2010-05-10 07:24:30

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Author Alex Heard Tells Us One Of The Great, Forgotten Tales Of The American South

Filed under: Alex Heard, Books, Featured, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Even the memory of the execution has vanished with the years, and that’s astonishing, given the subject matter–race and sex in Mississippi in the era before Civil Rights. “On May 8, 1951,” writes Alex Heard in his gripping new book, “a thirty-seven-year-old African American named Willie McGee was electrocuted on a much-disputed charge that he raped a white housewife named Willette Hawkins.”

That sentence alone, and the fact that it begins an almost forgotten tale of American injustice, gives you a sense of the narrative power in The Eyes Of Willie McGee: A Tragedy Of Race, Sex And Secrets, published tomorrow by Harper Collins.

But Heard, a child of the South, doesn’t just relate the tale. After digging deep into archives, interviewing people involved in the case, haunting old graveyards to look for the last resting place of the man at the center of the affair, the author relaunches a sobering chapter in American history, filling out gaps in information or outright distortions with whatever remains in the public or private record.

The result is a quiet tour de force of ambiguity, a study itself in the reporting of history, which, as we learn again here, is never either dead or fixed. If anything, it’s a sort of garden, dependent on culture, society and the labor of individual historians for its survival and health. With this book, Heard, a staff reporter for Outside magazine, plants a few seeds for the future and helps us as readers to round out one of the shadowy corners of the modern period.

Q:In the early 1950s, the execution of Willie McGee made headlines around the world, but now it’s mostly forgotten. Why don’t we know more about it?

A:One obvious factor: McGee was defended by the Communist Party, and we Americans seem to be uncomfortable with giving the far left of that era credit for doing anything positive. The party’s role in McGee’s defense wasn’t all heroics and good deeds–as I make clear, there was some dishonesty in the mix as well–but its contribution in the early days of civil rights needs to be recognized.

As for McGee, people really ought to be aware of his story again. Whatever he did or didn’t do–and I don’t pretend to know for certain whether he was guilty or innocent of the rape charge made against him–he was thrown into the maw of a southern justice system that was determined to grind him up, and he faced a struggle for survival and fairness that’s difficult to comprehend today. Did he even know what a “communist” was? I’m not sure. But he knew he was being offered free legal help by people who wanted to save his life, so, naturally, he took it.

McGee was an impoverished black laborer charged with raping a white woman in small-town Mississippi in 1945, which meant, by definition, that he was on a fast track to doom. He said he was beaten until he confessed. He narrowly escaped lynching after his arrest, and he wasn’t allowed to see a defense lawyer until the same day he was tried and sentenced to death in a courtroom ringed by armed guards–guards who were there to keep him from getting killed by white spectators. From 1946 on, quietly at first, his defense was paid for and managed by the Civil Rights Congress, a New York-based group with ties to the Communist Party USA.

Back then, the CRC competed with the NAACP over the defense of black defendants who, like McGee, gave off the telltale signs of being railroaded. It did this by paying for decent lawyers and shouting from the rooftops about injustice, sometimes mangling the facts to tell a more compelling story. On McGee’s behalf, the group hired white, male, Mississippi attorneys who had no ties to communism but who put their hides and careers on the line to try and provide McGee with an adequate defense. During the three years of appeals-court efforts surrounding the case–from early 1948 on–the main faces of the fight were William L. Patterson, a black Communist, and Bella Abzug, a white, far-left labor lawyer.

The fact that McGee was supported by Communists certainly doesn’t bother me, but it bothered people at the time. The case played out between 1945 and 1951, during the early years of the Cold War. Individuals who otherwise might have been sympathetic to McGee–including many liberal Democrats–shunned him because of a widespread belief that the involvement of “reds” tainted the whole thing. My book starts with an explanation of how Eleanor Roosevelt reacted to the McGee controversy. She avoided it, on the instructions of friends at the NAACP who told her the McGee cause was tainted. This same point was explicitly stated at the time by journalists who wrote about McGee, including Carl Rowan and Max Lerner. Many mainstream African-American newspapers, including The Chicago Defender, muted their coverage of McGee for the same reason.

The other factor in our memory lapse, I think, is that the case was so messy and murky and barnacled with lies–originating with both McGee’s attackers and his defenders–that it didn’t have staying power as a “cause.” He was executed for rape. He said he didn’t do it, and that the woman had trapped him into a love affair. She said there was no affair, and nobody has ever come forward with convincing evidence that she was lying. So the McGee case ended as a confusing tangle of competing realities, with Communists looming ominously in the background–at least in the public mind.

