stood around, but some thought ahead and brought lawn chairs. Bill Minor, a longtime Southern newsman who covered the execution for the New Orleans Time-Picayune, told me he remembered being struck by the festive mood he saw outside before going in. “There were children present—it was like a circus atmosphere,” he said. “Somebody was selling cold drinks, even.”

  The crowd clustered between the courthouse’s south entrance and city hall, which was across a short street called Yates. The jail was east of the courthouse. In those days, the jail’s second floor was connected to the same floor of the courthouse by an enclosed, barred catwalk on the north side of both buildings. When the time came for McGee’s last walk, it involved a trip through the catwalk to the courtroom, where the chair was set up. One reporter referred to it as a “bridge of sighs,” a phrase Lord Byron made famous in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which referenced the enclosed Venetian bridge that connected the Palace of the Doges, where sentences were passed, to the prison where executions took place.

  Tabor made a sketch showing me what was where. While he did that, Deavours and Dillard talked about the old jail, which was no longer in use. Deavours recalled that it contained a built-in gallows. “When they built that jail next to the courthouse,” he said, “all the cells were on the second floor, and as you went up the stairs, you looked up overhead—”

  “There was a trap door,” Dillard said, nodding.

  “Nope,” he said. “Well, yeah. But there was a big ring in the ceiling up there where the rope went.” Deavours once gave a tour of the courthouse to his middle daughter’s Girl Scout troop, which included a quick duck into the jail entrance for a look at the hangman’s loop. At the end of the tour, he asked the kids if they had any questions. A girl raised her hand. “Mr. Deavours,” she said, “did they ever have any big-time criminals here, like Communists?”

  Before long, we got back to McGee. Deavours, Tabor, and Dillard all agreed that, despite the criticisms of Mississippi justice, the system had worked well. Tabor said, “When you have men like John Stennis and J. P. Coleman and Burkitt Collins and the others handling the situation—including Paul Swartzfager, for that matter—you know the average citizen felt like they’d handled that thing all right. And they went on with their work. I mean, it just wasn’t something that
was daily talk around here.”

  “When it was over with, as far as people around here were concerned, it was over,” Deavours said.

  Soon the lunch ended, and I got in the car with Dillard. He needed to go by a local bookstore to see about placing a few copies of a new book he’d written, so we took care of that first. The woman who ran the shop perked up when Dillard told her I was researching the McGee case. She said her parents knew the Hawkinses and had taken her to the courthouse on execution night, when she was twelve or so. I asked if she’d ever heard the love-affair story.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said quickly. “I mean, I was aware of that as a child. I mean, that that was what they were trying to make it look like.” I told her many people treated the story as fact. She laughed. It wasn’t fact to her.

  Dillard and I made the short drive to the courthouse and jail. The catwalk was gone—a renovation years ago joined the structures with a blocky addition. Inside the jail, on the second floor, the old cells were intact, but they and seemingly ever other space were being used to hold records. The place smelled dusty and rusty, and there wasn’t much to see.

  We gave up, went back outside, and walked to the courthouse. Inside, a young white woman Dillard knew pulled out the keys and let us into the courtroom, which looked about like what I had expected: dim walls and heavy judicial furniture, darkly stained and varnished. The judge’s bench was against the east wall, with counsel tables and spectator benches lined up in front of it. The old balcony for blacks was gone, and the renovation had wiped out the windows and balcony on the south side, which is where the electric chair’s power lines had come through.

  Dillard had told the woman we were in town doing research about McGee, and as we stood there, she started asking questions.

  “Who represented him?” she said. We told her about the three trials and the various lawyers.

  “Nobody ever did a psychiatric evaluation on him either,” she suddenly declared. I started to tell her about the second trial and N. B. Bond, the psychologist, but she interrupted.

  “I still think she took advantage of that,” she said, “she” being Mrs. Hawkins. “I think she was just using him. They were seeing each other, I think, for sure. I think he was innocent. And just got caught. That’s just my opinion.”

  “Well, that’s the story that’s widely accepted,” I said noncommittally.

  “Because a lot of people knew. I mean, her friends knew, people that knew him knew it was going on. And when he got caught she screamed rape. That’s just what I’ll always believe. And I don’t believe his soul’s at peace, and I believe he still haunts this place. I don’t care what anybody says.”

  She wasn’t kidding about the ghost. A custodian told her she saw a shadow one night in a hallway; other people said they heard voices. For this woman, the really spooky thing was the elevator, whose second-floor door was positioned in the hallway just outside the courtroom. It was an old-timey unit, and to get it to work you had to be inside, pushing the buttons yourself. But sometimes, she said, it went up and down by itself, empty.

  She believed McGee’s spirit was in there, riding forever because it was restless. “I’ve heard too many stories about somebody’s soul not being at peace,” she said, “based on what happened at the death.”

  The Jackson arrests and the Lincoln Memorial vigil were the climax of McGee’s public support, but they weren’t all there was to it. Between the Supreme Court’s final refusal and McGee’s last night, the story transcended the facts of the crime, the trials, the alibis, and the appeals and assumed its final form as an American myth. Carl Rowan got it right when he wrote that McGee went from being a “nobody” to becoming a unique and complicated symbol—part victim, part Communist pawn, part mysterious tangle of disputed realities. Whatever he had or hadn’t done, Rowan said, his name would “live a long time—in the minds and consciences of honest people who feel that, guilty or not, he paid too much.”

