Chapter 8, « Mississippi », from Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict. New York: Vintage, 1978, pp. 160-194.

By EARLY 1951, each mail was bringing an extraordinary assortment of mimeographed directives, all sent airmail, many special delivery, all marked "Rush!" from the CRC national office in New York, for Clarence Rossman was now working there as organizational director. Sometimes, if I happened to be in a rush myself, I would stuff his letters into the wastepaper basket unopened, say quietly to myself, "Rush!" and rush.

One day things were slow at the office and I was desultorily opening the familiar envelopes and glancing through the con- tents: "Absolutely essential you get full page ads in all local papers calling for letters to Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright demanding reprieve for Willie McGee. ...Even more essential you send your quota of $10,000 [dashed in by hand] to the National office to cover expenses of legal defense and mass mailings." I skipped on through "Vitally important you get your local city council on record against this legal lynching...resolutions from Young Democrats and Young Republicans condemning this flagrant frame-up." Somewhere buried away were the words: "Imperative you send your full quota of 4 [written in] women on the White Women's Delegation to Mississippi." Followed the time and place where the delegation would forgather-March 10 at an address ill St. Louis, Missouri.

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Madman Rossman had scored again. He knew very well that we could not afford the full-page ads; that no local city council was going to put this case on its agenda; that no Young Democrats or, a fortiori (as Clarence himself might have said), Young Republicans would bestir themselves over this issue; he also knew that no ten thousand dollars for the national office would be forthcoming. But a White Women's Delegation, sounded to me like a marvelous idea. If four were expected from Oakland, there would be scores or hundreds from such Party strongholds as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and our accomplishments could be great. I was determined to be part of this great conclave.

Willie McGee, a thirty-six-year-old black truckdriver in Laurel, Mississippi, had been convicted of raping a white woman despite persuasive evidence that his accuser had long been his mistress. He had, been in prison, under sentence of death, for more than five years. The court transcript and eyewitness accounts of the three trials, together with stories from the local Mississippi press, made sickening reading; at the first trial, which lasted less than a day, the jury had taken two and a half minutes to reach a verdict. It was obvious that a ritual race murder was in the offing. At the heart of the case was the fact that no white had ever been condemned to death for rape in the Deep South, while in the past four decades fifty-one blacks had been executed for this offense.

The CRC had entered the case at the appellate level, after the first trial. Thanks to the skillful work of Bella Abzug of New York and John Coe of Florida, members of the CRC legal panel, there had been two reversals of the guilty verdict and new trials granted. After McGee was found guilty in the third trial, all legal remedies had been exhausted, the only remaining hope being executive clemency. Under the direction of the Party and the CRC, the campaign to save McGee's life had

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reached worldwide proportions. Political Affairs, theoretical journal of the Party, reported "protests of millions in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, the Peoples' Democracies and the people's movements in the capitalist and colonial countries. . . resolutions from the 600,000 strong London Trades Council and the Caribbean Labor Congress." Alas, as was so often the case, the response from London to Peking out- shone our home-grown efforts; yet considering the inclement political climate, these were considerable.

The McGee case had been designated a "national concentration" by the Party, which meant that Party clubs everywhere, in trade unions, neighborhoods, professions, would swing be- hind it in a style of work dating from the days of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro case. Tirelessly we labored, in keeping with United Front strategy, to "broaden" the campaign, to enlist support of trade unions, liberals, churches, the community at large. The Peoples World meticulously recorded every action, its job as Party newspaper to inform, encourage, exhort, stimulate. It reported daily on endeavors and developments, some on a minuscule scale: "200 protest postcards signed..." "$8 collected for telegrams..." "35 signatures gathered outside Sears..." "24 graduate students and junior faculty members at U.C. send a telegram to Governor Wright..." And some of more substantial dimensions: "Marine Cooks & Seawards distribute 10,000 leaflets. .." "day of prayer set by Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance ..." "strong protest from African Methodist Episcopal Bishops' Council. .." "Los Angeles CIO urges stepped-up campaign..." "National CIO appeals to Governor Fielding Wright. .." "six state legislators agree to wire Truman. .." " Albert Einstein, Josephine Baker, pledge support..."

I did my part-writing leaflets and resolutions-fairly mechanically, believing in the justice of the cause yet finding it

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impossible to think myself into the actual situation of blacks in Mississippi; the daily horror of their lives was too far removed from any experience of my own to permit of taking it all in, except in an abstract fashion. The realities of Mississippi began to come alive for me when Willie McGee's wife, Rosalee, arrived in Oakland on a national speaking tour that had been organized by the CRC. She was accompanied by CRC national director William L. Patterson's wife, Louise Patterson, herself an important figure in the Party's black leadership and veteran organizer in the International Labor Defense. I went to meet them at the airport with Mrs. Lofton, powerful church sister of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, deep in the Oakland ghetto. A member of the CRC executive board, Mrs. Lofton ran her church, its huge congregation of over two thousand, its board of deacons, and its minister with an iron hand, and had swung them behind many a CRC fight. Much later, Louise giggled affectionately at her recollection of this, our first meeting: "There you were, looking so English and proper in your tweed skirt, and Mrs. Lofton in her pink satin toque and matching high-heeled shoes. I thought to myself: What an odd pair they are!"

Rosalee McGee, a diminutive twenty-eight-year-old woman who looked much older, had never before been out of Mississippi. On the first lap of her plane journey, from Jackson to New York, many hours in those pre-jet days, she had forgotten to bring the lunch that neighbors had packed for her, and arrived famished. Stewardesses had solicitously offered meals, which she refused, having no idea they were free.

From her account of life in Laurel, and the genesis of the rape charge against her husband, one began to see the macabre contours of oppression in the Deep South. If McGee was executed, she said, he would be the third man in her family to die violently at the hands of white Mississippi. "I saw my nephew

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lynched by six white hoodlums, and my first cousin was put to death in the electric chair ."

Mrs. Hawkins, the white accuser, had pursued McGee relentlessly for years, said Mrs. McGee. "People who don't know the South don't know what would have happened to Willie if he told her no. Down South, you tell a woman like that no, and she'll cry rape anyway. So what else could Willie do? That's why I never got angry at Willie." Eventually, after years of acquiescence to Mrs. Hawkins, McGee did decide to break off the affair. It was at this point that she pressed the rape charge. According to her testimony at the trial, McGee had come into her bedroom in the middle of the night; she did not cry out, she said, for fear of waking her husband and baby; who were sleeping in the next room.

