by Alex Heard
President Truman, like every major official who got near the case, received thousands of letters and telegrams, which his staff summarized for him in long daily lists of names and organizations that often began, “The following writers ask for clemency for Willie McGee.” On May 2, he was sent an “open letter” signed by ninety-one prominent people, including Uta Hagen, Oscar Hammerstein, Garson Kanin, Norman Mailer, Wallace Stegner, and Sam Wanamaker. May 8 was Truman’s birthday, and somebody had cards printed up to remind him of this, which said, “Save this Man, Willie McGee, Mr. President, for a Happier Birthday for You and a Happier America for all.”
Frequently, the letters had to be translated, because they were from Europe or Asia. The State Department forwarded this one:
KONING, Miss Annemarie
Voorstraat 27
Delft, The Netherlands
Letter to the President, dated 2/18/51, written in Dutch.
Translator’s Summary of Communication
The writer, a nine-year-old girl, thinks it terrible that the President wants to kill Willy McGee, and she asks that he be released at once. He didn’t do anything, and anyone who says he did is lying.
Another was sent by “114 members of the Free German Youth of the District Youth School of Königstein,” who demanded that Truman stop and study the facts in “the coming execution of the young American Negro Willie McGhee of Mississippi, who is to be killed this month. He could never have committed the crime he is accused of, since he was proved to have been 45 kilometers away from the scene of the crime when it was committed.”
Interest remained especially high in France, where left-wing and Communist papers like Combat and L’Humanité kept the case in the news every day, and where the execution was front-page fare all over the country. “[T]he scope of the sentiment against racism is indicated by the kinds of letters and protests in response to Combat’s appeal,” a Daily Worker correspondent reported from Paris. “One comes from the secretary general of an independent union of editorial workers; another from 96 students of the young women’s junior college in Paris; a third from a group of artists; a fourth from a dozen people in a hospital of the Paris suburb of Garches.”
Everybody knew that China and the Soviet Union were tuned in—periodically, Chinese officials sent telegrams or issued statements berating Truman or Wright. On the night of the execution, shortwave-radio operators in Europe and the United States picked up broadcasts from Moscow that blasted the American government for letting McGee die. “The Moscow announcers read the same piece of script at least once an hour from early evening up to 10 or later,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported. “Coupled with the pleas for McGee were bald statements that 15,000,000 Negroes in the United States are now living under a reign of terror because they have…taken the lead in supporting the peace aims of USSR and the ‘great Stalin.’”
McGee didn’t arrive in Laurel until shortly after 10:00. The drive shouldn’t have lasted that long, but his escorts once again took a roundabout route. They would have been wary of going all the way until they knew the execution wouldn’t be halted again. There were still legal appeals in play.
After Mize’s decision, Abzug’s colleague Mary Metlay Kaufman—a New York–based lawyer who had worked on the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg—asked a federal judge in New Orleans to grant a restraining order until, at their behest, he had reviewed the arguments they’d presented to Mize. He refused. In Washington, Vito Marcantonio placed a call to Presidential Assistant David K. Niles, asking him to persuade Truman to intervene, based on a lengthy clemency plea Abzug had submitted that day—written by her, but styled as if McGee were addressing the president directly. The document called on Truman to live up to the spirit of his 1947 Lincoln Memorial address, recognizing that a Southern court was incapable of giving McGee fair treatment in a case like this. McGee insisted that fear of mob violence had prevented him, for years, from telling the real story.
To charge as I did under oath, that there was actually no rape and that the prosecution knew it, that the complainant’s story was not the truth…that far from never having seen me in her life, as she testified, we knew each other intimately over a number of years, would have been beyond the power of someone like myself, imprisoned, terrorized by my jailers, and constantly under fear of lynching. My lawyers took the same attitude, making it plain that to interpose such a defense…would be out of the question in Mississippi, and they could not see their way clear to present it in open court.
Marcantonio was told that afternoon that the president wouldn’t step in, so the final pleas were aimed at the U.S. Supreme Court. Starting at 6:30, Marcantonio, along with lawyers James T. Wright and Ralph Powe, appealed in turn to William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Chief Justice Fred Vinson. At 10:25 p.m., Vinson announced that he wouldn’t take action, and that was that. There were no more legal options.
In Laurel, the crowd had reached capacity by 10 p.m. The Leader-Call, which published the highest estimate, thought there were as many as 1,500 people on the scene. The west side of the building, on Fifth Avenue, was jammed with parked cars. The courtroom, where the electric chair was set up in late afternoon by state engineer John Laird and executioner C. W. Watson, was off limits to everyone but roughly five dozen officials, spectators, and reporters—all male—who would be allowed to witness the electrocution. Troy Hawkins arrived at around 11:00 and took a seat four rows back in the benches, accompanied by Mrs. Hawkins’s brother and two of her brothers-in-law. Mrs. Hawkins and her children were probably out of town, but that’s unclear. She had been in Jackson that day for the federal court hearing, but she didn’t return to Laurel. According to her daughters, the four of them stayed with a family friend in Birmingham that night.
Neither Rosalee McGee nor Bella Abzug was in Laurel. Rosalee was still in Detroit. Abzug stayed in Jackson with Ernest Goodman, a colleague from the Detroit CRC who had flown in to take the place of John Coe. According to Goodman, who talked about his brief involvement in the case in an oral-history interview, as midnight approached he and Abzug walked together from their hotel to the governor’s mansion, having arranged to speak with Wright one last time.
“We went in the side way,” he said, “and there we were met by a uniformed butler, black man, of course. We were escorted into the living room, and there in one part of it was a card table. And two couples were sitting there playing bridge. One of them was the governor and his wife and the other was the Attorney General and his wife. And they were waiting for us.”
Abzug made her plea, but, inevitably, Wright said no. “Did you ever make an argument to a metal statue of a human being?” Goodman said. “One, however, who was a Mississippi governor, and gracious, lovely, pleasant, and polite? That’s what it was like.”
One of the photographs from that night shows a portion of the crowd outside the courthouse, looking up in unison. There is no indication of when the picture was taken, but it had to have been before the execution, since the faces still looked expectant. There were smiles and grins all around. More men than women were there—by about 7 to 1—and the men were dressed the way they would for a Saturday night, not a Sunday morning: casual shirts, sports jackets, caps, and hats.
From where these people stood, they wouldn’t have been able to see into the courtroom. They were just looking for signs that something was happening, and for that the south side was the best place to be. From there they could see the generator truck, which was parked on a driveway between the jail and courthouse, the second-floor catwalk, and the balcony and south-facing windows.
The old newspaper stories don’t agree on how McGee was transferred from the highway patrol vehicle to the jailhouse, but it appears that the authorities used a decoy. Wayne Valentine Jr.—the son of onetime Police Chief Wayne Valentine, who was nineteen at the time and who later became a highway patrolman—told me that lawmen dressed him up like a prisoner, drove to the Yates Street jail entrance, and hustled him inside. If that’s true, it fooled
Bill Minor’s colleague on the Times-Picayune, Robert Peters, who reported that the vehicle holding McGee stopped in front of the jail and unloaded him there.
I think the Laurel Leader-Call probably had it right. Its lead story said McGee was “hurried through the north door of the courthouse” by a group that included Brogan, Tillman, Oalman, and Jack Anderson. They hustled him up the stairs, through the courtroom and past the electric chair, and through the catwalk and into his cell. He would remain there for nearly two hours, talking to a preacher, smoking a cigar, writing last letters to his mother and Rosalee, and getting his hair clipped. With McGee locked in, an officer informed the south-side crowd that everything would now move forward as planned, so they should settle down and behave. “We have waited a long time for this,” he said. “You have been patient. We want no demonstration. Let’s everybody be nice.”
The radio broadcast originated from Hattiesburg station WFOR, which sent over a crew with a portable transmitter powered by a car battery. The on-air voices were Granville Walters, the station manager and a Mississippian, and Jack Dix, a newsman originally from Minnesota. At around a quarter to twelve, Dix started setting the scene.
“I’m sure that you have heard over both radio stations, WFOR and WAML, that all channels open to Willie McGee to save his life have now been exhausted, and the execution is to take place here this evening,” he said. “As far as the crowd is concerned, I think the only thing we can say is that there are many, many people here, milling around the courthouse. Naturally, many rumors have gone around. The Life photographer is now climbing up on top of the truck. There are two of them here tonight, and one of them is now climbing up on this big, silver-bodied truck. He’s set his camera up there. And now he is following his camera up here, and that’s where he is going to sit.”
Looking for signs, they paid close attention to three things: the catwalk, various men whom they could see moving around near second-floor windows, and the truck itself. “There’s no activity around the truck yet,” Dix said. “Naturally, when we hear the motors of the generator of this truck kick off, you’ll know that the electrocution is very near indeed.” He said that the catwalk, with its “bars and grill-work…looks for all the world like one of the entranceways that a circus uses to get lions from…their cages into the arena.”
Walters took a turn, noting that light and shadows coming through the barred windows of the jail were casting huge images on the east side of the courthouse. “And it certainly presents a very eerie appearance,” he said, “when you look over the two-story wall there with the jail bars, the window bars, outlined clearly all up and down the courthouse wall.” He also touched on the intense interest in the case (“This event tonight has really, as you well know, created nationwide attention”); his glimpses of people he couldn’t identify (“There has also been some gentleman up there, a reporter probably, possibly an A.P. or U.P. man, who has been very busy at the telephone….”); and the whereabouts of McGee.
“Time is rapidly running out for Willie McGee,” he said. “And down here, right below us, they are opening the truck, getting it all set, ready to turn it on, so that the juice will be funneled up through these cables that are running from the truck to the chair, and will of course provide the power that will give Willie McGee the execution.”
At this point, for the first time, you can hear the generator, which comes through as a steady thrum of white noise. “Those of you who are listening, I could hear the motor of the truck,” Dix said. “…Let’s put our microphone over the rail just a moment and see if you can pick that up. Jim, if you’re listening, you might jack our gain up a little bit.”