  As always, the involvement of Communists crept into everything, and to people like Max Lerner, a liberal columnist for the New York Post, this aspect of the case was a deal breaker that prevented it from stirring “the national sense of injustice” in a way that had true mass appeal. The Scottsboro case had it, he wrote, but “the case of Willie McGee…seemed to have become the exclusive property of the Communists.”

  All the same, Lerner had sympathy for the man. “Willie McGee is—or was—a human being,” he wrote. “We would be wrong to erase him from our conscience only because the Daily Worker has written his name on every Communist banner. The Russian police-state has its own Willie McGees, millions of them, which is what makes the weeping of the American Communists such a mockery. But America cannot afford to judge the just and unjust by political tags.”

  Whether McGee’s story became as measurably “big” as Scottsboro, there’s no denying that it stirred people, and Lerner was wrong that it only captivated the far left. When you look at the acts of ordinary citizens who said and did something in those last weeks—through petitions, letters, poems, speeches, rallies, campus debates, and other tools of dissent—it’s obvious that the CRC continued to get through to Americans who had no interest in the Communist agenda.

  All over the United States—in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Phoenix, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, Washington, New York, and other cities—union members, Communists, progressives, liberal Democrats, students, and church groups marched and organized petition-and letter-writing drives. Some of these acts made headlines; some were barely noticed. In a way, the little gestures were more noteworthy than statements by people like Einstein, Faulkner, and Norman Mailer, because they came from anonymous people who had caught the fever of the moment and were acting from their hearts.

  In Oakland one day, a team of signature-gatherers was stationed in front of a Sears store when several clerks rushed out, saying, “Let me sign this thing!” After listening to a talk in Los Angeles by Juanita McGee—Willie McGee’s California-based sister-in-law—a man named Irving Oppenheim grew so angry that he dialed the governor’s mansion in Jackson and somehow got Fielding Wright on the line. He lit into him about sending an innocent man to his death on a phony rape charge.

  “Where’d you get your information?” Wright asked.

  “From the Civil Rights Congress.”

  “It’s a pack of lies,” Wright said. He and Oppenheim traded insults until Wright told him to “go to the devil” and hung up.

  A 500-person Times Square rally on April 1 was broken up by mounted police; six people were arrested, including a man named Harvey Bellet, who was charged with trying to kick a patrolman’s horse. That same day, Rosalee McGee spoke at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, vowing, “I’m going to keep fighting till my blood runs like water.” She kept busy throughout the final months, appearing in several cities, including Detroit, Denver, Memphis, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago. Her Detroit appearance in March was typical of the stops she made. Anne Shore, a CRC member there, told Patterson that she drew “[c]lose to 1,000 people, a wonderful program and a real demonstration of Negro white unity.”

  Unions kept things stirred up all through April, organizing events from New York to San Francisco. One of the largest marches happened on April 29 in Chicago, when thousands of CIO-affiliated packinghouse workers turned out for McGee. One was a man named John Polk Allen, a twenty-one-year-old union meatpacker who would become famous himself in the 1990s, when he was the driving force behind the controversial science experiment known as Biosphere 2. Recalling the march nearly fifty years later, Allen teared up as he tried to convey why Willie McGee had such resonance. “It was so outrageous and so different from the Martinsville Seven,” he said. “It was one individual, and you could look at his photograph…and you knew that a great wrong was being committed.”

  On April 30, in Phoenix, Vice President Alben Barkley encountered a picket line as he arrived at the local Jackson-Jefferson Day dinner. He ignor
ed everybody there—including a mother and her eight-year-old son who had traveled 115 miles from Tucson to hold up signs.

  Of course, not everybody was swept up. One of the ironies of McGee’s final weeks was that mainstream African-American newspapers, by and large, turned their backs on him because of the Communist involvement, even after the NAACP relented ever so slightly about McGee in the spring of 1951. In March, Walter White urged chapter members to write or wire Governor Wright and ask for clemency, though they were told to keep in mind that the NAACP was in no sense working with the CRC.

  Overall, papers such as the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier treated McGee like somebody else’s news. The Defender didn’t write about the execution at all until two weeks after it happened, when it published an editorial blasting both “the Communists and white supremacists” for “making a mockery out of democratic concepts which undergird our republic.”

  These papers’ silence was countered by steady mainstream attention—in the Times, Life, and so forth—along with wall-to-wall coverage in papers like the Daily Worker, New York Compass, Daily People’s World, and the Paul Robeson–affiliated publication Freedom, which ran a mid-April extra devoted to the case. Under a banner headline that read, YOU CAN SAVE MY DADDY! the front page featured a sketch of black children holding signs that said, “Pappa was electrocuted for ‘rape’” and “Don’t lynch our father.”

  The feedback from outside the United States was also impressive.

  Cables came in from Mexico City (Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and others wrote Truman, calling the sentence “monstrous”), the Soviet Union (Dimitri Shostakovich, Anton Chekhov’s widow, and others, who informed the supreme court of Mississippi that “mankind shall not forgive those guilty of this terrible infamy”), Ireland, England, and France. In early April, the Daily People’s World ran a photo of protesters in front of a London movie theater, holding up signs that said, WILLIE MCGEE MUST NOT DIE! Later that month, Mississippi lieutenant governor Sam Lumpkin complained about having to deal with pro-McGee letters and telegrams when Governor Wright was out of the state. “They must have an effective underground to keep up with what’s going on,” he said, mentioning one letter that came from “30 residents, 19 Cornwall Ardens, London.”