All court appeals had been exhausted. The year before, Clarence himself had gone to Jackson with a delegation ill an effort to persuade the governor to grant executive clemency. Alone in his hotel room, he was ambushed and severely beaten by five men, who had gained access by calling out, "Western Union." A friend of ours in San Francisco had telephoned that evening, sobbing bitterly as she spoke: "Clarence is dying in Jackson." He was in the hospital with a fractured skull, and in terrible danger of lynch mobs gathering outside, she said; we should try to reach the governor to demand his safe conduct out of the state.

Frantically I started telephoning, and to my astonishment soon heard the voice of Governor Wright at the other end. "We don't know nothin' about it, ma'am," he drawled. "But our folks down here sure don't 'preciate outsiders meddlin' in our affairs." Actually, Clarence had escaped without serious injury; he returned radiating his usual bouncing self-confidence: "I pulled over the chair like this, grabbed the lamp like this, and

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really whammed them. They were cops, though, make no mistake about it. Probably sent by the governor."

In the myth-bound mind of the South, the sanctity of white womanhood, nothing less, was at stake in Jackson. Any man, black or white, who dared to intercede for the life of Willie McGee would be fair game for the local Klansmen. Some of that sanctity , the CRC reasoned, might rub off on us, white women from the North, perhaps protect us from physical assault. " Although, Dec, don't be too surprised if them Ku Kluxers give you a whupping," Buddy Green sympathetically suggested. And I still have Virginia Durr's letter, in which she wrote in her nonstop, unpunctuated style: "Now honey you be careful they'll likely tar and feather you and run you out of town on a rail. " This unpleasant fate, she said, had almost overtaken a librarian friend of hers in a small Southern town who had permitted blacks to use the library facilities.

These warnings only whetted my desire to go, to escape from the routine of mass mailings, leaflet distributions, and protest meetings, into the very stronghold of the enemy. Perhaps people generally act from a mixture of motives, and it is hard to sort out mine at this distance in time. For one thing, I did feel Clarence had hit on the only scheme that might have some remote chance of saving McGee's life: to take the case directly to the people of the state that sought to execute him. But I should admit I also hoped it would be a thrilling adventure ( a thought it would have been injudicious to communicate to the comrades, as the Party was squarely opposed to "adventurism" as a manifestation of "left-wing infantilism"), let alone a welcome breather from diapers and housework. Bob, of course, understood immediately, for like me he got positive pleasure out of crossing swords with the Class Enemy. He readily agreed that I should take our car, and he would assume the onerous

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job of lone coper with house and children for the duration of the expedition.

It was not hard to recruit three others to make up our quota of four. They were Evie Frieden, a rollicking, jolly warehouse worker; an absolutely silent young woman of nonexistent personality known as the Youth Comrade; and Rita Baxter, dour top-rank Party leadership cadre. They volunteered, despite a certain amount of grumbling from their husbands, at an Oakland McGee protest meeting. In fact, it was the husbands who saw themselves as the real sacrificers. Their complaints, at first suitably muted, grew louder as the journey progressed. A mere report on mechanical difficulties with the car-"We are in Needles, California, having our valves ground" was the simple postcard I had dispatched-brought anguished phone calls from our Menfolk at home. Rita was a great one for the Menfolk at home. On the first night out she whimpered more than once about her darling Geordie and the boys, only to be brought sharply to book by me. We were all in the same boat, I pointed out, had left our husbands and small children, but we had come of our own accord, so what was the use of complaining?

Evie and I chatted about all sorts of trivia as we drove. It was, after all, in those days a tiresome five-day journey to our first destination, St. Louis, where we were to meet the rest of the Women's Delegation. "Clarence will probably be there in a wig and dirndl," I suggested hopefully. "Knowing him, he wouldn't miss this for anything." Rita glared disapprovingly into the rear-view mirror. The Youth Comrade said not a word.

None of us knew each other especially well. I had run across the others from time to time at meetings. Evie occasionally volunteered to come down to the CRC office to help on emergency mailings or leaflet distributions. She had always seemed to me to be an interesting one, with her enthusiastic and

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dashing way of doing things, her distinctive laugh somewhere between a giggle and a guffaw. I was somewhat leery of Rita. As county ed. director she sometimes toured the clubs to give an Educational on some topic of current interest. She would go on interminably, in a creaking monotone. As the goal of Educationals was to link theory with practice, her customary peroration was: "So, Comrades, we must soberly estimate the contradictions flowing from the situation, mobilize our forces, and mount a campaign, however limited." I hated "however limited"; however vast was more to my liking. The Youth Comrade seemed a cipher. First impressions turned out, as they often do, to be pretty accurate.

"I hear Bert and his wife have broken up," Evie said as she settled comfortably down into her seat. "Do tell. Is there another man?"

"Comrades, I don't think we should gossip about other comrades on this trip," came the Voice of Doom from the back seat. Not that of the Youth Comrade, who was possibly suffering from mal d' auto.

Evie and I groaned the groan of the well-advised, and I tried another tack. "There's a frightfully nice Russian comrade in our branch," I started telling Evie. "Oh, he is sweet. He might even be a Comintern agent, because his reasons for leaving Russia are obscure, to say the least."

Great sniffs were emanating from the back seat. I recklessly continued: "He really is a brave and devoted one. During the election campaign one of the comrades complained that every time she advocated the Progressive Party in her precinct, people looked at her as though she was a 'Russian with a beard.' Naturally, all eyes turned to blissful George Bratoff. He had a lovely beard, looked just like Lenin. But the dear thing! Next meeting, he showed up completely shaved, a different person, just so he could do better precinct work."

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The sniffs turned into verbal complaints. "I regard this whole discourse as an attack on our Foreign Born comrades."

"Attack! How could you! I'm most terrifically fond of George; in fact, he is my favorite thing. Oh, all right, we'll change the subject."

Evie started telling some dirty stories her husband had heard on his job, but these also were put down as unsuitable topics in view of the high purpose of our delegation.

It was not until the third day out that I blew up. Rita had just reproved me for using the term "cracker," which she considered an unacceptable way of referring to the exploited masses of poor white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and other victims of the absentee landlords and their Wall Street partners in infamy. She was drawing breath for the purpose, no doubt, of delivering a lecture on the historic task before our Party, that of aiding in the building of a United Front between the poor Southern whites and their natural allies the Negro people; but I had had about enough, and said so loudly. Evie backed me up, the Youth Comrade's eyes popped in a scared way, and the fight was on.

