The Legends of Willie McGee
No place in the world has more legends than Jones County, other than maybe Ancient Greece. I’ve talked to folks who still look for Newt Knight’s buried treasure in riverbanks and in secret caves. Then there’s that stuff about Jones County seceding from the Confederacy when Mississippi seceded from the Union. One of my favorites is the legend of Rachael Knight, a slave woman who lived deep in the Piney Woods and whose supernatural powers helped shape the history of Jones County.
Even an event that happened as recently as 1951 has already taken on the proportions of legend. I’m referring to the Story of Willie McGee.
This was one of the most extensively covered cases of its day. In my office here, I have piled on my desk feature stories from Life Magazine, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Christian Century, The Commonweal, the Nation, and Newsweek. That doesn’t even include the international press the case attracted. I can flip through the yellowing pages and see the black and white photos of McGee being escorted back and forth between the jails in Jackson and Laurel, dazed and in chains with a phalanx of state guards summoned to prevent threatened mob action. Of Willie McGee sitting glum, slumped over in his cell, a cigarette burning between his fingers. Of his sheeted body being carted out of the Jones County Courthouse into the care of Pete Christian, a local black funeral home owner in Laurel.
Willie McGee was everywhere. And then almost the very next day he vanished. With all the national attention, and out of respect to the victims, much of Laurel just wanted the whole thing done with. But the story didn’t die. There were those predictable conversations between friends and neighbors, whispered in hush tones. One person says, “How could such a thing be?” and the other surmises an answer, “The way I hear it was…” and thus a legend is born. The facts become more and more illusive.
But there are some things we do know for sure. Willie McGee, 32 and a father of four, was a black man who in November of 1945was arrested for raping a young Laurel housewife, the mother of three little girls, in her home. He was tried in Laurel and found guilty by an all white jury of rape and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Those last two facts are significant.
The make-up of the jury would factor in the case being overturned twice by the State Supreme Court and cause the ordeal to drag on for over five years.
The fact that McGee, a black man, was condemned to die for a crime Mississippi had never executed a white man for, gave fuel to those around the world who wanted to put the South’s race relations on trial.
Also put on trial was the character of the rape victim, herself, even as her husband continued to work at the post office downtown and her daughters tried to have normal childhoods in the Laurel public schools.
Finally, we can be sure that Willie McGee, prosecuted by City D.A. Polly Swartzfager, was found guilty by a jury a third and last time. And, for the third time and last time, Judge F. Burkitt Collins imposed the death sentence. This one to be carried out in Laurel.
On May 8, 1951, at 12:05 a.m., it was. The body of Willie McGee is buried in Pachuta.
We can agree on those facts. But that’s about where consensus ends. If you ask a white person of a certain age what they remember about the case, they will talk about the “execution.” But if you happen upon a black Laurel citizen, he will more than often use the word, “lynched.”
It’s typical of that great Black/White divide we see in opinion surveys from Rodney King, to O.J. Simpson, to Katrina to what happened in Jena, Louisiana. In a way, you could say we are separated by our stories.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share the stories that I have been told. We’ll look at Willie himself and hear from those who remember him. We’ll learn about his wife, who spoke on his behalf to packed houses up North. We’ll get to know the family of the victim, though, I will not print her name, upon request of those who remember the family fondly and suffered with them through the ordeal.
I will share stories of how the event dramatically shaped the lives of Laurel’s children of the time, both black and white. We’ll talk about the major players of the day, who had to handle this political hot potato, people whose names we know today only because we drive on a street named after them.
You’ll hear about some sinister forces at work in Laurel at the time. Like the two opposing factions of thugs who used lies, intimidation and death threats to ensure that the verdict went their way. Though they wanted different outcomes, they were equal in their viciousness.
Why bring it up now? Why not let it lie? These are questions I’ve been asked.
For one thing, it’s a fascinating subject and most folks enjoy a good story.
Secondly, if stories shape who we are, then they also shape people who are different from us. By listening to their stories, we just might understand them better.
And thirdly, get ready, because not one but two major books are coming out over the next couple of years about the Willie McGee case. My guess is we are about to be in the national spotlight again. Laurel and Willie McGee could get the same notoriety as Emmitt Till and Bryant’s Grocery, and Birmingham Church and its Sunday morning bombers, and Neshoba County and the three civil rights workers, Beckwith and Medger Evers. Seen through the lens of 1950’s Jim Crow, Laurel could be cast as the latest site where there is evidence of a disgraceful perversion of justice.
So when they come looking for us, CNN and MSNBC as well as the sightseers and curiosity seekers, snapping pictures of the Confederate Monument and the Courthouse, asking, “Is this where they lynched Willie?” as they surely will, we better get our stories straight.
The Faces in the Crowd
I’ve looked at those newspaper photos taken on the eve of Willie McGee’s execution hundreds of times. The grainy shots of the crowd. I couldn’t make out the faces, but I often wondered if they really were the bloodthirsty mob described by the international press. And there was that odd picture of the boy up in the tree looking into the courtroom where the traveling electric chair had been set up. Who was he? Why was he there? What did he see through the window that night? I had to find out, so I began looking for clues.
I first listened to what Sam Bowers said about that day. He remembered that he was servicing his pinball machines at a store across from Masonite. Still over a decade away from being the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, he had only been in Laurel for three years. He said that afternoon he witnessed a group of men spontaneously get up a lynch mob. He said they weren’t loud. There was no speech making. They fully expected for the courts to step in as they had two times before on Willie’s proscribed death day and save him in the nick of time. This group of citizens was going to make sure that Willie McGee didn’t cheat death again. Sam said he watched as one of the men calmly walked over to his desk in the store, pull a pistol from a drawer, and tuck it under his shirt. With growing admiration, Bowers watched as the men departed the store and headed for the courthouse. He didn’t join them, but Bowers said they left him inspired with a new sense of purpose.
When they got to the courthouse that afternoon, the men found that a crowd of over 200 had already gathered. But there was no Willie McGee. With the entire world watching their every move, Governor Wright and Mayor Gartin were not going to risk a lynching. They had conspired to keep McGee in Rankin County’s “lynchproof” jail until the last minute when they would whisk Willie into Laurel accompanied by a well-armed state guard. The lynchers would have to wait like everybody else.
Roy Hammond told me that at about 5:30 that day he got off work from Laurel News Stand, hopped on his bike and headed straight for the courthouse to see the going’s on. Only 14 at the time, he said he was awed at what he saw. The crowd had swollen to almost a thousand by that time. “They weren’t yelling or screaming,” he said. “Some remember a frantic mob. But the way I remember it, they were somber, almost reverent.”
Jean Holifield was 19 and told me she had been working late at her church, the Kingston Assembly of God. Her minister, Reverend Yates, a man she admired greatly, was a real Christian and a voice of the community. She said Brother Yates loaded them all up in the car to go to the courthouse. “He was just that kind of person. He wanted to see if there was anything he could do to help.”
Mrs. Holifield remembers waiting in the car while Rev. Yates made his way through the multitude, all the way up the steps and through the door of the courthouse where the execution was going to take place. It was dark now and the car became engulfed by a surge of people, spilling from the lawn and sidewalks and crowding into the streets.
Carolyn Horne said she got there later that night. Only a child she remembers gripping tightly to someone’s hand, perhaps her mother’s. The crowd was close, and she recalls looking up and noticing how the lights from the courthouse shown through the trees. She told me she didn’t realize exactly what was going on, but knew it wasn’t good. She was frightened. The crowd was not loud, but somber. People talked low and serious to the persons next to them.
Anne Sanders remembers that night well. It was nice, spring weather, cool enough for a sweater, she said. But once you got in the crowd, you warmed up quick. Mrs. Sanders was already a seasoned reporter for the Laurel Leader Call, and had covered each of McGee’s three trials. But her interest was also personal. She told me that she lived across the street from where the rape occurred. She was acquainted with the victim and her family, and had gone to extra lengths to dispute the stories the international press was reporting, dragging the reputation of her neighbor through the mud.
Mrs. Sanders had been invited by the paper’s editor to join the victim’s family, along with members of the international press, to witness the execution. She declined. Mrs. Sanders took her post outside with the crowd, under the courthouse balcony where the bailiff would eventually appear, either to announce another reprieve, or the fact that Willie McGee was dead and the nearly six year ordeal had finally come to an end.
Rev. Raymond L. Horne was a cub reporter for the Leader Call at the time. He was also in the crowd that night, standing close to the front door of the courthouse. He didn’t even have a press card, but he was a curious young man and already a dedicated reporter. Even though there was no chance of getting into the courthouse, he felt he needed to be there nonetheless. He knew it was history in the making.
Above the rumble of the crowd and the roar of the generators, Rev. Horne thought he heard someone call out his name. He looked up and saw a man in uniform. It was his friend, Paul Craven, who had the job that night of guarding the door to the courthouse.