As news accounts of that night make clear, McGee died with dignity, though the Jackson Daily News was stingy with its wording, saying McGee walked to his death “[a]lmost bravely, almost defiantly.” At around 11:30, a local black barber, Alex Spencer, showed up to cut his hair and shave his head at the base of the skull. McGee gave 55 cents to Reverend T. W. Patterson, a black Laurel preacher who stayed with him to the end, and left $7.25 for his mother. He smoked while the barber worked, and at one point announced, “I got all my business fixed. I’m not worried at all. Willie is ready to go.”
They took him over just after midnight, with Patterson reading the Twenty-third Psalm before they left the cell. Outside, Dix had just marked the time—“It’s now straight up of twelve o’clock”—when, after about forty-five seconds, he saw a moving mass of people. “I believe that is McGee going in now, there can be no doubt of that,” he said. “Because there was a party of perhaps—oh, shucks, there must have been at least a dozen people that passed through that passageway, and they’re still going. The county attorney has left the window, the man is still at the telephone, no lights at all on that party as they came through there. So we assume now that it will be just a moment until his execution takes place.”
The final preparations went fast. The Leader-Call said McGee “took his death seat without being urged or aided and remained calm as attendants fastened leather straps around his abdomen, ankles, and wrists.” He didn’t make any last-second statements and apparently said only one thing: “Is the Reverend Patterson here?” He was, but McGee couldn’t see him while the men strapped him in. “McGee appeared interested in the fastening of the large leather straps to his body, wrists, and ankles,” the story said. “His wide eyes flashed several times as he watched the officers go about their grim business.”
He was wearing a short-sleeved green shirt, blue trousers, yellow socks, and bedroom slippers. Attendants removed the slippers and placed them on the floor as they adjusted the leg straps. Then, the Leader-Call reported, the executioner put a “metal skull-shaped electrode to McGee’s head and strapped a wide leather band across his face, covering the eyes, but leaving openings for his nose and mouth.”
The first shock, 2,500 volts, was applied at 12:05, only three minutes after McGee was brought in. His hands formed fists as the charge went through him for half a minute. The executioner applied a second jolt, but McGee was probably gone by then. “Twice, yeah,” Bill Minor recalled. “And I just have a vague memory that you could smell the odor of scorched flesh, of burnt flesh, in that courtroom.”
Two local physicians checked McGee’s chest and pronounced him dead at 12:10. He was left there for another fifteen minutes before he was put on a gurney, covered, taken downstairs and through the crowd outside, and placed in a hearse that took him to the funeral home of Pete Christian. “Hundreds lined the sidewalk leading to the south door of the courthouse, as McGee’s body, covered with a white sheet, was rolled to a waiting hearse,” the Leader-Call said. The hearse rolled away, and that was the end. With nothing left to see, the crowd dispersed within minutes.
In Jackson, Abzug said she got the news from a caller at the courthouse who held up a phone, allowing her to hear what she called “the blood-curdling cries” of the spectators. “And then…I cried too,” she said. “I cried at the notion of the human degradation that could kill a man because of his color, because that’s what it was.”
Goodman was with her, at a pay phone, and he remembered it the same way. “[W]e had arranged to call a newspaper reporter there…. And just as we got him on the phone, we heard the rebel yell, the rebel yell of victory, just so loud we couldn’t hear him talking. They had just turned the switch. They’d won another battle…. We left immediately.”
After that, everything else was reaction: Fred Sullens gloating, Paul Robeson predicting the decline and fall of the Western world. Two of the more eloquent statements came from Josephine Baker and McGee himself, whose last letter was cleaned up grammatically by a CRC editor and then sent off to newspapers.
Baker was performing that week at the Fox Theater in Detroit. She paid for Rosalee McGee’s plane ticket back to the South—she went to New Orleans—and she also wired money for McGee’s burial expenses. Prior to one of her performances, she took a minute to talk to the audience about McGee.
“Today
is a tragic one for all American negroes and darker peoples of the world,” she said. “The execution of William McGee does not stop with just the death of McGee. It means a part of every American negro died a little with him.”
Two weeks later, when Life published its story on the case, it had two compelling photographic portraits to choose from. In one, McGee was hanging his head, looking thoroughly defeated. In the other, he was staring straight into the camera, showing a face that was calm, self-assured, even defiant. Life ran the first picture, but the second one was more in tune with the spirit of McGee’s final letter.
“Dear Rosalee,” he said. “They are planning here to kill me and I dont no if you and the people will be able to save me. if I have to die I want you to say goodbye to my mother and the children and all the people who no it is wrong to kill a man because of his color.
“You no I am innocent. tell the people again and again I never did commit this crime. tell them that the real reason they are going to take my life is to Keep the Negro down in the south. they cant do this if you and the children keep on fighting. never forget to tell them why they killed their Daddy.
“I no you won’t fail me,” he concluded, “tell the people to Keep on fighting.”
epilogue
