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Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee:
Bella Abzug and the Fight for Civil Rights, 1948-1951
When African American Willie McGee was executed in the courthouse of Jackson,
Mississippi on May 8, 1951 for allegedly raping a white woman, the American Left anguished
over the bitter ending to what had seemed a promising battle against the Jim Crow South. With a
quick arrest, coerced confession, and verdict delivered in less than two and a half minutes by an
all-white, male jury, Willie McGee’s first trial clearly did not evidence due process of the law
and a fair, impartial trial. How could the U.S. Supreme Court and President Truman turn a blind
eye to this level of injustice? Members of the Left shook their heads at the coverage of McGee’s
execution in the mainstream press, which portrayed the Civil Rights Congress’ efforts on behalf
of McGee as driven primarily by self-interest and Communist propagandistic purposes.1 And, as
they reflected upon the last five years of struggle for McGee’s life through the poignant writings
of sympathists such as Lorraine Hansberry and Howard Fast, Hansberry’s words reverberated:
“See the eyes of Willie McGee/ My mother told me about/ Lynchings/ My mother told me about/
The dark nights/ and dirt roads/ and torch lights/ and lynch robes.”2 Like Hansberry, those who
had participated in the “Save Willie McGee” campaign expressed great remorse over his
For a discussion of Left and mainstream press response to McGee’s execution, see: Gerald Horne, Communist
Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (Rutherford: Associated University Press, 1988) 95-97. Jessica
Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) 191-194.
2
Lorraine Hansberry was a member of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a group of Black women who supported
the campaigns of the Civil Rights Congress, including the fight to save Willie McGee. For background on this
group, refer to: Horne, 206. For the complete poem referenced: Lorraine Hansberry, “Lynchsong,” 1951
<http://www.amiercanlynching.com/literary-old.html#hansberry> (4 June 2004). For Howard Fast’s writing on the
Willie McGee case, among other campaign of the Civil Rights Congress, see: Howard Fast, “Crisis No. 3,” Civil
Rights Congress, 1951 <http://www.trussel.com/hf/crisis3.htm> (4 June 2004).
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wrongful death, which the Civil Rights Congress described as an act of genocide.3 Few felt this
event with as heavy a heart as McGee’s chief counsel, thirty-one year old Bella Abzug.
Retained just a few years after graduating from Columbia Law when she was working as
a specialist in labor law, Abzug honed her legal expertise in the Willie McGee case during the
formative years of her professional development. As a participant in Left civil rights campaigns
in the late-1940s and early-1950s, she witnessed first-hand the great obstacles that the Left faced
in achieving their goals as anti-communism intensified and the limitations placed on that
community by the courts, the press, and the public increased. Her frequent trips South from
1948 to 1951 were tests of endurance in which she faced great opposition from Mississippi
officials, attorneys, journalists, and local vigilantes. Nevertheless, Abzug maneuvered through
the volatile waters of the Southern political and legal system, pushing for civil rights advances in
both the courtroom and the streets. Her public advocacy of Willie McGee’s innocence
contributed substantially to the Left legal community’s national push for civil rights court
reforms well before Brown v. Board of Education came into fruition. Drawing upon a tradition
of progressive labor, feminist, and pacifist political organizing, Abzug exemplifies how radicals
fashioned a new conception of civil rights at the height of the Cold War.4
Abzug has received minimal attention in the few extended examinations of the McGee
case. 5 Yet, Abzug’s role in what was a cause celebré of the Left community is worthy of greater
Civil Rights Congress pamphlet promoting William Patterson’s book We Charge Genocide lists Willie McGee as
one of many victims of genocide. This book was published in conjunction with the CRC’s petition to the United
Nations for action on behalf of U.S. African Americans. Refer to: “We Charge Genocide!,” Civil Rights Congress,
2/22/1952. Box 91, Folder 2 “CRC, 1951,” J.B. Matthews Papers, Duke University.
4
I use the term progressive here because people on the Left, such as Abzug, saw themselves as progressive activists.
This term is distinguished from the classification of Progressives of the Progressive Era.