Evie and I felt right was on our side. All of us believed in the political importance of our mission, were anguished over the suffering of Willie McGee and his young wife, had thought long and hard about what we could accomplish in Mississippi, where we knew we might face certain dangers. There was nothing in the nature of a "lark" about the undertaking. Nevertheless, Rita's insistence on an atmosphere of unremitting reverence and gloom did cast a certain unnecessary pall.

No sooner did we forcefully point this out to Rita than she began to see the point, for she was fundamentally a good-hearted creature. She even went so far as to be self-critical for setting herself up as chief censor of our conversation. I in turn

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apologized for rounding on her when she was flattering on about how much she missed her family, and we made up.

I often speculated on what might have become of Rita had her life taken a different course. She was an extremely intelligent, well-educated woman of great drive, little humor, and modest appearance. She seemed driven by an overriding need to sublimate something, somewhere. At first blush one might have dismissed her as one who could as easily have become a fanatic Catholic, or a hopeless alcoholic, as a Party member; one whose inner compulsions might as well, given the opportunity, have taken anyone of a number of erratic paths. For she was in a sense one of those Party caricatures, a worshipper of the Line, starry-eyed idealizer of the leadership, stern frowner upon deviationists. Had the Party forged the mold into which a once flexible, pliant Rita had eventually jelled? Or was it the other way around-was she drawn to the Party , had she become one of its devoted handmaidens, because of a streak of Original Rigidity handed down through the ages from Puritan forebears?

To write her off-and many like her-as one with a neurotic need to "believe" in something, to be led, to feel important and superior among her peers, would be too simple, for although there was an element of this in Rita's personality, it was not, of course, the whole of it. If the Party had fed this quality of compulsiveness in her, it had also given her a purpose in life, had opened up the way for her to become an effective person in her own right, had provided her with a philosophy and direction towards progress in which she could feel at one with vast humanity. In other words, had it not been for the Party, Rita might well have been far more impossible than .she actually was.

Evie, no less ardent in her devotion to the Party, was in all other ways the complete opposite of Rita. She had grown up in

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Chicago, where her Hungarian-Jewish immigrant parents had long been rank-and-filers in the radical movement. She had once thought of becoming a teacher. She had not finished college, but both she and her husband, Mike, who had completed a year of law school, in response to the Party's call willingly abandoned their ambitions for professional careers in favor of factory jobs. As Communists, they were prepared to accept the Party's view that they could better carry out its vanguard role by working in a warehouse or on the assembly line-Basic Industry, we called it. It would never have occurred to them to regard this as a "sacrifice"; it was natural for them to put the Party's needs first in all aspects of their lives.

Evie infused everything she did with her own buoyant joie de vivre and a kind of moral toughness that I found most attractive. She hadn't an ounce of sentimentality in her make-up, which was such a mercy (there was all too much mawkishness in some Party members for my liking), but she had boundless compassion for human suffering. While Rita had, one felt, grimly steeled herself to make the dangerous journey to Mississippi as a sort of religious atonement for the myriad sins of whites against blacks, Evie approached it in a joyful spirit of comradeship with all oppressed people, as being a good and useful step to take.

We had only one other slight altercation, which ended rather sadly for Evie and me. Dead tired after a full day's driving, we broached the subject of buying a bottle of whisky to revive us. Rita expressed herself as unalterably opposed to this; it might expose us to the possibility of a police frame-up on charges of drunk driving, it might get us into all sorts of trouble. We argued the point for a good hour. Finally a compromise was reached, and feeling extremely daring, we bought the smallest bottle to be had, a half pint, which we passed around

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in the car. To our dismay, Rita, perhaps to show she was really a good fellow after all, downed almost all of it at a gulp.

We had no idea what would be expected of us once we were in Mississippi. We assumed that after the meeting in St. Louis we would become foot soldiers in a large army led by seasoned organizers from the higher echelons of the CRC, that our operations in the field would be mapped out for us by comrades knowledgeable in the ways of the South. Meanwhile we decided to try to mobilize support for Willie McGee along the way. Rita thought it unwise for us to proceed thus on our own initiative, unaided by directives from the national office, but she was outvoted by Evie and me, the Youth Comrade abstaining. Early in our trip, we had two hours to spare while the car was being repaired in Needles, a railroad town in the Mojave Desert. After some quick research in the yellow pages, we called on two white ministers, a black minister, the secretary of the local NAACP, the local newspaper editor. We were elated by the response; all were sympathetically interested. The ministers said they would pray for us, which was comforting, and promised to circulate petitions demanding executive clemency. We could never have accomplished as much in the Bay Area, where the noxious miasma of redbaiting that hung over the Willie McGee case would have poisoned such an effort.

I was delegated to write up reports of our doings for the Peoples World, which I first submitted to the others for collective criticism. Quoting the white Methodist minister who directed us to Reverend J. M. Cadell, the seventy-six-year-old black pastor of a Baptist church, I wrote: "Reverend Cadell has won the respect, the love, the sympathy of the community ." Rita, ever ready to inject what she conceived of as the "correct approach to the Negro question," suggested, "I think you should say that Reverend Cadell is 'a man of tremendous

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stature.' " Later in our travels I noted that she invariably proposed inserting this phrase when we were reporting on conversations with blacks. I managed to resist these suggestions, fearing that our readers might suppose we had encountered an outbreak of gigantism, a dysfunction of the pituitary gland.

After Needles, we drove night and day to reach St. Louis at the appointed time. We found our way to the hall; it was locked, with a note on the door directing us to somebody's house. Arriving there, we were greeted by the local CRC chairman and a beaming Clarence, who had come down from New York to give us our marching orders. "Where are the others?" I asked. Clarence, not in the least abashed, explained there were no others-we four were the whole delegation, the generals and soldiers of this great nationwide call to action. Apparently no one else in this wide land had read down to, the final "Imperative" in Clarence's directive. Nor was there any blueprint, or plan of campaign. Mississippi was pretty much uncharted territory , said Clarence. We should have to develop our plans on the spot when we arrived in Jackson, and he would do his best to get other women to join us there.

We were unlikely to find any local inhabitants who shared our political outlook. Evie had seen a recent news story giving the FBI's estimated strength of the Communist Party in various parts of the country: New York, 10,000 members; San Francisco, 5,000, and so on. For Mississippi, the report gave the disheartening figure of 1. There were to be times when we longed for that lone Mississippi comrade. Clarence, had he known his or her whereabouts, would have been prohibited from telling us for security reasons, and we never did summon the courage to inquire at FBI headquarters.

