The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South
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The suit’s existence isn’t mentioned in any of the books that summarize the McGee case, but Willette persisted with it for years, and the Daily Worker, with help from the CRC, invested considerable resources to search for witnesses who could help prove she’d lied. The Daily Worker’s investigator, Spivak, never found any. The closest he came was during an interview with her pastor, the Reverend Grayson L. Tucker, who said, after prompting, that he believed it was true that McGee had worked in the Hawkinses’ neighborhood and that he knew Troy. But he also said he knew this only because he’d read it in the newspaper. He said he thought McGee committed the crime, calling him “a Negro who I think was just slightly mentally off, especially on the subject of passions.”
Spivak wasn’t the only person looking: CRC activists with the Detroit branch also tried to find several Detroit-area blacks, originally from Mississippi, who were believed to know something, but that quest came up empty. In the spring of 1952, during procedural back-and-forth about where depositions would be taken, defense lawyer David Freedman asked that Mrs. Hawkins be forced to come to New York for pretrial questioning. Only two people in the world could “bear witness” about the affair, he said: Willette and Willie McGee. McGee was dead, leaving her as “the only person who can be looked to for direct evidence on a crucial issue of the case.”
That was a strange argument, considering the old Daily Worker line that everybody in Laurel knew of the affair. Rosalee McGee wasn’t even mentioned. Somebody must have decided that she no longer qualified as an eyewitness to the events.
After long periods of inactivity, the case was settled out of court on May 5, 1955, with the Daily Worker agreeing to pay Mrs. Hawkins $5,000 and publish two retractions, admitting that their allegations against her were not proven. She traveled to New York to finalize the settlement, posing in front of the federal courthouse with her two New York lawyers. On that day, anyway, the years of pain and misery were forgotten: In the picture, she smiled like a newlywed.
McGee’s defense lawyers went on with their lives without hitting much of a bump: Pyles had a long, successful career; Breland migrated into business; and London went back to Hattiesburg and worked the quieter fields of real-estate law.
Bella Abzug became Bella Abzug, one of the best-known New York political figures of the 1960s and 1970s. When Luke Lampton interviewed her, she had nicer things to say about the Mississippi lawyers she’d worked with, including London and Poole. “Both those guys worked very hard,” she said. But the man she admired most was her appeals partner, John Coe. After the case ended, he wrote her to apologize for quitting at the end. In a letter written in June, she more than forgave him.
“I want you to understand that one of the most constructive experiences that came out of the many relationships and facets of the McGee case was my association with you,” she wrote. “You must know that your ability, courage and strength can only be likened to an oasis in a desert. Everything that you are in view of your entire background…stands out as a might[y] example and symbol of truth and honesty at a time when so little of that kind of thing prevails either North or South, West or East. For me as a young person…my contact with you was a rich thing from which I gained much inspiration and courage. As you know, what I lack in eloquence, I make up for in directness, and if my words do not flow smoothly, I think you can feel the heart in them.”
As for John Poole, he did pay a price. His reward for doing his job honestly was disbarment in the state of Mississippi, a process in which, according to Dixon Pyles, Fred Sullens may have had a hand. Before pressing his libel case in Jackson, Poole tried to sue in Delaware, where the Jackson Daily News’s parent company was incorporated. That suit died, Pyles said, because Sullens’s lawyers were able to block it on the grounds of forum non conveniens, that is, the lack of a convenient forum.
“As a result of the threat,” he said, “Fred Sullens hired an investigator and looked into John Poole’s background. John Poole was a very able young lawyer. But they found that some of the funds in a small estate which he was handling…were not accounted for, so he was promptly disbarred. But about a year later we managed to get him reinstated.”
Pyles’s timetable was a little off, but the basics were right. Poole’s practice had collapsed as a direct result of the McGee case—he even lost his home—and it came out that he’d been convicted of assault in a fight that occurred not long before his libel trial in the summer of 1950. Poole also sometimes held on to small amounts of cash that clients had given him to pay fines, probably using the money as a temporary way to pay family expenses. He voluntarily withdrew from practicing law in March 1953, relocating to Texas for a period of rehabilitation, which he described to the Chancery Court of Hinds County when he faced disbarment proceedings the next year.
“There, respondent quit the drinking of intoxicants, worked very hard, attended church regularly, was attentive to his family…and revamped his philosophy of life,” his statement said. He was shown no mercy in the short term: He was disbarred in May 1954.
With help from Pyles and other Jackson lawyers, Poole was reinstated and practicing again by 1956. He had a long career in Jackson after that, building a reputation as a top-notch defense lawyer and earning newspaper coverage a few times as a result of yet another of his competitive skills: chess. Poole was an excellent amateur player, winning city and state titles in the 1960s. In 1965, in the town of Magnolia, he played fifteen boards at once during an exhibition, winning thirteen and tying two.
Unfortunately, Poole had a bad habit he never kicked. He was a pack-a-day smoker and eventually developed lung cancer. On November 13, 1980, weary of the pain and hoping to spare his family needless expense, he wrote a letter to his wife and daughters, telling them he loved them and apologizing for what he was about to do. And with that, Smiling Johnny went out his own way, holding a pistol to his head and sending himself into a long and merciful sleep.
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Interviews and Correspondence
Liz Abzug
John Polk Allen
Steve Babson
Ralph Boston
William S. Boyd III
Leslie Brody
Susan Brownmiller
Margaret A. Burnham
W. D. Coleman
Margaret L. Cooley
Bertha Mae Crowell
Jerry Dallas
William Deavours
Gus DeLoach
W. O. “Chet” Dillard
Jack Dix
Carolyn Poole Ellis
Katharine Carr Esters
Buddy Evers
Winifred Feise
William C. Gartin Jr.
Jack Gordy
Danny Grossman
Jesse James Harris
Ann Hawkins
Dorothy Hawkins
Sandra Hawkins
David Horowitz
Maurice Isserman
Leroy Jensen
Paul B. Johnson III
Zeb Jones
Cleaven Jordan
Ed King
Jim Leeson
Ann and Mitch Liberman
Evelyn Smith McDowell
Della McGee
Tracey McGee
Bridgette McGee
Robinson
Lawrence McGurty
Gerald Meyer
Donna Poole Mills
Bill Minor
Chester M. Morgan
Mary Mostert
Steve Ordower
Emmett Owens
Cleveland Payne
Beverly D. Poole
John N. Popham IV
Todd Pyles
Simmie Roberts
Lester Rodney
Constancia Romilly
Lucile J. Ross
James Rundles
Ann Sanders
Marshall L. Small
Anne Stoll
Courtenay Stringer
Peter Y. Sussman
Jon Swartzfager
Paul Swartzfager Jr.
Wayne Valentine Jr.
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Atlanta Constitution
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Chicago Defender
Clarke County Tribune
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Daily People’s World
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Pamphlets, Speeches, and Miscellany
Gerson, Simon. “Tribute to a Workingclass Journalist,” eulogy for Harry Raymond. Simon W. Gerson papers, Tamiment Library, NYU.
Hillegas, Jan. “Preliminary List of Mississippi Legal Executions,” Revised. Jackson: New Mississippi, Inc., 2001.
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Ackerman, Kenneth D. Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007.
Beautiful Jackson In Pictures. Jackson, Mississippi: Hederman Brothers.