“Raymond!” his friend called out, “You belong in here!” He swung the door open for Rev. Horne.
That’s how Raymond Horne got to be a firsthand witness to history.
Jim Clark was still a boy, living in Myric with his mother. His uncle operated a streetcar and used to bring back all the talk out of Laurel. He said that when his uncle told him about the electrocution, they all got in the truck and headed off to Laurel.
“Why did you go?” I asked Mr. Clark.
“I was a kid and ain’t heard of nothing like it before. It was big news.” Then he dropped the bombshell. “I shimmied up that water oak and took me a peek through that second story window.”
I couldn’t believe my luck! Had I actually found the boy in the tree? The boy that Jimmy Ward of the Clarion Ledger had caught with his camera almost 60 years ago? Indeed, Mr. Clark said he was that same boy. Over half a century later, both the water oak and the boy remain firmly rooted in Jones County. Mr. Clark, who still resides in the Myric Community, said he was only up in the tree for five minutes. He looked in and saw the back of the electric chair, but then they got frightened and went home, afraid of what the black community would do once McGee had been executed.
The thing that all these people above have in common is that they are all white. The only African-Americans that were on the scene were Willie McGee and his preacher. But that doesn’t mean black Laurel citizens do not have a story to tell about that night. They certainly do. They were also witnesses. It’s just that their story has not been told… yet.
Raymond Horne
Witness to an Execution
Part I
His speech is gentle, but undergirded with a quiet authority. You can tell he must have been a good preacher. But that wasn’t always Raymond Horne’s ambition. His father, who later began Horne’s Nursery on his farm north of Laurel, was a Depression era minister, and as a youngster Raymond’s silent prayer was, “Oh Lord, anything but that!”
For a while it looked like he would have a career in the newspaper business. He studied journalism at Anderson College in Indiana and edited the school paper. In 1951 he got a job with Laurel Leader Call as the farm editor at 35 dollars a week. Plus he got to write the obits.
Rev. Horne said he believed he could have made it in the newspaper business, if the Lord hadn’t had other plans for him. He seems to be blessed with that journalistic urge to know “the rest of the story.”
Horne wasn’t even supposed to be covering the Willie McGee case. That was reserved for seasoned reporters, like Odell McRae and Anne Sanders, but he couldn’t stay away. His instincts told him he needed to be there the night of the execution. This was history.
His lifelong friend, the late Paul Craven, must have thought so, too. Deputy Sheriff in 1951, Craven was guarding the courthouse door that night, and as soon as he spotted his buddy in the crowd of over 1500 people, he called out, “Raymond, you belong in here.”
At 11:00, an hour before the scheduled execution, Raymond entered the courthouse, climbed the marble steps and stepped into the chancery courtroom. The electric chair had already been set up. The forbidding contraption faced the courtroom with its back against the judge’s bench. He was one of 60 men, most of whom were standing around, talking in small groups. Reporters from all the nationals were there.
“I was only a young pup,” he said, and he was feeling privileged to be in the room at all. He wasted no time in claiming a seat before somebody “found him out”. He chose a chair in the jury box, front row, center, only a few paces from the waiting electric chair. He sat there for an hour, silently observing.
At midnight everyone turned to see two guards escorting a dazed looking black man into the courtroom. This was the first time Horne had laid eyes on Willie McGee. The condemned was wearing a light blue shirt with sleeves cut at the elbow and a pair of dark blue trousers. He had on loud yellow socks under bedroom slippers that whispered quietly as he shuffled his feet across the courtroom floor. Horne saw that McGee’s head had already been shaved.
Horne said that one thing he would never forget was how one of the guards had hooked his finger in McGee’s belt and appeared to be lifting him up and pulling him forward, guiding him toward the chair. Willie didn’t resist, meekly following the guard’s lead. In fact, Horne said, McGee had no reaction at all. He had the appearance of a man drugged.
Horne watched as McGee voluntarily sat down in chair, and as leather straps were fastened around his abdomen, wrists and ankles. The slippers were carefully placed a few feet away by the bench.
Willie McGee made no statement. The only words he uttered were, “Is the Rev. Patterson here?” At that, a black preacher showed himself and took his place by McGee’s side, Bible in hand. McGee never looked up at the preacher.
Next the executioner put the metal skull-shaped electrode on McGee’s head and a wide leather band across his face, covering his eyes.
So far, everything had been done at the height of efficiency. It had taken them only three minutes from the time McGee entered the courtroom to the time the executioner threw the switch.
Horne said he heard a loud, “Walloom!” and he saw McGee lift up in the chair. And then a few seconds later, there was another jolt, but this time, the body offered no response.
Dr. S.F. Carr, the county health officer put a stethoscope up to Willie’s chest. His smooth, dark skin was now covered with prominent goose pimples.
That was when people begin to get up and leave. But not Horne. He had picked up on something he found curious and naturally he was determined to check it out. Dr. Carr was standing over the body, but apparently not doing much of anything. Horne walked over to the doctor and asked him straight out, “What are you waiting for?” Doctor Carr explained that there is still brain activity after electrocution, and he was waiting for that to cease.
When Horne looked down at Willie McGee, he could see that the body still trembled. Soon, even that sign of life died away.
With no questions left to ask, nothing left to record for posterity, Raymond Horne descended the stairs and exited through the front door of the courthouse. He stepped into the crowd to make his way home, speaking to no one.
Next Week the interview with Raymond Horne will continue, beginning with his visit to the funeral home where McGee’s body lay.
Raymond Horne
Witness to an Execution
Part II
As Raymond Horne exited the courthouse, the grim memory of what he had just witnessed weighed heavily upon him. The crowd was still there, anxious for any news at all, but as he headed down the courthouse steps and winded his way through the throng, no one bothered to stop him. Here was a man who had been an eyewitness to one of the grimmest episodes in the annals of Mississippi justice, and no one even asked him about it.
Laughing, Rev. Horne told me he probably looked too young to know what was going on.
But even after all that, Horne couldn’t let go of the story. He had an obit to write. Instead of calling, which was the usual practice, he showed up in person at Christian’s Funeral Home, where they had taken the body.
“I will never forget,” he said, “I walked in, and I saw the casket. It was dead quiet. There was not another soul to be seen. ” It just Horne and the body of Willie McGee.
Horne peered into the casket. “I remember two things,” he said. “First, how nicely they had dressed Willie. And second I saw the wide blister around his head from where they had electrocuted him.”
The day of the execution, The Laurel Leader Call published an editorial entitled “A Clean Sheet,” in which the paper congratulated the citizenry on how well they handled the McGee ordeal and to call upon the town to turn the page on the past and start fresh.
Horne was surprised at how fast that page was turned. He said as soon as he was executed, all mention of Willie McGee disappeared. It was if it never happened.
But Horne knew that it had. He had seen it with his own eyes.
A few years after the McGee execution, the Lord called Horne to the ministry. He says flatly that he has no regrets. But from talking with him that spring morning, I’m willing to wager that two things come close, and they both have to do with Willie McGee.
Horne read in all the papers what had happened after he left the courthouse that night. When they brought the body of McGee out under the sheet, the crowd had let out an earsplitting cheer. He said that wasn’t called for. The occasion was a somber one, not one for celebration. It wasn’t worthy of Laurel to be remembered that way.
And the second regret might be this: the account he wrote detailing what he witnessed that historic night never saw the light of day.
In 1982, Rev. Horne was asked to contribute his memories to a book recognizing Laurel’s centennial commemorative. Ever the newspaperman, he recalled in journalistic fashion the significant events he had witnessed since he came to Laurel as a three-year old in 1930. He detailed the history of the 4H Club, the development of hospitals in Jones county hospital, the beginnings of the broiler business, and of course his most dramatic memory, began with, “I remember the Willie McGee Case…”
When he scanned the book on publication, he was surprised to see that they had omitted his recollections of the execution. He called the editor only to be informed that the editorial board wanted to “keep that story buried.” It seemed “The Clean Sheet Policy” asked for by the Laurel Leader Call was still in effect.
His recollections have remained unread, until today.
When I asked him how he felt about his remembrances from 60 years ago finally being published, he said flatly, “I believe in history. It needs to be told like it happened. You shouldn’t leave things out because somebody might not like it.”
Things have come full circle now for Rev. Horne. He lives on the land he plowed as a boy during the Depression. And he’s returned to an old love. He has just completed a book on the history of camp meetings and has begun research on his seventh family history. In addition he has self published a half dozen church histories. Always eager to know “the rest of the story,” his journalistic gifts are still paying off.
Mrs. Elner Andrews
Viewing the Body of Willie McGee
A man once told Elner Andrews that she was going to lose her mind before she died, because she remembers too much. I got the impression from talking with her one afternoon in April, that in fact, Mrs. Andrews has forgotten very little.
She remembers that back in the forties on Friday nights, after her father got off work at Greene Lumber Company, he would cut hair for twenty-five cents a head. She said folks would be lined up in the yard he was so good. “It was a gift from God. He never had any training and was so good he fixed the other barbers’ mistakes.”
She remembers going to the Lincoln Theater and later to the Strand when they opened the balcony to blacks.
And she remembers her first job. She went to work at Mayhew Canning in 1957 in order to buy her a set of false teeth. (She said her father spoiled her by keeping a lot of sweets in the house when she was young.) That job was followed by a lifetime of hard work. In 1959 she became an operating technician for the Jones County Community Hospital, a job she kept for forty years, never missing a day.
Her father, Elmer Lee, didn’t have much use for “the white man.” Mrs. Andrews said a prominent Laurel grocer once accused her uncle of stealing a lemon and grabbed him roughly. Her uncle hit the white man over the head, knocking him unconscious. They had the dogs after him in no time.
Her father probably saved his little brother’s life by getting him out of town that very night. But he never returned and soon was lost to the family forever. Mrs. Andrews said after that incident, her father put up a fence around their house and refused even to let the white mailman into the yard. If you wanted to do business with Elmer Lee, you had to transact it over the front gate. Nor did he trade with white grocers any longer. He bought his food in bulk and stored it in the back room of their house. His clothes he bought only from Fine Brothers, where he was treated with respect.
And then there was the tragedy that befell her favorite childhood companion. Just a teenager, her friend was seized by a group of white boys while she was walking home from the wrestling matches at the Civic Center with her boyfriend. The whites raped her while her sweetheart was made to watch. From then on, her father wouldn’t let Elner go out walking alone.
“Before that everybody said those two were going to get married. But she left town right after it happened.” Mrs. Andrews shook her head sadly. “I saw him walking down the street all by himself just the other day.”
It’s strange talking with black folks who claim Laurel as their home. We share the same zip code, but sometimes that seems about all we had in common. Yet Mrs. Andrews and I did find one common memory. The Lauren Rogers Museum. The most exciting day in elementary school was our yearly class trip to the Museum to look at the suit of armor. Mrs. Andrews says she remembers that, too. The first time she saw it, she thought it was a skeleton and was afraid it was going to jump out of that dark corner and get her! That’s about where the parallel ends. I received a library card and was permitted to go back whenever I wanted. Mrs. Andrews, being black, wasn’t allowed to return to enjoy the world-class art and fine literature.
When I asked her if she remembered anything about the Willie McGee case, she nodded excitedly.
“I saw him!” she exclaimed.
It seems that one day her fourth-grade teacher, Miss Maude Jones at Sandy Gavin, announced to the class, “They electrocuted a colored man and y’all need to see it!”
She marched us out the door and down the sidewalk to where Christian Funeral Home was. We lined up and went into this dark room one child at a time. There was this casket and hanging down from the ceiling was one lonely light bulb at the end of a long cord. It was swaying back and forth over the casket, throwing scary shadows everywhere. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. They were making us.”
What she saw was the victim of an execution. “All I remember was how dark he was. And how swelled up his head looked.” She said she couldn’t sleep for nights. “I kept seeing that great big head looking at me.”
I asked her why her teacher had taken her to see the body. “She wanted to straighten us out and to keep us from getting into trouble. To keep us afraid of the white man.”
When her father found out, he became angry. “He said they had no cause to do that. He didn’t want us to have to see any of it. My father didn’t want us to be afraid of white folks.”
Mrs. Andrews said her mother went to McGee’s funeral out at Pachuta. When the hearse tried to make its way through Laurel, some white folks tried to block it from passing. “When the white folks had a funeral, cars always pulled off to the side of the road to show respect. But not for Willie McGee. Momma said they had a time getting his body out of town.”
If Mrs. Andrews holds any bitterness, I sure couldn’t find it. She even laughs when she recalls how she wasn’t allowed into Walgreens to buy hamburgers. “They were the best burgers in town. But I had a friend who worked there and slipped us burgers out the back of the store.”
“I don’t hold on to that stuff,” she said. “A lot of people hang their stuff up, but I let it go.”
That’s what Mrs. Andrews told her sister who was complaining about her upbringing. “Don’t be taking that stuff to Oprah Winfrey, now! You got to let it go.”
I left Mrs. Andrews’ house asking myself, if these things had happened to me and my family, would I be so forgiving? I doubt it. I think I would want to at least tell Oprah about it.
Harvey Warren
Willie McGee was a Warning
Many folks know Harvey Warren from his impassioned editorials. He’s had several printed in the Laurel Leader Call and the Clarion Ledger and the Jackson Advocate. Harvey is a man of strong opinions. When my mother heard that I was going to meet with him, she was in awe. “He must be brilliant!” she said. Others have asked me to find out if he was crazy or not. So, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I went to interview Mr. Warren.
What I found was a well-educated, soft-spoken, extensively traveled man with an insatiable appetite for history and justice, and some carefully considered views about race in America. He wasn’t the ranting lunatic some told me to expect.
Besides his degrees from California State at Sacramento, Harvey Warren has had first hand experience with matters of race. His father was a plumber who claimed Sam Bowers as one of his clients. Young Harvey tagged along on jobs to several of Sam’s business’s on the black side of the tracks and remembers a reserved, well-mannered man whose trademarks were a freshly ironed shirt and kakis with careful creases, and he always drove a car the same shade of light blue. Harvey said he looked up to Bowers because he carried himself like a civilian soldier.
Later, Harvey had friends who worked at John’s Restaurant and often spotted Bowers there having intense conversations with other white men. But everybody stayed on their side of the race line and paid the white men no mind. Harvey has since wondered while his friends were pouring Bower’s coffee, if these men weren’t openly planning the bombing of a church or a synagogue or someone’s home, never giving a thought that a black employee might overhear.
But the thing that struck me most about Harvey’s story was his recollections of the Willie McGee trial. Harvey said he was only six at the time of the execution. McGee’s relatives lived on Harvey’s street and for most of his young life, rumors of McGee’s daily beatings and torture hung heavy over the neighborhood, filling folks with fear and dread. When it was finally over, the overall feeling in the black community was one of sad relief. People thought that perhaps, after over five years of incarceration in white jails, Willie McGee was better off dead.
After the execution, Harvey said that many black fathers forced their sons to go to Christian’s Funeral Home where the McGee’s body lay. “But it wasn’t for the viewing,” Harvey said, “It was for the message.”
When he resisted looking at McGee’s body, his father lifted young Harvey up and held him above the casket. Then his father pronounced to the six year old, “This is what happens with you mess with white women.” But Harvey can’t remember what he saw. He blocked it out.
He may not remember the sight of McGee’s body, but he never forgot that experience. Nor did he forget when, four years later, soon after the Emmitt Till lynching, his father became furious with his son when he heard Harvey come whistling down the street. It shocked Harvey. His whistling had always been a source of pride. In fact several people I interviewed remember Harvey as a boy who sure knew how to whistle a tune. They even called him “The Whistler.”
But after word got back to Laurel that a boy not much older than Harvey had been beaten, shot, tied to a gin fan and thrown into the Sunflower River, all for whistling at a white woman, Harvey’s father warned his son he’d better never catch the boy whistling again. Something so innocent as whistling your favorite love song had become a matter of life and death to an eleven-year old boy.
As I talk with folks, black and white, who lived through this time, I often wonder what impact these early impressions could make on a young child’s life.
Harvey shared with me a story that helped me better understand. When he was in California working on his masters degree in government, there was a girl whom he really liked. He can remember her name to this day, forty years later. She was white. Even though she was in his study group, he could never bring himself to initiate a friendship with her. Every time he tried, it all came back. The memory of being held above the casket of a dead man. A father’s warning, ”This is what happens when you mess with a white woman.” Any words of friendship were choked off by fear. “It becomes part of your DNA,” Harvey explained. “The fear and the caution never leave you.”
I was having lunch with my cousin at the Reserve the other day, and I related Harvey Warren’s story. A look of surprised recognition passed over my cousin’s face. “Oh, that’s what they meant!”
“That’s what who meant?” I asked.
She said that when she was a teenager in the ‘60’s she had a job at Pasquale’s Pizza. My cousin has always been the adventurous type and she decided she wanted to become friends with the two black girls who also worked there. Nobody she knew had black friends. They all decided they would go to the drive-in to see a movie.
Her new friends went home with my cousin so she could change out of her work clothes. While my cousin was dressing she called out to the girls to come join her in the bedroom. They adamantly refused to do so.
“Don’t be silly,” my cousin said. “I don’t mind.”
One finally explained, dead serious, “We can’t. It’s bad luck to see a white woman without any clothes on!”
My cousin thought it a silly superstition at the time, only to learn, over forty years later, the grave significance of that custom, handed down by generations of black mothers and fathers, in an effort to keep their children alive.
Anne Sanders
Searching for the Truth about Willie McGee
Part 1
Award winning journalist and Laurel native Anne Sanders remembers the Willie McGee case well. She was even invited to view the execution, and if she had accepted she would have been the only woman present.
That was not unusual for Mrs. Sanders. She was a real trailblazer for women and often found herself in situations dominated by men. She even covered the wrestling matches at the Civic Center!
“I loved Brenda Starr in the funny papers because she had so many adventures.” Indeed, Mrs. Sanders has had her share of adventures. What began as a summer job in 1944 at the Laurel Leader Call evolved into a career that has spanned over half a century in journalism and gave her access to six Presidents. She declares that her favorite interview was with Ike before he had announced his run for the nation’s top office. He called her affectionately “Ann ‘Mississippi’ Sanders” and patted her hand throughout he interview.
Ike asked her “What’s a little girl like you doing in Kansas?”
She must have disarmed him, because this “little girl” from Mississippi was the very first reporter to get the General to say on the record that he was considering a run for the Presidency. Overnight the name “Anne Sanders” was known in every newsroom in the country.
But she had no interest in watching McGee’s execution. “I couldn’t stand the idea of it. Odell McRae who was the sports editor at the time took my place.”
Instead, she chose to stand in the courtyard in that throng of people. I asked her about the mood. “They weren’t an unruly mob. This thing had been going on such a long time, people just wanted to see it over.”
It had certainly been a long journey for everybody, including Mrs. Sanders. It began over five years ago in 1945 when McGee was first accused of rape.
“The rape happened across the street from where I was staying with my parents.” Mrs. Sanders said Willie McGee used to work at McRae’s Service Station on Ellisville Boulevard. The victim was a very attractive woman and just had a new baby. Her husband worked at the counter of the post office downtown.
Mrs. Sanders remembers that the victim “…was a very quiet woman, a real lady. Brunette, tall and slender. Very pleasant but not outgoing. And she had such pretty daughters.”
With a reporter’s eye for the story, she details a vivid picture of the crime. “Willie followed the victim home and knew where she lived. Her husband had gone into the living room to sleep, because she had a colicky baby in bed with her. Willie cut the screen, climbed into the room and got into bed with her. She thought it was her husband, until Willie put a knife to her throat and told her that if she made a sound he would cut her throat and the baby’s. He raped her with his knife to the baby’s throat.”
“After the rape, the victim thought she knew who it was but couldn’t be sure. But she was menstruating at the time and when they found Willie, he had blood on his undershorts. That’s’ what convicted him.”
Mrs. Sanders said he was arrested and taken to the Jones County Jail. When they found out, members of the victim’s family and their friends went to the jail and demanded that McGee be turned over to them for lynching. The deputies shepherded him across the catwalk that led from the jail to the courthouse, into a car and then raced him straightaway to Hinds County to their “lynch-proof” jail. They kept them there until the first trial.
When they brought him back, according Mrs. Sanders, they transported him in a National Guard truck, surrounded by soldiers and dressed in a soldier’s camouflage outfit. “And that’s the way they tried him. In that uniform.”
During the trial Mrs. Sanders sat only a few feet away from McGee at the defense table, but she wasn’t allowed to interact with him.
“I’ve never seen anybody that scared in my life,” she remembers. “He acted like a zombie. He wouldn’t look at anybody. He sat just staring straight ahead into space. Of course he was terrified they would bust in there any minute and lynch him. Then I saw a puddle of water at his feet. He was so scared he had wet his pants.”
Next week in Part 2 we follow Anne Sanders’ coverage of the Willie McGee Trial, conviction and execution.
Anne Sanders
Searching for the Truth about Willie McGee
Part 2
When they called the victim to testify, they cleared the courtroom. Willie never took the stand to defend himself. “I really believe he was too stupid to testify,” Mrs. Sanders concludes.
It was a short trial. The all white jury of men was out only two and a half minutes and then Judge Burkett sentenced him to die by electrocution.
But it was not to be, as least not right away. Mrs. Sanders explains. “Because of some technicality it was reversed. And retried. By this time the NAACP from New York had got involved and hired him a white lawyer, and they had Willie wearing a suit. Fixed him up real nice. And again they cleared the courthouse when the victim testified.”
Again the jury found Willie guilty, sentenced to die and again it was overturned. This time because there had been no blacks on the jury.
“The third trial they got Bella Abzug and some other NAACP lawyers to come down,” Mrs. Sanders says angrily. “They put out lies about how she had met him at the service station and had been having an affair for two years. But I don’t think she had even been living here for two years. They even pumped Willie’s wife to admit that she knew about the affair but hadn’t done anything about it. It was all lies!”
Mrs. Sanders is still visibly upset about this. “It was all make believe. Got everybody stirred up. They got black witnesses to come out of the woodwork to testify about that affair.”
They put three blacks on the jury panel but he was still convicted.
“I examined that electric chair. It was an iron contraption. Set up against judge’s bench facing the courtroom.” But Mrs. Sanders had no desire to see the grim machine in operation.
That’s why she was standing outside the courthouse the evening of the execution. It was a cool night, she remembers, but the heat from the excited crowd warmed things up quite a bit. Off and on the portable generators sitting up on the flatbed trucks would rev up and roar above the noise of murmuring crowd, dimming the streetlights when they did.
A little after 12:00 midnight, those generators sent the final surge through McGee’s body. Anne was standing right below the courthouse balcony and swears she could smell burning flesh from the upstairs window. Soon the bailiff came out onto the balcony and announced to the crowd, “Willie McGee is dead.”
“You never heard such an uproar of clapping and cheering in your life,” she remembers. “But people weren’t an unruly mob like the Northern papers said. Once they got the news they had been waiting for, they quietly dispersed.”
She explains, “This thing had taken three trials and over five years and a lot of money. I think what people were feeling was relief it was finally over.”
Of course it wasn’t over for everyone. The victim had a complete nervous breakdown and ended up spending time in a psychiatric hospital. “It was hard on them all. They left town soon after.”
And it’s not over for the family of the victim. The oldest daughter visited with Mrs. Sanders not long ago. She was going to Gardiner High School when those rumors were being spread about her mother and is still troubled by them to this day. Mrs. Sanders says this daughter, now in her seventies, is writing a book trying to clear her mother’s name. She’s visited Laurel several times to gather information.
That’s in addition to another book soon to be published that attempts to clear Willie McGee’s name. This story did not die with McGee or even with the untimely death of the victim.
And after dozens of interviews, I am left with the impression that it’s not over for many in the black community. They still feel a great wrong was committed the night of the execution. The State had executed a man for a crime that no white man had ever lost his life for. In addition, most blacks I’ve talk with, who either remember the story or have had it handed down to them, do not believe Willie McGee was guilty. Most of the blacks and as well as a few of the whites believe that the relationship was mutual.
Stories are like that. They take on a life of their own, and eventually the truth becomes more elusive than the facts. Facts are easy. The truth however is more difficult.
Norman Jones
Enemy Territory
Norman Jones says that as a young man, he never understood why people carried on so when they lost a parent. Until it happened to him. He had spent most of his life separated from his mother and when she died, he never got over it. He can’t go to a funeral to this day without falling apart.
He blames the long absence from his mother on the terrifying events in Laurel that surrounded the Willie McGee case. That pervasive sense of terror caused him to flee his home, his beloved mother and all of his friends, beginning a self-imposed exile from Jones County lasting forty years.
As a boy Norman Jones knew little about fear. When it came time to defend his turf, Norman Jones wasn’t one to back away from a fight. One evening back in 1940 that instinct came close to costing him his life. He was 15 and walking his girlfriend home from the movies down Central Avenue.
This was familiar territory for Norman, as well as for most blacks who lived in K.C. Bottom. They trod up and down Central daily to shop in the white-owned stores, to go to school and to work.
Norman said that the prevailing custom of the era was for blacks to step off the sidewalk to let a white person pass. And as luck would have it, as Norman and his date proceeded down the sidewalk, a white boy, about his age, came walking toward him.
But on this particular day, Norman Jones, a teenage boy with a girl to impress, was not in the yielding mood.
He turned to his girlfriend. “You walk on. I’ll meet up with you later,” he told her. “I’m not going to yield this sidewalk.”
When the white boy passed, he roughly bumped Norman, teaching him his place. Instinctively Norman “whacked the boy upside the head.”
It was then that Norman realized what he had done. He had put himself as well as his girlfriend in mortal danger. He quickly caught up with the girl and they both ran for safety across the tracks and home.
“I lived in dread for the next few weeks. I didn’t know if the boy recognized me. Or who he had told.” Norman learned defending that sidewalk came with a price.
Norman graduated Oak Park High School in June of 1943 on a Friday, and on Saturday he was at Camp Shelby being inducted into the Army. Now he had an entire country to defend. He was shipped overseas and before his tour was over, he saw Africa, India, and Burma. He was mustered out on December 1 of 1945, excited about coming home to see his wife and his mother back in Laurel.
What he didn’t know was that something had happened to his hometown while he was away at war. Willie McGee had been arrested the month before, accused of raping a white woman. He was outside of Jackson behind bars in the Rankin County mob-proof jail, waiting to be brought back to Laurel in only two days to be indicted.
Emotions were running high all over Jones County. There was talk of lynching and black uprisings. The Guard had already been called up to protect McGee. Norman Jones came home from a War won, to one raging on the sidewalks of his hometown, but he was oblivious to it all. He didn’t know a thing about Willie McGee.
Back at the Hattiesburg bus station, Norman spotted a H.S. football buddy, Fats Cole, who offered Norman a ride home to Laurel, saving him the $2.05 the Army had given him for bus fare. When they got to Laurel, Norman asked his friend to let him out on Central downtown. “I hadn’t been to Laurel in so long, I just wanted to walk home.” This was a fateful decision.
To this day, he doesn’t know why his friend didn’t warn Norman that he was stepping out of that car and into territory more dangerous than he has seen during the war. The very same sidewalk he had successfully defended as a boy.
“I started walking down Central. I got my batch bag over my shoulder, the two stripes on my arm, the two little battle stars; I’m in my uniform. I feel ten feet tall.”
That feeling quickly evaporated. He noticed there was not another black face to be seen.
“All of these white men start coming out of the stores and staring at me,” he remembers. “Nobody said anything, but they were all looking. I knew they were going to take my life. You can tell.”
Even today at 73 Norman Jones does not look like a man who scares easily. He appears lean and fit, and carries himself with the discipline of a soldier. But he said, “Serving in the military was nothing compared to this. I was so afraid, I could hardly walk. Then I see three or four white men in a huddle. They were talking to each other and I could tell they were talking about me and it wasn’t good.”
Jones picked up his pace as he moved down the sidewalk. “I see some start following me. I knew if I could make it to the tracks into K.C. Bottom I would be safe. They wouldn’t follow me in there.”
Sure enough, as soon as he jumped the tracks, the men stopped.
Norman at last got to his mother’s house. He had wanted to surprise her and hadn’t told her or his wife that he was coming home. His mother was surprised all right. As soon as she saw him she exclaimed, “How did you get here!”?
“What do you mean?’ he asked. “Aren’t you glad to see me?’
When he told her that he had walked from downtown on Central, she was shaken. “Did they bother you?”
When he assured her he was fine, she went on to tell him about Willie McGee. How he was going to be electrocuted for sure and how many blacks had reservations about whether he was guilty or not; that perhaps the whole thing was consensual. Everybody, black and white was upset.
“They don’t want no colored men downtown,” she told him.
Norman Jones stayed in Laurel just 26 more days. “December 26th was my mother’s birthday,” Jones recalls. “I stayed for that.” But on the 27th, he and his wife were on a train headed North.
“While I was home in Laurel, I never left K.C. Bottom until the night I caught the train out of there. I was that scared. I didn’t even want to catch a train in the daylight.”
Milwaukee was to be his home for the next four decades. The first seven years, he was too frightened to return to Laurel, even to visit his mother.
He did good up North. He got a job with the bus company in Milwaukee, worked himself through the ranks and retired as a division superintendent, with 412 men working under him.
Today Norman counts his blessings. He’s thankful he served in the Army. “I got to see and do things that only rich folks get to.” And he finally moved back to Laurel in 1986. His mother passed in 1999. He’s thankful he got to spend time with her before she died.
“She loved to go to town,” he recalls fondly. “I got to drive her. Sometimes she would go to town three times a day!”
Of course times have changed and the sidewalks downtown are safe for him and his children and grandchildren. But he also knows he missed a lot during those 40 years.
“Maybe I would have left anyway,” Norman confessed to me. “And maybe not. I had a good work ethic. Momma made sure of that. I could have made it here. Maybe done better. But some things you can’t explain. That thing changed me. I knew I had to go.”
Prosecuting Willie McGee
Part 1
Not everybody has had the honor of being called a “Nazi” by William Faulkner. But according to Jon Swartzfager, his father held that distinction. It happened during the time of the Willie McGee episode, when the task of prosecuting the twice-convicted rapist, whose case had already created an international firestorm and become a political hot potato, fell in the lap of Laurel’s newly elected D.A., Paul “Polly” Swartzfager.
Jon remembers the morning they announced his father’s election. It was 1948 and Jon was eight years old at the time. His mother had gathered the children at the foot of the stairs and they all waited until their father emerged from his bedroom. “Now, y’all clap for him,” his mother had instructed. They let out with a round of wild applause as the new D.A. walked sleepily down the stairs in his shorts and tee shirt.
Jon says, “I didn’t know what it meant. But I knew it was special.”
D.A. Paul Swartzfager soon got a reputation for his flair in the courtroom. “I think he might have always felt a little inferior, because he didn’t have a degree from the big colleges. He wasn’t quite six feet, but he had a commanding presence. You knew when he walked into the room.”
Whether it was because of overachievement or natural talent, Paul Swartzfager soon became known for his oratory and cross-examination.
“I was fascinated by him,” Jon remembers. “The minute the school bell rang, I would run for the courthouse. They would put speakers outside because the courtroom would be packed. Just so people could hear ‘Polly,’ make his final arguments. Dad felt like he didn’t make a proper final argument if he didn’t have half the men on the jury crying. He was quite an orator. Back in those days people liked that. The Billy Graham type of approach. A lot of religion put in the final argument.”
It fell on Polly Swartzfager to prosecute Willie McGee. “I believe my dad had reservations about the case. It had been tried twice and had been reversed twice. And the third time it fell in my father’s lap.”
Jon says that down deep, he just didn’t know if his father really believed in the death penalty. While he had been county prosecutor, the duty fell to Polly to prosecute one of his best Army buddies.
Swartzfager won the case and his friend was given the death sentence. He was executed on Thanksgiving Day.
“Every Thanksgiving it was hell around my house,” Jon remembers. As the holiday approached, “Dad would go into deep depression.”
Jon believes his father was personally concerned for Willie McGee and believes that concern stemmed from the execution of his friend.
Pressure was enormous on Swartzfager to send Willie McGee to the chair. Jon remembers many late-night telephone calls and hushed conversations. He heard his father tell his mother, I’ve got to go out, and her crying, “Don’t go. Please, don’t go.”
“What he was doing was going to the VFW and meeting with large groups of men who were enraged about the verdict being reversed twice. They were extracting promises from him about what he was going to do. Basically they were threatening him.”
Paul Swartzfager was getting it both sides. His best friend and drinking buddy, William Faulkner, who was among dozens of celebrities including Einstein and Jean Paul Sartre speaking out on behalf of McGee, publically called Paul a Nazi. Paul replied famously in the Clarion Ledger that Faulkner has either been “seduced by his own fictitious imaginations or has aligned himself with the Communists.”
Then Jon shared with me the most disturbing bit of information of our entire interview. “Before Willie McGee was prosecuted by my father, and being prepared for trial,” Jon said, “my brother was kidnapped by a carload of men.”
I asked Jon to tell me the names of these men.He didn’t know. But he explains that they probably knew that his father was a softhearted man. There was no doubt that his father was clever enough to try the case and get a conviction.
“Hell, I could have tried the trial at 10 years old and got a conviction,” Jon says, “The feelings were just so high.”
But these men also knew that Swartzfager was clever enough to make certain the verdict would be reversed again on appeal, thus sparing the life of Willie McGee. These men were desperate and wanted to make sure this verdict stuck.
And if it didn’t, they wanted Swartzfager to know that his twelve-year old son would be killed. These men were bold and operated out in the open. They picked up Swartzfager’s boy right in front of his office on South Magnolia, in the light of day, just down from the police station. This is how Jon says it happened.
His mother was due at the office to pick up both her husband and her son to bring them home, since the family had only one car. Polly Swartzfager told his son to go on ahead to wait on his mother, he would meet him out front in a couple of minutes. When his father stepped outside his office, the boy was nowhere in sight. Swartzfager checked the Western Auto across the street. The barbershop next door. Within a few minutes, a pretty large crowd was helping him look for the boy.
“About an hour later a car drove up with the crowd still standing there,” Jon said. “They let my brother out. He wasn’t harmed. Wasn’t even crying.”
The men then told his dad, “If you don’t do what the hell you’re supposed to do, this is just to show you what we can do, are capable of doing, and will do.”