When we finally got to Jackson, we drove cautiously downtown and headed for the YWCA, which we hoped would be something of a sanctuary if trouble should threaten. Ordinarily,

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I would have resisted the oppressive gentility of a YWCA, but Southern friends had told me they often found the Y to be an oasis of decency in otherwise hostile territory, a gathering place for liberals and racial "moderates." The y director, a pleasant-faced youngish woman, greeted us with that extra degree of courtesy so often encountered in the South, and gave us two large rooms for one dollar a night apiece. We settled in to plan our next moves.

The CRC national office had conceived of the White Women's Delegation as a group large enough to organize demonstrations, picket lines, and leaflet distributions like those we had up North. But the pathetic size of our group, even if it was augmented by Clarence's promised reserves, was clearly inadequate for all this. We discarded the mass approach in favor of the next best thing: an effort to reach as many white Mississippians as possible on an individual basis with the facts of the case, an appeal to white consciences to act.

We drew up strict rules of conduct: never venture from the Y except in pairs; work from early morning until sunset but never after dark; wear hats, stockings, and white gloves at all times. Readying ourselves to work behind enemy lines, as it were, we felt the appearance of respectability was essential both for our own personal security and for the effectiveness of our work among white Southerners. So each morning we checked each other over for hats-gloves-stockings and straightness of stocking seams (a constant preoccupation in those days) before setting forth two by two on our respective rounds.

We made visits to clergymen, clubwomen, and other persons of local prominence whose names we culled from the city directory and telephone book. We buttonholed delegates to a statewide teachers' convention which by a fortunate coincidence was being held in a Jackson hotel. We did door-to-door canvassing in white neighborhoods, roughly based on tech-

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niques I had learned in my old market research days, taking random samplings of opinion in working-class, middle-class, and upper-class territories. Each evening we reassembled at the Y for a quick supper of black-eyed peas, grits, and other Southern delicacies, then met far into the night, comparing notes and writing up a report of our findings.

Soon Clarence's promised reserves, some of them Southerners, began to arrive. Some stayed only a short time, but at its height our delegation numbered eleven. The Southerners, from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana, were a delightful and exhilarating addition, their native accents a great asset in gaining entree to Jackson households.

As time wore on, some of my preconceived notions about the white South were dispelled. Far from encountering the impenetrable wall of hostility I had anticipated, we found many people willing to talk with us about the case and not a few who ventured to express a guarded sympathy. Feelings on both sides of the issue ran far deeper here than in California, more promising in a way than the frustrating indifference that pervaded the "liberal" North. When the change did come, one felt, it would come sharp and fast.

Painstakingly we tabulated the results of our survey of forty- three white working-class families for the Peoples World:

Hostile 12

Listened to us but wouldn't express an opinion. 8

Convinced of McGee's guilt but willing to listen. ...7

At first convinced of guilt but changed mind on basis of discussion 5

Convinced of his innocence but made no commitment to act 7

Pledged action: talk to neighbors, write Truman, Gov. Wright. 4

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The hostile twelve met us with invective, threats, and variations on the theme "They should have hanged him the day it happened." Among the four who "pledged action" we encountered some surprisingly emotional responses. One woman said, in shaken tones, "The way the Negroes have been treated is a blot upon the South. We'll all suffer for it one day." These four-slightly less than 10 percent of our meager sample- seemed to represent some hope for the future. As to our middle-class survey, in the privacy of their homes many of the ministers, teachers, and clubwomen declared their belief in McGee's innocence; others, unwilling to go that far, nevertheless deplored a double standard of justice under which scores of black men had been executed for rape while no white had ever received the death penalty for this offense. A few even showered us with embarrassing praise for coming. More prayers than I care to remember were offered for our safety and success.

Yet there was an almost universal reluctance to take any sort of public stand, to sign a petition or write a letter to the governor. "I have to think of my husband's job"; "It would wreck my son's career"-all the familiar reasons for inaction were given, plus that hoary rationalization: "I've worked for years for Nigra rights in my own way. If I speak out on this case, it will ruin my long-range effectiveness." Or: "I'm already labeled; my position on these questions is known in the community. I would do the case more harm than good by speaking out." There were some who proclaimed their "love" for "our Nigras." One of these, a clergyman's wife, deplored the new-fangled Northern habit of addressing blacks as Mr. and Mrs. "We call them Auntie this or Uncle that-it's so much friendlier ," she said. "Then how does it feel to be murdering one of your first cousins?" Evie shot back acidly. Our sojourn at the YWCA was short-lived. Soon after we arrived the director approached me and asked if we had come

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to Mississippi about the Willie McGee case. I replied that we had. She said, "Well, you don't have to be so secretive about it." I was somewhat taken aback, and assured her we were not trying to be secretive; on the contrary, our whole purpose in coming to Jackson was to talk about the case to anybody who would listen, and that I would like to discuss it with her, too. To my surprise, she was quite willing to chat. As a member of a local church fellowship she worked with groups in Jackson and elsewhere, she told me, trying to improve race relations by issuing Christian tracts about the brotherhood of man and the need for "treatin' the Nigras more human." She often went to Laurel, ninety miles away, to meet with colleagues in this endeavor. Friends there told her it was pretty common knowledge that McGee had been falsely accused; they said his relationship with Mrs. Hawkins had been the talk of the town for years.

That afternoon Evie and I had an appointment with a Mrs. Stevens, a civic leader who had been recommended to us as one who had worked for many years to abolish lynching. She turned out to be just another of those se1f-styled "friends of the Negro people" who abound in the South. She informed us that she had "put an end to lynching in Mississippi by educational means," thus circumventing any need for an anti-lynch law; that she held classes in her home for "Nigra" girls, "to teach them how to live"; that groups such as ours were doing more harm than good by undermining the people's reliance on the courts for justice. But in this case, Evie insisted urgently, the courts may well be perpetrating a terrible injustice; what if McGee was convicted on a trumped-up charge? I told Mrs. Stevens of my conversation with the Y director, and repeated what she had said about the McGee-Hawkins affair being common knowledge in Laurel.

Ten minutes later we were back at the Y, and the director

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peremptorily summoned me into her office, apoplectic, all her Southern civility evaporated.

"I don’t want you using my name any more in connection with this case!" she shouted in near frenzy. I observed that I did not even know her name.