Just four years later, in 1955, the civil-rights movement was gaining steam on a variety of more constructive fronts, and 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi, providing an incredibly shocking example of racial inequities in the South. Who needed Willie McGee as a rallying cry anymore?

Q:When you started to delve into the case, the trails weren’t easy to follow. Was there one interview or document that essentially broke the back of the reporting and opened the way for you to write this book?

A:I submitted my proposal to publishers in the summer of 2006, but even after it was accepted I didn’t know if I would be able to find enough information to write anything worthwhile. The written record was fragmented and hard to reassemble. By late 2006, for example, I still hadn’t been able to find transcripts for two of the three circuit-court trials that McGee went through. I had nothing that shed light on who he was or what he did during all the years he was in jail. I didn’t know anything about what was going on in the minds of his defense lawyers.

There was no single eureka moment. Instead, it was a slow process of accretion that led, eventually, to a sense that narrative coherence was theoretically possible. Some of my most important finds were in the papers of the Civil Rights Congress, which I wasn’t able to look at until early 2007. I was astonished to learn that the papers contain dozens of letters sent to the CRC by McGee, his mother, and Rosalee McGee, a woman who claimed (falsely) that she was married to him and who became a well-known public figure between 1948 and 1951. They also contain transcripts of interviews with four of the Mississippi-based lawyers who defended McGee. These provided essential background material on what the case was like for them. All four said it was a frightening, dangerous, and terribly difficult case. And keep in mind that one of McGee’s lawyers, Dixon Pyles, had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, so he knew a few things about fear. Seeing those interviews brought everything to life.

Q: As a rule, the general public knows the broad outlines of the Civil Rights era, and there have been popular depictions of the era of slavery and its immediate aftermath, but the period from the First World War to, say, the mid-1950’s, a period that a fair number of people can still remember, remains a gap in the American imagination. Can you give us a sketch of the state of race relations in the period before Civil Rights?

A:You’re right about the gap in popular knowledge, and it’s puzzling. The information is out there, in any number of books that cover aspects of this period. Four I’d recommend are John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, Leon F. Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Kenneth Robert Janken’s White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP, and Kari Frederickson’s The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968.

These books give a stunning overview of a period when lynchings were still all too common in the South, the federal government wasn’t doing much to help African-Americans gain their basic rights, and the pace of change was slow and bleak. In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, one typical goal was to push through passage of a federal law against lynching. It never happened, but it wasn’t for lack of effort by people like Walter White. Unfortunately, the Southern power bloc in Congress, particularly in the Senate, put a stranglehold on such legislation. FDR himself was afraid to cross the South on the issue of lynching, so he never put his support behind these bills.

Another exercise I’d recommend–for any curious student–is to go to a library that stocks a microfilm collection called the Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File. Specifically, ask for reels 221 to 236, which are devoted to lynching. For years, people at Tuskegee saved newspaper stories about lynchings, legal lynchings, race-based killings committed by law-enforcement officials, and other atrocities fueled by race hatred. It’s a collection devoted to mayhem, so it’s an overwhelming thing to look at. But I think it’s a valuable experience. There are hundreds of amazing stories from that era that, like the McGee case, have faded from memory.

Q:You write about growing up in Mississippi in the aftermath of civil rights. I grew up in Dallas in the same period, and while so many of the prejudices and tensions remained in place, the authority of the law no longer backed them up. Can you talk about your own sense of race as a small kid in the South?

A:I was a small child during the classic civil-rights era, so the main thing is this: I didn’t have to make any choices, sacrifices, or risky commitments. It’s important to establish that clearly, because people were fighting and dying over historic conflicts in those years, while I had a comic book in front of my face and very few serious thoughts in my head. I was five when Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, my hometown. I didn’t know it happened, and I wouldn’t have understood the significance if I had known.

Kids like me were raised in a bubble habitat that left us with a fairy-tale idea that sounded like so: “We like the way things are, and they do, too.” “They” being black people. My elementary-school and junior-high years were spent in an all-white suburb of Jackson, and my exposure to African-Americans was limited, circumscribed, and amiable. I met yardmen and household maids who were fun to be around and seemed happy enough, so I didn’t contemplate their real lot in life. I had no idea that African-Americans toiled in a world of limited opportunity and lifelong humiliation, supported by a system of legalized segregation and violence.

