The Eyes of Willie McGee

A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South

Alex Heard

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061993565
• Print ISBN:
  9780061284151
• Subtopic: African American History

A gripping saga of race and retribution in the Deep South. "Like a real-life  To Kill a Mockingbird, but with even more subtlety and complexity." —Walter Isaacson, New York Times-bestselling author
In 1945, Willie McGee, a young African-American man from Laurel, Mississippi, was sentenced to death for allegedly raping Willette Hawkins, a white housewife. At first, McGee's case was barely noticed, until Bella Abzug, a young New York labor lawyer, was hired to oversee McGee's defense. Together with William Patterson, the son of a slave and a devout believer in the need for revolutionary change, Abzug and a group of white Mississippi lawyers risked their lives to plead McGee's case. After years of court battles, McGee's supporters flooded President Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Supreme Court with clemency pleas, and famous Americans—including William Faulkner, Albert Einstein, Jessica Mitford, Paul Robeson, Norman Mailer, and Josephine Baker—spoke out on McGee's behalf.
By the time the case ended in 1951 with McGee's public execution in Mississippi's infamous traveling electric chair, their movement had succeeded in convincing millions of people worldwide that McGee had been framed and that the real story involved a consensual love affair between him and Mrs. Hawkins—one that she had instigated and controlled. As Heard discovered, this controversial theory is a doorway to a tangle of secrets that spawned a legacy of confusion, misinformation, and pain that still resonates today.
Based on exhaustive documentary research—court transcripts, newspaper reports, archived papers, letters, FBI documents, and the recollections of family members on both sides—Mississippi native Alex Heard tells a moving and unforgettable story that evokes the bitter conflicts between black and white, North and South, in America.

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

CL: Jackson Clarion-Ledger

Compass: The New York Compass

CRC: Civil Rights Congress

DW: The Daily Worker

JDN: Jackson Daily News

LLC: Laurel Leader-Call

LOC: Library of Congress

MDAH: Mississippi Department of Archives and History

NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Rogers: Lauren Rogers Museum of Art Library

SRC: Southern Regional Council

NYT: The New York Times

WaPo: The Washington Post

EPIGRAPH

sorrow night: Hansberry, Masses and Mainstream, July 1951, 19–20.

ONE: THE HOT SEAT

F. Aegerter: “Mrs. Roosevelt Calls McGee ‘Bad Character,’” CRC press release, June 1, 1951. CRC papers.

from obscurity to fame: See Rowan, South of Freedom, “Run! The Red Vampire!,” 174–92; Zaim, “Trial by Ordeal: The Willie McGee Case,” Journal of Mississippi History, Fall 2003, 215–47.

The story began: State of Mississippi v. Willie McGee, December 1945 Special

Term, Jones County Courthouse, Laurel, Mississippi; CL, JDN, LLC, December 6–7, 1945.

Hinds County jail: CL, December 14, 1930.

thousands of individuals: see “15,000 ‘Free McGee’ Pleas Swamp Wright,” Compass, July 29, 1950.

“Dear Mr. President”: Willie McGee letters, April 30, 1951, CRC papers.

Faulkner: Meriwether, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters by William Faulkner, 211–12; Blotner, Faulkner, 539.

Einstein: “A Letter from Albert Einstein,” NYT display ad, May 4, 1951.

State Department: JDN, April 25, 1951.

Combat: Rowan, South of Freedom, 191.

Mayella Ewell, Tom Robinson: Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 172–77, 190–242, 269–70.

love affair: Willie McGee’s initial account of his alleged relationship with Willette Hawkins appeared in an autobiographical statement he wrote for his first appeals lawyer, Forrest Jackson, which he and others expanded on later. See Dixon Pyles’s interview with a Daily Worker investigator, CRC papers, 1952; Willie McGee’s affidavit, February 3, 1951, Hinds County Courthouse, Jackson, Mississippi, CRC papers; and Rosalee McGee’s affidavit, July 25, 1950, MDAH.

“depraved, enslaved, adulterous woman”: References to Mrs. Hawkins were cut from “A Black Woman Speaks” when Beah Richards published a collection of her poetry in 1974. The original version, which she read at a civil rights meeting in 1951, is widely available on the Web. See www.thumperscorer.com/discus/messages/11222/8608.html.

Carol Cutrere: Williams, Orpheus Descending, 27–28.

Roosevelt was no coward: Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two, 1933–1938, 153–54, 177–81; Janken, White, 209–11.

China, Soviet Union: NYT, July 27, 1950; see “Execution of M’Gee Blasted by Moscow,” Toler Papers, Mississippi State University.

Julius Rosenberg: Meeropol, The Rosenberg Letters, 98.

CRC origins: “Congress on Civil Rights” invitation; Walter White memo, May 1, 1946; Marian Wynn Perry memo, May 7, 1946, NAACP papers.

“the Communists persuaded”: Eleanor Roosevelt to Roy Wilkins, July 18, 1950; Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt, July 24, 1950, NAACP papers.

“added suspicions”: Eleanor Roosevelt to Aubrey Grossman, March 14, 1951, CRC papers.

radio broadcast: “Willie McGee Execution,” Jim Leeson audio recording, May 7–8, 1950, University of Southern Mississippi oral history collections.

execution scene: CL, JDN, LLC, NYT, May 8, 1951.

Dray seemed convinced: Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 397–405.

as did Mitford: Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict, 160–94.

not proven fact: Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 239–45.

Carl Rowan in Laurel: Rowan, South of Freedom, 174–92; Rowan, “McGee was Going to Die,” Stag, March 1953.

Adolphus and Marjorie McGee: In Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca: Blacks, Whites and Reds at Camp, authors June Levine and Gene Gordon recall these as the names of two McGee children who attended a leftist summer camp in the late 1940s.

Mary Mostert: author interview, September 2004; Mostert, “Death for Association,” The Nation, May 5, 1951; Mostert, “Internet Journalism—the Guerilla Warfare Wing in the Media and Propaganda War,” July 26, 2003, http://w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher