Willie McGee was a Black truck driver in Laurel, Mississippi, married to Eliza Jane Patton and the father of four children: Willie Earl, Della, Gracie Lee and Mary. In November 1945 a white Laurel housewife accused him of rape. Over the next five and a half years three trials ended in three convictions, and the sentence was carried out in the Jones County courthouse in Laurel.
McGee was held for more than a month before he confessed. At the first trial, in December 1945, National Guardsmen stood watch and the jury took under three minutes. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed because the judge had refused a change of venue despite a constant mob presence.
Three trials
The retrial, in Hattiesburg in 1946, produced a verdict in eleven minutes and was overturned because Black residents had been shut out of the jury pool. In 1948, back in Laurel, lawyers for the Civil Rights Congress put McGee on the stand, where he testified that he had been tortured into confessing. They left the state before closing arguments, citing mob threats. The jury again convicted him, and the state supreme court and then the United States Supreme Court let the verdict stand.
A case the world watched
McGee's mother, Bessie, first contacted the Civil Rights Congress, a legal defense group with ties to the Communist Party. It argued that the rape statute was applied by race, since no white man in Mississippi had been executed under it, and it said the two had been in a relationship. The courts did not accept that claim, and the question has never been settled. Bella Abzug argued appeals. Dock workers in New Orleans, meatpackers in Chicago and garment workers in New York held work stoppages and collections, and in France Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Richard Wright were among those who organized a demonstration. In April 1951 several thousand people marched in Times Square.
May 8, 1951
On May 6 protesters chained themselves to a pillar of the Lincoln Memorial. Governor Fielding Wright received hundreds of telegrams the day before the execution, and the stays ran out. Just after midnight on May 8, McGee was electrocuted in the same courtroom where he had been sentenced, in Mississippi's portable electric chair. Local stations WAML and WFOR broadcast from the courthouse. Accounts of the crowd outside run from about 500 to as many as 1,000, and a group of white men cheered as the body was carried out. It was taken to Pete Christian's funeral home.
Richard Nixon, the 1952 Republican vice-presidential nominee, said stickers on his car in Switzerland protested "the legalized lynching of Willie McGee." McGee's granddaughter Bridgette McGee-Robinson grew up with a hidden photograph and, at her dying mother's request, went to Laurel for a 2010 radio documentary to learn the truth. She could not find his grave.
Hattiesburg, where the second trial was held, is home to the Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial, on a later chapter of the county's fight over voting. In Laurel, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art tells of the timber fortune that built the town.