I started to wake up in 1970, when the schools were desegregated in Jackson and I was in 7th grade. The big, court-ordered crack-up of the old order happened over Christmas vacation, and there was instant and massive white flight out of the schools. I stayed in public schools, though that wasn’t really my “choice.” I wanted to go where my friends were going–to one of the new private schools that sprang up overnight. I don’t know why my parents kept me in public school, but I’m now glad it happened, because it gave me a chance to see things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

There were no Disney moments of healing and understanding, and I didn’t make any close African-American friends that first year or later. For the most part, I and the other members of the tiny white remnant–there were only about 30 of us in a large junior high called Bailey–were ignored by the black students who now ran the roost, but I learned a lot about the realities of growing up black in Jackson just by listening. Looking back, the most impressive thing about that period was the performance of the teachers, white and black, who stayed in the system and tried to make things work. It was good for me–and for any white kid–to be exposed to African-American teachers who set such a fine example.

Q:What is your sense of Willie McGee the man, to the extent you can conjure him up in your own imagination? Who was he?

A:McGee was born in the country about a half hour north of Laurel, and his father moved to the city to work in lumber mills. (Laurel was a Piney Woods town with a strong industrial base built around lumber and related products.) He had limited educational opportunities–I think he probably stopped going to school after 7th grade or so–and he spent his youth doing hard, low-paying jobs that involved manual labor. Beyond that, it’s difficult to say too much about his boyhood, because the records just aren’t there.

McGee kept working, married and started a family, and left that family in 1942, for reasons that aren’t clear to me. Sometimes he rambled–he went on freight-hopping excursions to places like New Orleans, Nevada, and California–and it’s obvious from oral-history recollections and court testimony that he drank and womanized a fair amount.

In the case presented against him at trial, these traits allegedly came together on a night that ended with a very bad decision. Friends of McGee’s said he went on a drinking-and-driving road trip that involved a search for his estranged wife and stops at bootleggers and at least two homes where gambling was going on. The prosecution’s story was that he parted company with these guys late that night, drove his truck down the street that Mrs. Hawkins lived on, saw her through a window, and decided to stop the truck, crawl through a window, and rape her. As the story went, she was alone in a front bedroom with a sick infant and her husband was asleep in the back of the house, leaving her vulnerable to attack.

Once McGee was arrested, he was kept under wraps for five years–almost never interviewed, rarely heard from. The main clues about “what he was like” are in the letters he wrote to the CRC from jail. In these, he comes across as a cheerful, religious man who was extremely grateful for the legal help he was getting. These letters would have been read by his jailers, I think, so of course he didn’t bare his deepest thoughts.

As for the manner in which he left this world, I stress that he faced execution with impressive bravery and composure. No whining or complaints, just a calm insistence that he was being unfairly killed by an unjust system.

Q:And what about the woman he raped, Willette Hawkins? One of the more interesting aspects of this story is the way it addresses a very familiar and explosive theme in tales about black and white relations in the South, i.e., sex between white women and black men. For many, Hawkins became the villain in this case, but who was she really?

A:Willette Hawkins was an ordinary, somewhat sickly housewife with three children and a husband, all of whom loved her dearly. If she did what McGee said–trapped him into an affair, lied about it when they were caught, and coldly sent him to his death–she deserves to be demonized. I maintain that the evidence for McGee’s love-affair claim is so skimpy that the burden of proof has to shift back to Mrs. Hawkins’s accusers. Over the years–and continuing today–people have written about the case as if it were established fact that McGee’s love-affair story were true. In reality, it was a claim he made to his trial lawyers–who were afraid to bring it up in court–and later to his appeals lawyers, who only put it out there during the last few months of the case.

Q:She filed suit against the Daily Worker for libel and won her case. Evidently, she felt her name was cleared. What do you believe? Did she and McGee have consensual sex or was she raped?

A:I leave that for readers to decide, and I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say this: People need to think long and hard about the sloppy factual handling that journalists and historians have given Mrs. Hawkins. Google the subject–or look at books like Jessica Mitford’s A Fine Old Conflict–and you’ll see it routinely stated that she seduced McGee, kept a secret love affair going for years, and then lied about it to save her neck.