"Well, Mrs. Stevens just called, and it seems you told her I said the case is a frame-up."

"But didn’t you say that?"

"I may have, but you shouldn’t have told Mrs. Stevens. She is a member of the YWCA board, and I’m likely to lose my job."

I reminded her that Willie McGee would surely lose his life if knowledgeable people like her and her Laurel friends refused to speak out, that she had already surrendered her right of free speech by allowing herself to be terrorized into silence by the hysteria surrounding the case. She kept backing away from me, repeating, "I don’t want to have anything more to do with you people!" It came as no surprise when, later that day, she ordered us to move out immediately, as our rooms were "already engaged." We packed our belongings and drove around looking for a place to stay. A hotel, we decided, would be both too expensive and – in view of Clarence’s experience – too dangerous. Eventually we found a ROOM FOR RENT sign on a dilapidated little house on the outskirts of Jackson. This time we decided to tell the owner in advance why we were there; apparently in this poverty-stricken part of the town the lure of five dollars a night for the room, in which we slept two to a bed, outweighed other considerations, and she took us in.

I often wondered what became of Mrs. Stevens and the Y directory, what shape their lives took in later years. For despite their infuriating attitude to the McGee case and their timidity, they probably did typify a somewhat more decent than average

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breed of white Southerner. Ten years later, when I visited the Deep South in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-in movement, I found women like them who had been propelled forward by the force of black resistance and were giving positive encouragement to the student militants. But in 1951 Jackson was a veritable concentration camp of the mind in which people like Mrs. Stevens and the Y director were themselves prisoners, confined by tradition and their keepers within strict boundaries to their Christian tracts and classes for "Nigra" girls, their tiny, tentative efforts to do right as they saw it.

Mississippi's largest and most influential newspaper, the Jackson Daily News, furnished some insight into the source of this intimidation. We scanned the editorials, written in the folksy, down-home style of the region, for glimpses of received Klan doctrine as preached by the News and practiced by the Mississippi authorities:

The Negro race, unfortunately, has not thus far produced any worthwhile literature and mighty little in the way of high-class music. Their melody consists mostly of spirituals. ...

Ruby Keeler,* announcing herself as "regional coordinator" for the NAACP, proclaims from Birmingham that she will file court proceedings in Mississippi and Alabama to compel the admission of Negroes in all graduate and professional schools. In other words, she wants to fling open the doors for the admission of Negro students. ...The intelligent and influential Negroes of Mississippi should tell Ruby Keeler, whoever the hell she is, to stay away from our state and not try to meddle in racial relations. Mississippi is still Mississippi. ...

* A black NAACP leader, not to be confused with the white entertainer of that name.

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Congress may be about to decide that the Armed Forces are not the proper place for institution of proposals by starry eyed citizens designed to bring on the millennium by requiring mixed intermingling of the races.

The McGee case was featured almost daily. There were insistent editorial demands for his execution:

In a petition for the pardon or commutation in behalf of Willie McGee, condemned rapist, Communist-paid lawyers perpetrate the same old poppycock and time-consuming palaver with which they have afflicted the courts of Mississippi for more than five years. The time for this shystering and nonsensical nagging should now be brought to a close. ...Willie McGee should be given a new date with death, to be met at the earliest moment.

And direct incitement to lynch him:

Paul Robeson, Negro singer and notorious Communist, who declares he prefers Russia to the United States, blew off his loud bazoo to the effect that the next step should be to get Willie McGee out of jail. It could happen-but not in the way Robeson is thinking about.

Came the inevitable day, shortly after we had moved out of the Y, when the Jackson Daily News learned of our presence in town. The banner headline announcing it streamed across the front page: 150 WOMEN CANVASS HOUSEWIVES HERE ASKING Am FOR MCGEE. The story went on: "Two barelegged Chicago women chugged down East Fortification Street in a battered old car. One of the 'civil rights' crusaders was described as dark-haired, about 23, and looked Italian." Obviously Evie, who was bitter about being described as bare-legged; she loathed wearing stockings, but dutifully put them on each morning in com-

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pliance with our collective decision. "I suppose they've never seen sheer nylons down here before," she said crossly,

We were enchanted to find that the News had magically succeeded, where Clarence had failed, in multiplying our number more than tenfold, and gratified to see that our modest effort had indeed resulted in a breakthrough; for the first time, a Mississippi newspaper had published the full details, hitherto completely suppressed in that state, of the CRC's frame-up allegations. The next day's News reported that the mayor of Jackson had hastily convened an emergency meeting of top law-enforcement officials to deal with the crisis-the city prosecuting attorney, the city attorney, the chief of police. He had emerged with the pronouncement: "If strangers come to their door, homeowners should ask them away. If they persist in staying, the Jackson police will cooperate."

Huddled in our sad lodgings, we pondered what to do. Rita thought we should telephone to the national office for instructions, a move I opposed since we had already been "instructed" by Clarence to make our own decisions on the spot; what guidance could "the national office, hundreds of miles away in New York, possibly offer us? We decided to press forward and continue the door-to-door canvassing as though nothing had happened. As we emerged from the lodging house, we saw a message scrawled in thick black ink on an adjoining wall: "Behold, a people shall come from the North, and a great nation and many kings shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth. Jeremiah, 50:41." We stared at it in fascination, and decided it was not the random work of some Bible Belt fanatic, but one of the few ways people in this fear-ridden town had of expressing their feelings.

Despite the publicity, few people did call the police. To our relief none of us was arrested; the police just "asked us away." Perhaps the thought of tackling all 150 of us was too

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much for them? Or more likely the order not to arrest us had come from on high, possibly from the governor. We took this as a sign that CRC's slogan, 'The Eyes of the World Are on Mississippi," might after all have been prophetic, that those eyes may have influenced the decision of Mississippi authorities to allow us to proceed unmolested.

We had already overstayed our time in Mississippi. The four weeks allotted for the trip stretched into five, as we did not wish it to appear we had been chased out by the Jackson Daily News. But we decided we could not leave the state without attempting to see Mississippi's most-indeed its only-illustrious resident, William Faulkner. The reserves having drifted back to their respective homes, it was the original four of us who drove down to Oxford. We asked a gangling, snaggle-toothed white boy for directions to Faulkner's house. "Down the road a piece, past the weepin' willa tree," was his response, which I took as augury of our arrival in authentic Faulkner country. We turned through a cast-iron gate into a long avenue of desiccated trees leading to a large, run-down plantation-style house, its antebellum pillars covered with grayish moss. Through the window we saw Faulkner, a small man in a brown velvet smoking jacket, pacing up and down, apparently dictating to a secretary.