Next Week, Polly Swartzfager prosecutes Willie McGee
Prosecuting Willie McGee
Part 2
He was only 10 years old, but Jon Swartzfager remembers well the night they executed Willie McGee. “They brought down the traveling electric chair and set it up in the courthouse. The damn thing was broadcast on the radio! That’s how ghoulish it was.”
On that particular cool, May evening, the eyes of the world were focused on Laurel, Mississippi. Twice before on his “death day,” McGee had been reprieved by the courts at the last moment.
Now, his lawyers were in Jackson and Washington trying to get another stay of execution. Papers all over the world had their reporters in Laurel, tying up any phone they could find, so they could announce to the world the instant the thing was settled, one way or the other. Crowds had gathered in New York and Washington waiting somberly to hear the news of Willie McGee. Over a thousand were on the courthouse lawn in Laurel.
Many said at the time, including Mayor Carroll Gartin and Governor Wright, that the fact Willie McGee had made it this far without being lynched should reflect positively on Mississippi.
In many ways, it was a miracle that McGee had survived this long. Jon says he knows for certain that during the trial a certain law enforcement officer gave the victim’s husband a gun and said, “Just go up and blow his damned head off and get it over with. Nobody going to prosecute you.” Jon said the man wouldn’t do it, “much to his credit.”
Jon remembers that evening his uncle, who was a physician, coming to the house to pick up Polly and take him to the execution. He would be one of the official witnesses. “Dad had been bracing himself for it. Drinking a bit. Dad was such a softhearted guy.”
There in the kitchen, Jon remembers his uncle pulling a pistol out of his pocket and telling Polly, “Here, you might need this tonight when you go up there.”
Jon can still hear his mother screaming, “No, for God sakes! Don’t”
“Dad didn’t take it,” Jon says. He shakes his head. “That scared me.”
“Later I remember listening to radio through the door where my mother had gathered with friends. They were listening to the broadcast of the electrocution. All the males had gone to the courthouse. I remember them talking about some kid who had climbed a tree and was looking inside the window. I was young, but old enough to be appalled. It was a damn zoo.”
Years later Jon learned what happened that night between his father and Willie McGee. “My dad said when he got there, he asked to see Willie by himself.”
Jon’s father was well aware that it was not allowed to provide the prisoner with any alcohol. “But my dad had sneaked in a pint of whiskey under his coat. He went in and sat with Willie for about an hour. Gave him some whiskey. Gave him some bottle courage.” The two men talked quietly as they drank.
After the execution, Swartzfager was a hero to many. “When my dad ran for reelection, one of the editors of the Jackson Clarion Ledger said that if for no other reason, Polly Swartzfager should be reelected for having convicted Willie McGee.”
But Jon says he doesn’t know for sure what his father would have done if he hadn’t had children to protect. Perhaps the men were right about Polly Swartzfager. Perhaps he would have tried the case in a way that would have caused it to be reversed again. Maybe he would have tried to save Willie’s life.
What Jon does know is this: Willie McGee haunted his father and him for many years afterwards.
“My personal feeling is that if he did it, they shouldn’t have taken his life for it.” The press forcefully and repeatedly pointed out that no white man in Mississippi had ever been executed for the same crime.
What about the talk that the relationship between Willie McGee and the white victim was mutual, I wondered? McGee’s defense team tried hard to spin that story internationally, but they never brought it up in trial. Today, in the Black portion of Laurel’s citizenry, that is the prevalent account.
Jon doesn’t think it would have made much difference. “If they had used the defense that it was consensual, he would have been convicted for sure. They would have really socked it to him if he said that she was involved in it. Tarnishing a white woman’s reputation that way.” It was the paradox of a past era.
But like they say, past is prologue.
The victim’s daughter contacted Jon not long ago. He remembers her from school. “She was a lovely girl,” Jon recalls. “A majorette, only a couple of years old than me.” She is now in her mid-sixties and the case haunts her as well. She told Jon that she’s upset about what her children and her grandchildren were finding on the Internet about Willie McGee and her mother. She wants to redeem her mother’s name.
So the story of Willie McGee is still being written. I’m learning that some stories are like that. They become living things, myths that we live by. The story of Willie McGee still shapes Jon Swartzfager to this very day, just as it shaped his father.
It shapes the child of the victim just as it shaped her mother. And the child knows in her bones that the story has the power to shape her children and her children’s children.
Willie McGee knew the power of the story. His last request to his wife was what she would tell their children. He wrote, “Never forget to tell them why they killed their daddy.” I’m sure that will shape his offspring for generations to come.
And even though I never heard the story about what happened to Willie McGee in my hometown on the day that I was born until I was forty-five, it shaped and is still shaping me.
They say you can’t kill a story. Not even by refusing to talk about it or by erasing it from the history books or even expunging it from the Internet. It won’t die because it becomes part of us, of how we see ourselves and each other. It can uplift or it can leave us twisted and broken.
I guess the best we can do is to be vigilant in the stories that we pass on while we are still here, because it’s the only part of us that lives after we are gone.
The Seat of Judgment: Mississippi’s Traveling Electric Chair
Willie McGee’s case riveted the eyes of the world on Laurel. But there was a supporting character in the drama that created almost as much sensation—Mississippi’s portable electric chair, the only one of its kind in the world.
Our famous death machine came about after a series of botched hangings in the ‘30’s turned the stomachs of even the most bloodthirsty citizens. A less grizzly, more humane method of execution was demanded. In vogue at the time was the electric chair, but there was only one problem. Where you could hang a body anywhere, anytime, at very little public expense, an electric chair was a considerable investment, cumbersome, and always needed to be housed in a central location with ample electricity to “juice the victim.”
The obvious home for such a machine was at the State penitentiary at Parchman, but the folks in Sunflower County let out a howl and said no way they were going to be known as “Death County.” Back in those days, whatever the Delta said, went, so the legislature wrangled until one creative lawmaker finally thought outside the box.
“Let’s get us one that’s portable and haul it from county to county.”
It had never in the history of the planet been done, but they found a company in Memphis willing to give it a shot and soon they had constructed the world’s first portable electric chair. It was a good deal. For $4000 the State got a portable generator, switchboard, oak chair, helmet, straps, electrodes and 600 feet of electric cable, all hauled on a pretty, silver-painted truck.
It was quite an achievement and the whole country took notice. But it was hard to tell if they were truly impressed, or just laughing up their sleeve at us.
Time Magazine, like most the nationals, issued a story on our modern contraption. The Time article ran under the morbidly humorous title, “Death on Wheels.”
And it didn’t help that the first electrocutioner was not only an ex-convict and a practicing drunk, but also a backroads vaudevillian, a hypnotist that went by the name of Dr. Alzedi Yogi. His real name was Jimmy Thompson, raised over in Simpson County near Sullivan’s Hollow. He never lost his passion for the stage and enthusiastically showed off his full-body tattoos of black cats, snakes and strawberries. Jimmy was widely quoted in papers across the country saying things like, “I’m always polite. The first thing I tell a client to put him at ease is to have a seat.” Or, “Rapists need more voltage than murderers because of their great strength and sexual drive.” He warmly referred to his beloved machine as “my old shocking chair.”
All this made the atmosphere at executions circus-like. One Philadelphia, Mississippi observer remembered execution days clearly. “A crowd gathered late at night on the courthouse square with chairs, crackers and children, waiting for the current to be turned on and the street lights to dim.”
Not everybody was amused. George McNeil of Laurel was just a boy when he first saw the machine. The white elementary school back in the ‘40’s let out almost onto the courthouse lawn. He remembers the kids being treated to the sight of several trustees lowering the dreadful chair off the truck and carrying it into the courthouse. He was stunned. “The whole thing was gruesome,” he recalls.
It was also not funny to most blacks—perhaps because they were the overwhelming odds-on-favorite to be the next victim of what they called “that killin’ machine.” In some towns, like Port Gibson and Durant, blacks were forcibly marched in from the countryside and lined up by the hundreds to watch one of their own be executed. “Let that be a lesson to you,” was the sentiment.
Jon Swartzfager, son of the D.A. who prosecuted McGee, remembers being appalled that on the night of Willie’s execution in 1951, WFOR Radio hauled in some remote transmitters out of Hattiesburg and broadcast the execution live. I couldn’t believe what Jon was telling me. But one day at USM’s Center for Oral History, I stumbled upon an old recording of the event.
Jon was right. I listened as the radio men, obviously more comfortable announcing football games than electrocutions, gave a play-by-play, commenting on the fine weather, the good behavior of the crowd and even the precious younguns who shimmied up the water oaks to peer into the second-story courtroom to get a first-hand look at Willie’s last moments in the chair. You can even hear the rebel yells from the crowd as the generator begins its death groan.