Nobody proved anything, and there are factual problems with McGee’s alibi. To cite just one example: He told two different versions of it, with different timetables and different basic facts. As early as 1946, McGee told his lawyers about the alleged affair, saying that it started in August 1944 and that it was tied in with a murder plot. Mrs. Hawkins supposedly wanted McGee to kill her husband, Troy, so she could collect a “double indemnity” insurance policy and she and Willie could run away together.

When McGee talked about the affair in a 1951 affidavit, he said it started long before 1944 and was motivated solely by her lust. There was no mention of a murder motive, so his account was dramatically different. And that’s not the only hole in the fabric.

Meanwhile, the fact that Mrs. Hawkins won the libel case has to count for something. The Daily Worker didn’t simply punt. As I explain in the book, the paper’s parent company spent considerable time and resources after 1951 looking for new witnesses who could prove that the affair happened. They even sent a private detective to Mississippi in 1952 to look for new evidence. They never found any, which is why the case was settled in Mrs. Hawkins’s favor in 1955.

Q:In general, regardless of the verdict, there was clear evidence of jury tampering and other abuse in the legal handling of the case. What was the most startling miscarriage of justice that you discovered?

A:The jury tampering. The defense lawyers at McGee’s third trial alleged that the state placed three hand-picked African-Americans on the grand jury to satisfy a mandate from a Supreme Court decision in a different case, Patton v. Mississippi. For this, they were harassed, barked at by the judge, and ravaged by Mississippi newspaper editors. One of the lawyers, John Poole, was targeted in a politically motivated disbarment proceeding that succeeded, sending him into a period of career exile.

As it happened, I lucked into being able to prove that Poole was right, thanks to a taped interview done years ago by a student, Luke Lampton–who’s now a prominent M.D. in Mississippi–who got interested in the McGee case. He spoke with Paul Swartzfager, the D.A. who prosecuted at McGee’s third trial, and Swartzfager not only admitted that the tampering had occurred but bragged and laughed about it. I was astonished that the state was willing to go this far to win a case that it was going to win anyway. It made me wonder: What else were they capable of?

Q:Do you hope, or believe, that the state of Mississippi will revisit the case in some fashion based on what you’ve discovered?

A: I’d prefer that the story itself, told accurately, serve the function of “restitution” in this case. For me, anything that provokes new conflict over this matter would be a bad idea. There’s been enough pain and friction.

Besides, I’m not sure what you would do. Was McGee guilty or innocent? It’s impossible to say, so a move to exonerate him officially would be controversial, to say the least. I think it’s terrible that he lost his life for a rape that he may or may not have committed, especially since the death penalty for rape was only applied to black males in those days. That can’t be undone, so the best way to observe this injustice is to explain it.

On the other side, we have to consider the rights of Mrs. Hawkins and her surviving family members. I don’t know whether McGee raped her, but I think it’s definitely possible, and I believe something bad happened to her, whether it was at his hands or someone else’s. Her daughters have had to endure 65 years of watching people vilify their mother without understanding the most basic facts about her, the trials, or McGee. It’s time to let both of them rest in peace.

Q:As you were working on this book, the United States elected its first black president, who was born a decade after the execution. Any thoughts on the amazing pace of historical change that brought us in half a century from the era of Willie McGee to that of Barack Obama? It seems to me, given what you were investigating, that the election must have seemed that much more astonishing?

A:I never thought I would see an African-American president, period. That’s a platitude by now, but I’m still amazed that it happened. During the summer before the election, I told an African-American friend that Obama couldn’t win because a silent majority of white Americans would lie to pollsters, voting against him in the racist privacy of the booth. He thought I was right. So we were united in our wrongness. I’m not sure why, but something about that moment still strikes me as memorable and great.

Comments (3)

3 Comments »

1. Excellent interview. The book sounds like one that should have been written generations ago, but of course, could not have been.

   Comment by Scott R — May 10, 2010 @ 1:28 pm

2. Fine work. Mr. Heard and the book are to be commended for shedding light on a shuttered time in our history.

   Comment by Greg H — May 10, 2010 @ 3:10 pm

3. [...] May 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment Review of and Q & A about The Eyes of Willie McGee today on Purple State of Mind, a great Web site devoted to finding “common ground” in political and social discussions. Smart questions from Purple State’s John H. Marks. Go here. [...]

   Pingback by Purple State on Willie McGee « The Eyes of Willie McGee — May 10, 2010 @ 4:28 pm

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