We gingerly approached and rang the front doorbell. Faulkner himself came to the door, and when we explained the reason for our visit, greeted us most cordially, invited us in, and held forth on the McGee case for a good two hours. (Later we learned that the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, on his much- publicized tour of America, had telephoned to Faulkner from Memphis, seeking audience with the great man. When Faulkner told him he could only spare twenty minutes, Ehrenburg had declined the honor. )

Faulkner spoke much as he wrote, in convoluted para-

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graphs with a sort of murky eloquence. I was desperately trying to take down everything he said in my notebook, and frequently got lost as he expatiated on his favorite themes: sex, race, and violence. The Willie McGee case, compounded of all three, was a subject he seemed to savor with much relish; it could have been the central episode in one of his short stories.

Later it was my job to edit down his rambling monologue as a brief press release to be issued by our national office: "He said the McGee case was an outrage and it was good we had come. He cautioned us that many people down here don't pay much attention to law and justice, don't go by the facts. He said in this case they are giving obeisance to a fetish of long standing. He expressed fear for McGee's safety in jail. When we left he wished us good luck. ..."

William Patterson was jubilant when I telephoned to tell him of our interview with Faulkner. It was a major break- through, he said. The release would certainly be picked up by the wire services and flashed around the world! But he insisted we show it to Faulkner and ask him to initial it, for fear that pressure from his Mississippi compatriots might later induce him to repudiate it.

This time I drove alone past the weepin' willa tree to find Faulkner in dungarees and hip boots, up to his knees in dank manure, working alongside one of his black farmhands. I showed him the release and explained why I had come: "Mr. Patterson thought I should ask you to sign this, for fear you might later repudiate it. " He read it through, initialed it, and as he handed it back murmured softly, as though speaking to himself, "1 think McGee and the woman should both be destroyed." "Oh don't let's put that in," said I, and clutching the precious document made a dash for my car.

One can only conclude that Faulkner gave expression, in his own distinctive voice, to the deep-seated schizophrenia then

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endemic among white liberals and racial moderates of the region.

After the Faulkner visit we made for California at top speed like horses returning to their stable. (Mississippi had its mean little revenge after all. Soon after we got back the car conked out altogether, never to go again. The mechanic said its engine was hopelessly gummed up by a large amount of molasses that had been poured into the gas tank.) The bliss of arriving home was enhanced by the rousing, emotional welcome given us in the black community. Mrs. Lofton had chivvied her church into opening its doors to a mass meeting of more than two thousand, at which we reported on our expedition. She herself had just returned from Washington, sent there by CRC as part of a nationwide delegation that sought appointments with government officials to present the case for clemency. Relating her experiences there, she told the meeting, "That Senator Nixon, he said it was none of our business what happens in Mississippi, and President Truman, he skipped out on me." Introducing our delegation, she said, "Since going to Washington, I've been called a Communist. I don't know what a Communist is, but if that's what it is, I'm rarin' to go! Show me any other type of white women that would go out and fight for our men- I would die for them."

Three weeks before the scheduled execution date, in the secure anonymity of a crowded downtown cafeteria, Buddy Green unfolded to Bob and me his incredibly daring plan to enlist hundreds of black Southerners in a last-minute effort to save McGee. Not a word of this would ever be breathed in our homes, offices, or even cars, which we assumed (correctly, as we now know) were bugged.

It was Buddy's prescient view that while the White Women's Delegation had broken new ground by journeying to the Deep South, eventually only a movement spearheaded by

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the organized power of blacks would bring fundamental change there. He was determined to be a catalyst of this change. He proposed to go to Memphis, his childhood home, where he had many friends and relatives, establish headquarters there, and travel through Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, mobilizing black ministers, civic clubs, trade unionists for a demonstration to be held at the state capitol in Jackson.

It was a sensational idea, but how to get the go-ahead from the Party leadership, who were bound to spend endless days pondering its "correctness in view of the present relationship of forces" and so on? We decided to broach it first to William Patterson, who was immediately enthusiastic and told Buddy to proceed without delay. Armed with this directive, we had no trouble getting approval from the local East Bay leadership, who furnished Buddy with a "security clearance" for a leave from his job at the Peoples World, meaning no questions were to be asked by his co-workers as to the reason for his absence.

Buddy estimated that he would need five hundred dollars for travel and living expenses-a large sum in those days-as he anticipated having to finance the trips to Jackson of blacks from all parts of the South. We hit on a marvelously simple and effective way of raising the money. He and I drew up a list of five people whom we knew to be both solvent and reliable. We visited them one by one, and told each that we were about to impart a tremendously important plan: "Because of its deeply secret nature, we have been instructed to tell no more than five people, of whom you are one." Having exacted a promise from our interlocutor to reveal the secret to no one, we proceeded to divulge it. Came the punch line: "We need five hundred dollars to finance the project. Since we can only tell five people, and we've just told you, your share is a contribution of one hundred dollars." So successful was this approach that we couldn't resist

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trying it on a few more, to raise our quota of McGee's legal defense costs.

The days after Buddy's departure dragged with nightmare slowness. We expected, and got, no word of his progress. I was assailed by awful fears: if something went wrong, and his purpose was discovered by the authorities, he might be quietly done to death in some remote Southern hamlet and we should never hear of it for weeks, perhaps months. ...When he did return, to tell a tale laced with spine-chilling episodes, he seemed imperturbable and matter-of-fact as ever, as though to him it had all been in the day's work.

From Memphis, where he was staying with his aunt, Buddy had darted around the South from Atlanta to the Mississippi Delta, creating a network of support for the demonstration like a latter-day Paul Revere. His method was to concentrate on organizational leaders-the president of a ministerial alliance, the Grand Master of a Negro Masonic society, the shop steward of a union. From these his message spread like brush fire through their own organizations and beyond. Within ten days over four hundred people had pledged to attend the "Sunrise Prayer Meeting" on the capitol lawn, a format for the protest urged by the ministers. Prayers would be offered to the Lord asking His guidance for Governor Wright, that he might do justice to Willie McGee. "We weren't even to say, Free the man!" said Buddy. "I had to settle for that, or there would have been no participation. But I figured just the crowd would be a demonstration that people cared."