In the 15-year history of our chair, Willie McGee was one of 56 black males executed. There were 16 white males, none of which got the chair for rape, McGee’s crime. There was one black woman. In what Thompson called a double-header, two fourteen year-old black boys accused of accosting a white woman were to be executed on the same day. The problem was they hadn’t yet grown big enough to fit the chair. It was suggested that Jimmy fix them up like children at the dinner table and let them sit on a stack of books. It went off without a hitch.
Willie McGee was one of the last to sit in that chair before the State’s love for modernity brought on the gas chamber, over the squeals from Sunflower County, and the chair was retired in 1955. Jimmy Thompson was retired much earlier by Governor Paul Johnson, Sr. for drinking on the job.
There were those in the crowd that night who believed Willie was still alive. They were certain that his Yankee lawyers, who over the past five-and-a-half years showed a knack for winning McGee a reprieve from the chair at the very last moment, had smuggled him out of Mississippi. When McGee’s body was hauled out of the courthouse on a gurney under the white sheet, they were positive there was a dummy under there. And when Mr. Peter Christian, the black Laurel undertaker, refused to lift the sheet, they were convinced it was a conspiracy to rob them of McGee’s death. A paper in Jackson even felt the need to write a notice two weeks later to stem the rumor. It was entitled, “Don’t Be Misled, Willie McGee is Dead.”
Of course blacks didn’t need to be convinced. They knew Willie was dead the second a white woman pointed the finger at him. And that is a good reminder. Even though it is easy to be glib about the absurd state of affairs at the time, families alive today, like the McGee’s, remember losing a loved one in an atmosphere that can only be termed carnival-like. That is a true tragedy.
The chair is on display in the lobby area of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers’ Training Academy in Pearl.
Mrs. Maycie Gore
The Defiant One
When you go around asking complete strangers to reveal their memories about past events—like Willie McGee, the Knights, Leontyne Price, Sam Bowers and the KKK—you get a lot less and a lot more than you bargained for.
I secretly hope that this person will be the one who finally solves the mystery and fills in the blanks. To that degree, I am always a little let down. Each person holds only his piece to the puzzle.
But then again, I end up getting more that I could have hoped, because many people, along with that bit of information, offer something even more valuable. A glimpse into their own history. They give me the gift of their life.
I’m thinking now of Mrs. Maycie Gore. Indeed she has memories of Willie McGee. She was 18 and working at Snow White Cleaners across from the jail and says she can still see Willie gazing forlornly out the window of his cell. The word in the black community was that he was there for a crime he didn’t commit. Maycie and the other black workers would pool their nickels and pennies and carry the fistful of change over the jailer, telling him it was for Willie, to buy cigarettes.
That was her total memory of Willie McGee. Maybe it doesn’t say much about Willie, but it says volumes about Mrs. Gore. That act of generosity was also an act of defiance. She is not the kind of person who allows the hopelessness of a situation to rob her of the ability to act, even if the act is only symbolic. She will not surrender without a stand. She told me, “You have to find a way to defend yourself, to satisfy you conscience.”
She said, “I guess I got it from my daddy. Nobody called him nigger and walked away.”
That seems to be the theme of her life. As a child she could do nothing about being forced to sit in the back of the bus on a wood plank “reserved” for black people, while the white kids got to ride up front. But that didn’t stop her from pulling those same kids out of the tree and beating them up when they threw rocks at her brothers.
She tells me another story. When she was a young teen she got a job with her sisters in the kitchen at the downtown Walgreens. Blacks were hired to cook the food that only white folks were allowed to eat. One day while they were fixing a sandwich for a white boy, the girls noticed him laughing at them, and mouthing the word, “nigger.”
The sisters couldn’t change the segregationist practice at Walgreen’s lunch counter, but they knew they had to do something to “defend their conscience.” One of the sisters spat onto the boy’s sandwich before she placed the bread on top. While the boy ate his sandwich, the girls stared at him and giggled. He had no idea what was so funny.
“Now it was our turn to laugh,” Mrs. Gore chuckles. She winks at me. “Always be good to your waitress.”
In 1964, when she let a white freedom worker from Michigan stay in her home, the Klan threatened to dynamite her house. “I remember plenty of nights, hunkering down in the hallway with my family, waiting to be blown up.” But she let the boy remain with her all summer.
Later in the 1960’s she ventured out to an organizing meeting for the Freedom Democratic Party being held at the old Providence Church. Only 10 people had the courage to show. Mrs. Gore was elected secretary.
The next day the white press printed her full name and address in the paper, placing her and her husband’s lives and jobs at risk. One of her jobs was watching the children of a white preacher in Laurel who was rumored to be in with the Klan. Several times before, he had tried to pump Maycie for information about what “the colored were up to.” This was just before Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman’s bodies were found up in Neshoba County. When she went to work the next day, the preacher was sitting at the breakfast table with the paper in his hand.
“If you are going work for me, Maycie, you’re going to have to curtail your activities.” She was silent. She simply walked over the refrigerator, reached on top to get her purse, and left the preacher sitting there.
The incident only strengthened her conviction to be a community organizer. Later she worked setting up Head Start schools driving all over Jones and Wayne Counties, recruiting parents.
“Of course what we were really doing was registering people to vote, and the Klan knew that.” Again there were threats on her and her family’s life. Unmarked cars full of white men were always tailing her.
At 78 Maycie Gore hasn’t slowed down. She’s still a fighter, whether it is going up against City Hall to keep the beer joints out of her neighborhood or protecting Laurel’s trees.
The day I visited her she was still riled up about a comment Sarah Palin had made about Obama, putting him down because he was a “only” a community organizer.
But she found a way to fight back and satisfy her conscience. John McCain sent her a fundraising letter admonishing her “not to sit idly by” and let Obama win. Mrs. Gore said she took a pencil and underlined that part of the letter and then wrote, “Senator McCain, don’t worry. I will not be sitting idly by, because I am a COMMUNITY ORGANIZER and will be out there organizing to make sure you don’t win!”
And of course that’s what she did.
By the way, when I left her house that day, she was still considering whether or not to mail that letter—without a stamp—forcing McCain/Palin to pay the postage. Like with Willie’s cigarettes, it may be only small change, but the value to her conscience is priceless.
Jim Crow’s Double-Edged Sword
I’m writing this on a plane departing Minneapolis, and I have no idea what to expect when the 757 makes its final descent into Las Vegas. In a few hours I will be having dinner with the family of Willie McGee. Bridgette McGee Robinson is his granddaughter. Her Aunt Della is his only surviving child. She just celebrated her 73rd birthday. After a Laurel relative sent them a copy of my column from the ReView, I was invited to Nevada to talk with them about Willie McGee.
From phone conversations with Bridgette, one thing she said stood out in my mind. “I hope that my grandfather is innocent of the things they say he did. But if he was guilty, I want to know that, too. I just want to follow the story wherever it leads me.” I was truly glad to hear her say that.
I haven’t always run into that sentiment during my search for Willie McGee. Some of the folks closest to the case, especially family members, have sacrosanct versions of the account, and woe be to the naïve interviewer who would suggest someone else might have a different story. I’ve been threatened with libel if I veered too far from their telling of the truth. One woman actually told me that she would talk with me only if I worked to exonerate the rape victim, a relative of hers.
I politely declined. I told her that my interest was in uncovering the stories, not in casting judgment. I promised I would tell her story accurately, but I couldn’t let her censor other’s people’s truths. I sympathize with her motivation to protect the memory of her relative, but once you turn a blind eye to one person’s truth, it’s impossible to get your bearings again. When truth becomes optional, everything you say becomes suspect.
I think that’s why so few people I meet believe Willie McGee was guilty. In Jim Crow Mississippi, truth became optional, and because it did, everything that came out of that case was suspect. The fruit of a poisonous tree. Even the innocence of the rape victim is tainted.
On the surface, it looks like McGee was treated more than fairly. He was allowed a change of venue. Twice the Mississippi State Supreme Court overturned his verdict. The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed it. He was granted two reprieves and five stays. And yet today the majority of the people who’ve heard of the case say Willie was framed. With all this access to the justice system, how could that be?
I think it’s because Jim Crow cut both ways. The intent of Jim Crow was to ensure white rule through law and custom. Reading through the transcripts of the trial, you can see where “custom” comes into play.
CUSTOM #1: A BLACK PERSON CAN NEVER DISPUTE THE WORD OF A WHITE PERSON.
Of course that throws the entire search for the truth off track right there. In McGee’s trial his accuser took the witness stand and testified to the rape. But under Jim Crow, her account wasn’t—couldn’t be—called into question. The lawyer who did so would be run out of town. I’m not exaggerating. McGee’s lawyer in the final trial, John Poole from Jackson, was run out of Laurel before he could give his closing argument. He was later disbarred for having the gall to defend McGee against a white woman.
This custom also put at risk any witnesses who might be called to support McGee. Take Rev. Patterson, Willie’s own preacher, who was called to the witness stand. McGee’s lawyer starts by asking what seems to be a simple question. Here’s how the transcript reads:
DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Do you believe that this boy can get a fair trial or not in Jones County at the present time?