Relearning Southern ways gave him a little trouble at first. Boarding a bus in Greenwood, Mississippi, he took a seat halfway back in what he assumed was the Jim Crow section, only to be snarled at by the driver: "Hey, nigger, you get up, you get on all the way back there!" He had almost forgotten that a

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black man was supposed to give way to whites on the sidewalk, to flatten himself against a building or if necessary to cross the street to avoid impeding their progress. He bought a cap for the purpose of tipping it to any white person, such as a bus driver or store clerk, with whom he might have occasion to speak, much as we had adopted the hats-gloves-stockings routine in hopes of merging unobtrusively into the white Southern populace.

Using the alias "Jimmy Brown," Buddy was in daily contact with Patterson at a secret telephone number. " As things began to shape up, and I was sure of at least a hundred people, Pat ran into pressure from the Party Central Committee," said Buddy. "They told him to have me call it off; they were afraid it would end in a massacre. Pat refused, so they sent a white committee member to Memphis. He showed up at my auntie's, and I thought, Oh God, the FBI!" Having convinced Buddy of his identity, the committee member instructed him on Party orders to cancel the prayer meeting. "I said, 'Sorry, I won't do it. There's too much at stake; I can't walk out on them now.' I decided on the spot I'd have to go over his head. It was very shaking."

The night before the prayer meeting hundreds of black men and women, some with children, began streaming into Jackson by car, chartered bus, Greyhound, train, to take shelter in designated black homes near the capitol, ready to converge on the lawn at the appointed moment. Shortly before dawn, it became clear that something had gone wrong. A platoon of fifteen city patrol cars, together with numerous police and plainclothesmen on foot, began slowly circling the four square blocks around the capitol. Buddy, patrolling the patrollers, nipping swiftly, ducking in and out of dark side streets to observe this operation, concluded that a stool pigeon must have given the plan away.

As lookout man for the demonstration, he quickly alerted

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some of the more influential ministers who, with their flocks, were quartered in nearby homes. After agonizing deliberation, it was decided to send five volunteers, three men and two women armed with Bibles and prayer books, as "weather vanes" to breach the designated praying ground. As they crossed over to the lawn, police moved in and arrested them. Within minutes, some two hundred city and highway patrol cars were swarming over the area. "The cops put out the word from the moment of the first arrests that if the prayer meeting took place they would 'kill every black s.o.b. in town,' " said Buddy. Sweeping through the side streets, guns drawn, they arrested every black in sight, shouting, "What's your damn business on this street, nigger?" "Put your hands over your head, nigger!" and " Are you in sympathy with nigger McGee?"

Thanks to the high quality of organization and the discipline of the demonstrators, only thirty-one blacks were arrested that morning, of whom Buddy was one. At the city jail, the booking sergeant asked the patrolman who had Buddy in tow, "What's this nigger in for?" "He's in sympathy with nigger McGee like the rest of 'em." The sergeant, scratching his head, turned to the chief of police, who was on hand to supervise the arrests. "How do you spell 'sympathy " Chief?" "Oh, just abbreviate it. Write s-i-m-p," was the reply.

There was a nasty moment for those charged with the crime of Simp when they were put in a cell with local black prisoners, in for such offenses as shoplifting and drunkenness, to whom police handed billy clubs with the injunction to "show these niggers some of our Mississippi hospitality ." "But when the local prisoners found out why we were there, they immediately offered to help; they took up a collection and pinched together ninety-six cents so we could send a wire to an attorney," said Buddy.

From his conversations with Patterson, Buddy knew that

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the CRC national office was bending all efforts to get a new delegation of white women to take part in the Sunrise Prayer Meeting. When, several hours after their arrest, he and the other black prisoners were taken down to the courtroom, he was overjoyed to see a large group of white women, also in custody. He immediately recognized two of them: Dobby Walker and Jean Vandever, from the East Bay CRC. "I never thought I'd be glad to see friends under arrest," said Buddy. "But I'll be dog, what a relief! All those white people in there with us-it seemed like our only chance of getting out alive." Dobby, one of the chosen five from whom Buddy and I had solicited their "share" of a hundred dollars, was privy to his presence in Mississippi. Resolutely disciplined as ever, she never told Jean he was there. "On the drive out from California, she must have cautioned me at least a dozen times that if I should see any Negro in Jackson whom I knew, I mustn't give any sign of recognition," said Jean later. "I wondered what it was all about, until suddenly I saw Buddy. So I looked right past him, and he didn't even flick an eye. I thought: Aha, that's why Dobby kept nagging all across the country!"

In all, twenty-four white women had come from New York, Chicago, California, Virginia to assemble that morning at the Y. In groups of three or four they walked the three blocks to the capitol. As they approached their goal, they were hustled into waiting police cars and driven to the "jail.

By fortunate coincidence, McGee's lawyers, Bella Abzug and John Coe, were in Jackson that day to make a last-minute clemency appeal to the governor. When they learned of the arrests they rushed down to court-where two hundred armed city police and highway patrolmen filled the spectator benches -and worked out a deal with the authorities: charges would be dropped provided those arrested left town immediately.

The getaway was fraught with terror. There was an awful

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moment when the lawyers seemed about to assent to the district attorney's proposal that the white group should leave first, the blacks later. "Dobby immediately knew this was a trap," said Buddy. "She stood up in court and insisted we should all leave together. The other white women agreed; they said they would not leave without us. As we filed out, police muttered, 'We’ll meet you niggers down the road.' Highway patrolmen made a quick dash for their cars to make good the threat. Negroes who had come by car were trapped if they tried driving out, and trapped if they stayed in town. So some of the white women volunteered to drive the Negroes' cars to their homes in Memphis or Atlanta or wherever, which meant going hundreds of miles out of their way. "

The whites quickly took up a collection of $190 to meet the unforeseen expense of train fares for the blacks, then accompanied them on the fourteen-block walk to the station, with a dozen police cars slowly cruising alongside. "We couldn't walk down the street together; it's absolutely forbidden in Mississippi for a Negro man to walk within arm's length of a white woman. If you are caught doing so, they don't ask you any questions, you are just clubbed and kicked right on the street by police officers 'enforcing the law " " Buddy explained. "So there was no way of communicating. At the station, we found seven of the same cops who were in the courtroom waiting for us in the 'colored' section. They stood around taunting us, calling us every name under the sun. Hours went by waiting for the train.

"One of the white women tossed us a note. She had overheard a cop telephoning headquarters; apparently he had learned that one of our group had bought a ticket to New Orleans and would be traveling alone. The cop told his colleagues to watch for the train when it stopped at Brookhaven, less than a hundred miles south of Jackson, at nine fifty-five that evening. So we quickly changed the ticket for one to Mem-

190 phis, where the rest of us were headed. When we boarded the train, northbound, all of the Negroes shook hands and made a pledge-that if any attempt was made down the road to pull one of us from the train, we would all go. And nobody would be taken off that train alive. For we well knew that for the next 210 miles, we would still be traveling in the state of Mississippi."

"My dear Buddy, I must say you are a man of tremendous stature," I observed when he had finished his hair-raising account.

ON THE EIGHTH OF May , Willie McGee was executed. That the execution was indeed a surrogate lynching, for the Laurel mob next best to the real thing, can be inferred from the Jackson Daily News, which devoted eight pages of news stories, photographs, and feature articles to the event. To ensure that local would-be lynchers would not be cheated of this long-awaited moment, the electric chair had been transported to the Laurel courthouse from Parchman Penitentiary, 150 miles away.

A crowd of a thousand, or one out of every twenty Laurel residents, gathered outside the courthouse. For those unable to attend, the News re-created the festive atmosphere, compounded of blood lust and jollity, what James Baldwin described in his short story about a lynching as "a very peculiar , particular joy" :

...teenage boys did some laughing arid there were a few girls and women in the throng. A patrolman shouted, "Let's everyone be nice. We want no demonstrations. You've been patient a long time." Everybody shouted as he said Willie was going to die. ...A 70- year-old plumber perched atop a 30 foot cedar tree overlooking the courtroom where the execution took place. The nimble old man

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excitedly related the events to the eager crowd below as they took place. ...When the execution was finally completed, witnesses were rushed by hundreds of people asking such questions as "Is he dead?" "How did he look?" and "What did he say?"

A big cheer arose as the body was driven away.

Two separate eyewitness stories furnished minute-by-minute accounts of the execution, replete with detailed descriptions of McGee's clothing, the barber who shaved his head, the black pastor who administered last rites, the executioner and his aides, and the final moments:

WILLIE MCGEE BRAVE IN LIFE BUT HE SHED A TEAR AS ELECTRICITY TOOK A TOLL

Willie McGee still had a cocky air about him as he took his seat in the electric chair. But he died with a tear in his eye. Almost bravely, almost defiantly he walked to that chair. ...His face was enclosed in a weird black mask.

SHACKLED WILLIE MCGEE LOOKED SMALL, BLACK, WITH DEATH STARE IN HIS EYES, SINGING HYMN

By 12.03 a.m. he was strapped to his chair. By 12.04 belts and black fittings about his face were adjusted again. ...Watson moved the dial. He set 2200 volts for 45 seconds. ...Willie's mask was removed. His eyes were shut, his mouth was wide open. ...His body was rigid, his fingers curled. Then a tear trickled across the right side of his black, still face.

A few days after McGee's death, the News had this editorial comment:

The recent Willie McGee case was a striking illustration of the desperate tactics Communists use to gain ground for their cause. They spent at least $100,000 in defense of Willie McGee, a proven rapist, not because they cared anything whatever about the de-

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fendant, but they were boldly and impudently seeking to create disrespect for law and order among Negroes throughout the nation, and especially in Southern states. ...The Communists tell the Negro's plight in all the far corners of the earth. It is their greatest weapon against the Marshall Plan and places us in a false light, especially to the yellow and black races.

Time and Life picked up the theme, rounding on the CRC and the Communists, denouncing them for "using" the McGee case to further the cause of international Communism and foment racial strife. Thus Time of May 14, 1951:

To Communists allover the world, "the case of Willie McGee" had become surefire propaganda, good for whipping up racial tension at home and giving U .S. justice a black eye abroad. Stirred up by the Communist leadership, Communist-liners and manifesto- signers in England, France, China and Russia demanded that Willie be freed. ...Not only Communists took up the cry. In New York, Albert Einstein signed a newspaper ad protesting a miscarriage of justice. Mrs. McGee, a captive of the Communists, addressed party rallies.

And Life a week later:

There was a bare chance that this sentence might never have been carried out on the reasonable ground that he, a Negro, had been condemned to death for a crime no white man has ever been executed for in Mississippi. But something very unfortunate happened to Willie. His case fitted too well into the strategy of the Communist International. ...Money was raised to reopen Willie's defense and to prolong his propaganda value. ...As the Communists moved in, such groups as the NAACP drew back. ...

Five years and five months later, after numerous appeals, six stays of execution and three Supreme Court refusals to review the case, the Communists had worked Willie McGee for all they could.

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The liberal weeklies, ever alert for an opportunity to prove their own political purity and lack of any taint of subversion, followed in Luce's wake to launch their own peculiar kind of flank attack against McGee's defenders. John Cogley wrote in Commonweal:

The Communists vigorously espoused McGee's cause, but their support nowadays is rather a kiss of death. ...The Communists and fellow travelers have been so thoroughly and rightfully discredited that no decent American wants to have any share in their crocodile tears and phony indignation.

Mary Mostert, writing in The Nation, also bought the "kiss of death" theory. While deploring "the new and most dangerous element, conviction by association," she proceeds to buttress the element in her own way:

After the Civil Rights Congress, a so-called Communist Front organization, took up the fight, people seemed no longer to care about any evidence presented by either prosecution or defense. ... Willie McGee was convicted because he was black and supported by Communists, not on any conclusive evidence.

Thus did The Nation and Commonweal end up in a cozy, safe alliance with the Jackson Daily News and the Luce press. Neither magazine had printed one word about the case when it was being fought through the courts, when there might still have been time to mobilize liberal opinion for a nationwide effort to halt the execution. Gripped by the prevailing hysteria, they joined the chorus: Communism, not racism or injustice, is the issue. There is not a word of criticism of a Supreme Court that tacitly gave its blessing to institutionalized racism, and upheld the double standard of justice by three times refusing to review the case. Nor is there a word of recognition for the in-

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convenient truth: that had it not been for CRC and the Communists, the McGee case and the issues it raised would have gone unnoticed outside Mississippi, his execution just another local bloodletting in the violent history of black repression.

Evidently Willie McGee perceived his case as part of the continuum of that history. The day before his death, he wrote to his wife:

Tell the people the real reason they are going to take my life is to keep the Negro down in the South. They can't do this if you and the children keep on fighting. Never forget to tell them why they killed their daddy.

I know you won't fail me. Tell the people to keep on fighting.

Your truly husband, Willie McGee