The preacher refuses to answer.
JUDGE COLLINS: Go ahead and answer the question, Rev. Patterson. You won’t be bothered as long as you are in this court.
PATTERSON: Judge, I won’t be in this court very long. (Here there is laughter in the courtroom)
Everybody in that courtroom, white and black, understood the consequences of violating Custom #1.
CUSTOM #2: IT IS NOT CONCEIVABLE FOR A RESPECTABLE WHITE WOMAN TO HAVE DESIRES FOR A BLACK MAN.
IF, and I repeat IF, Willie McGee’s affidavit of February, 1951, was true, and he was the object of a one-sided love affair driven by the passions of an unstable white-woman, that testimony could never be presented in court. Willie would be killed quicker for accusing a white woman of enthusiastically getting into bed with him than if he confessed to raping her.
When McGee’s account of an affair was submitted to the Mississippi State Supreme Court, Chief Justice Harvey McGehee commented that the whole idea of a white woman willingly submitting herself to a black man was a “revolting insinuation.” He stated that such a possibility could not be entertained in a Southern court. Such a thing just couldn’t happen.
But like they say, a match can burn twice. I always thought blacks were the only victims of Jim Crow. Now I see how it burned whites as well.
Anne Sanders, who covered the trial for the Laurel Leader Call, did some of her own investigations. She told me she dug up evidence that would shoot fatal holes in McGee’s signed testimony of an affair. But because the victim’s account of the rape was never challenged in court, that evidence never went on the record. Nobody ever saw it because it wasn’t needed.
In fact, some said that the rape victim was bighearted even to allow McGee a trial. She probably was. In those days, all a white woman had to do was to point the finger at a black man. Jim Crow and a made-to-order mob did the rest.
Tragically, the woman’s reputation as well as McGee’s is still being debated today, almost 60 years later. It’s still forcing folks to take sides. That’s what happens when you turn a blind eye to one person’s truth, everyone gets burned. The same Jim Crow that cast doubt upon Willie McGee’s guilt, also cast doubt upon the rape victim’s innocence.
Blind justice only works if it is blind to all, not just a select few. That kind of justice acquits no one.
Healing Stories
After sitting down with dozens of Jones Countians and listening to their memories of Willie McGee—his arrest for raping a white woman, his three trials and finally his execution in the traveling electric chair at the Laurel courthouse—I had hit a dead end. The next logical step would be to interview the surviving family members of both McGee and the rape victim, but where were they? The world seemed to have swallowed them up.
I was about to give up on the story when a couple of chance occurrences put me on a new track.
While sitting in the Forrest County courthouse, poring over transcripts from the second of McGee’s trials, I turned the page and there it was. Someone had slipped a scrap of paper between the pages with a name, address and phone number. It took a moment to understand what I had found. It appeared to be the contact information for the victims’ eldest daughter! Just to make sure, I asked the County Clerk, and she said, yes, one the victim’s children had been there within the last year searching for information about her mother’s case.
I held onto the paper for weeks, wondering if I should call or not. People who remembered her had told me how she had never gotten over the trauma of the trial and its aftermath. I didn’t want to cause her additional pain.
Finally I dialed the number. It’s funny. I was half expecting to hear the youthful voice of the pretty majorette her fellow classmates had described to me. An older woman picked up, then it occurred to me that she must be in her seventies by now. But behind her words, I still detected the shy girl who had stirred the awkward sympathy of her classmates. Several had told me they hadn’t known what to say to a girl whose mother had been raped by a black man in 1940’s Mississippi. Especially, they said, after the McGee’s defense team began to suggest that it was not rape, but an affair. This had to have made her feel isolated and alone, no matter how well intentioned her friends.
We had a long, intense conversation. There were tears as well as flashes of anger. The wounds were still fresh, the memories sharp and clear. We talked of many things, but she asked me to respect her privacy and not make the content of our conversation public. I agreed. But it was clear that the tragedy that befell her family over sixty years ago still haunts her today, and is still shaping her life.
A few days later, a second twist of fate occurred. I got an email from the family of Willie McGee. They now live in Nevada. McGee’s granddaughter said that a relative in Laurel sent her Aunt Della, Willie McGee’s eldest daughter, a copy of a column I had written about her father. They said they wanted to meet with me and tell their story. Of course I said “yes.” I’ll be flying out to meet with them at the end of January.
Fate has brought me in contact with the eldest daughter from each family, two children whose lives have been shaped by heartbreak. According to my math, they were both nine years old when McGee was arrested for the crime, and neither was ever the same again. Both were forced by fear and shame to leave their homes. Both were innocent of any wrongdoing, yet each had to carry a profound burden of guilt and disgrace. It began to occur to me that what these two women have in common is far greater than what separates them.
But this tale of shared stories doesn’t end there. Let me tell you of another incident that came to my attention a few weeks ago. In 1974, Albert Atkins, a 19 year-old black man, was shot and killed in Laurel by a white man named Ronald Hannah, 22, the son of a Jones County pastor. Jessie Atkins, the victim’s older brother, told me that this incident, which sparked demonstrations and a riot, eventually destroyed his family. Not only did it take away his best friend, his brother Al, but the loss also led to his grandmother’s succumbing to the overwhelming grief of losing her favorite grandchild. Because the killer was never charged with a crime, his father was unable to get over the injustice. He began stockpiling guns, filling the house with dozens of them, even obtaining a .357 Magnum, identical to the weapon that took his son’s life. He was never the same again. His health rapidly deteriorated and he died a young man. Today, Jessie’s mother still mourns silently, unable to speak of her loss.
Jessie told me that he was determined to avenge his younger brother’s death. He remembers the night he went to the home of the only Hannah he could find in the phone book. He drove by the house for 3 or 4 hours with a loaded gun in his lap, waiting for someone to show himself. He wasn’t even sure it was the right house. The next day his brother, struggling for his life in his room at the Community Hospital, looked up a Jessie from his bed and said, “Brother, let it go.”
Soon after his brother’s death, Jessie, who had served his country in the military, was sent to Parchman for drug possession and distribution. He roamed around aimless from job to job, bitter about his loss, blaming Ronald Hannah for destroying his family. Jessie resented the fact that the white boy would go on to graduate from college, get married and have a chance at a normal, happy life.
Today Jessie has finally got his own life together. He has tried to do as his brother had asked thirty years earlier, to “let it go.” He’s a hard worker and now owns several properties in Atlanta. He has found Christ and is an ordained minister. He is in a good marriage.
But even today, when he speaks of his brother, he breaks into tears. There is only one thing that he wants. He would like to sit down with his brother’s killer and listen to his side of the story.
“Maybe,” Jessie said, “Ronald will say something that will make me understand. Maybe he would even say he regrets it happening. That would help me and my mother so much.”
The thing I’m learning about stories is that they are never done. A story lives forever, never ceasing to reshape itself, and in the process, it reshapes us. In many stories, if you listen carefully, you can hear a profound ache, a plea for healing and resolution. And because stories don’t die, they give us a second chance at redemption.
I hope the time is near for the two daughters, now both 72, to sit in the same room and tell their stories to one another. I wish the same for Jessie and his brother’s killer. I would like to think it possible for them to talk with each other across race, across time, across guilt and blame and shame. I can’t help but believe they know each other better than they think. And I believe they need each other more than they know. I even believe their stories can redeem each other’s pain.
Someone once said, “In relationship we are wounded and in relationship we are healed.” And sometimes, it is the person who has been a part of the wounding, who holds the secret to our healing. Only they can tell the story that makes us well.
Your piece is informative,and hair raising!
It also awakes one to the realization that even though times have changed racism is yet alive and strong! Not in the same ways,yet here! Listening to the People Mag ten best looking men in america not one of them was a man of color! I really wish men would judge or treat others as they want to be treated!
Do unto others as you desire to be done too you!
Job well done Jon
Thanks, Jesse. That means a lot coming from you. Even though it’s hard sometimes to realized that the way we were taught to see things is not the only way, it’s none the less important. Maybe one day we’ll have a true American Story rather than a white story and a black story.
Hi Jon, its been a long time since I have spoken or heard from you. My Auntie has asked about you several times. I just happen to run accross your story googling my name. Thank you for the wonderful job you did with this story, I will print and share with my Auntie. I prayerfull all is well with you and your family. Thank you again. Bridgette McGee-Robinson
Hello Bridgette! Tell your aunt hello–I hope you both are doing well. Would be great to catch up!
Hi Jon, sorry for the delay on this post., we are both doing well and I will speak with her this evening and will make sure she knows you said hello. I can still be reached at the same phone number if you still have it. Please contact me anytime, I would love to visit with you. I hope you are having a great! summer. Hope to speak with you soon.