5
Chapter Three of Gerald Horne’s study of the Civil Rights Congress focuses on the Willie McGee case and
mentions Abzug cursorily: Horne, 74-98. Sarah Hart Brown’s study of John Coe, co-counsel of Bella Abzug from
1950-1952, examines Abzug’s relationship with Coe. Sarah Hart Brown, Standing Against Dragons: Three Southern
Lawyers in an Era of Fear (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998) 103-105. For a study of the legal
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2
exploration. Her experience as a New York radical, Jewish attorney litigating on behalf of
Blacks in the South enhances historians understanding of how radical attorneys from the mid1940s and mid-1950s promoted civil rights, as the red scare intensified, laying the foundation for
the liberal civil rights reforms of the mid-1950s and 1960s.6 While Abzug was not a member of
the Communist Party, she traveled in circles that were greatly affected by the anti-communist
purges in the labor movement with the passage of the Taft-Hartley law in 1947 and the defeat of
progressive party Presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948.7 Additionally, a growing
number of anti-communist legal attacks were directed toward leftists, led by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and congressional un-American committees, as well as liberal groups like the
Americans for Democratic Action and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
developments of the Willie McGee case, refer to: Craig Zaim, “Trial by Ordeal: The Willie McGee Case,” Journal
of Mississippi History 65, no. 3 (2003).
6
This study of Bella Abzug builds on the work of Nelson Lichtenstein and Robert Korstad, who call for a
reperiodization of civil rights history, taking into account the contributions of the Left. This growing body of
scholarship also highlights the limitations placed on the Left’s civil rights campaign as a result of the Cold War, as
well as the rich black-Jewish alliance that formed on the Left to combat white supremacy and anti-communism.
See: Nelson Lichtenstein and Robert Korstad, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil
Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December 1988) 786-811. For a general
historiographical essay that recognizes this shift, see: Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The
Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Historical Review 96, no. 2 (April 1991) 456-671.
Historical studies that evidence early collaborations between the Left and African Americans, especially in labor
organizing include: Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights:
Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism:
Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial
Justice in the Cold War South (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The
Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). Gerald Horne,
Black & Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Col War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1986). Gerald Horne, “The Red and the Black: The Communist Party and AfricanAmericans in Historical Perspective,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, eds. Michael
E. Brown, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993) 199-237.
7
On the Taft-Hartley Act and labor movement: Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American
Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) 114-118. Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life
and Labor Since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000) 75-78. On the Henry Wallace campaign: Ellen
Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) 35-37.
Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982) 246-247.
Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer. . . (New York: Basic Books, 1987) 6-7. Freeman, 78. Biondi, 141-147.
Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996).
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People (NAACP).8 Abzug’s involvement in civil rights activism as the Cold War heightened,
despite these political roadblocks, suggests that many Left activists publicly challenged the
attack on radical politics and personal freedom spearheaded by both white supremacists, and
anti-communist conservatives and liberals.
Closed out of many political venues, the Left of New York reinvented itself in the late1940s, focusing all efforts on civil rights and civil liberties. By taking both civil rights and civil
liberties cases, Abzug joined other progressive New York attorneys and activists who used the
law to battle racism and anti-communism simultaneously. Her choice to represent Willie McGee
suggests that she believed that the Jim Crow South was an example of political and social
repression in its most brutal form. Challenging the Southern justice system head on, Abzug, like
many Left attorneys, used the courts not only to bring unfavorable public attention to the
Southern apartheid system, but more important, to bring about social change.9 While Abzug was
in the vanguard of this effort, she was one of a band of leftists resolutely promoting civil rights
when few were ready to join the fight.
Abzug contributed to a Left legal reform movement that not only fashioned a new civil
rights legal strategy, but also helped focus U.S. and international attention on African
Americans’ civil rights. The late-1940s marked a repositioning in Left legal thinking in which
they shifted their demands for civil rights from a labor-oriented, economic argument to one of
8
For the most complete historical study of the growth of anti-communist legal proceedings, see: Schrecker, Many
Are the Crimes.
9
Charles H. Martin, “Race, Gender, and Southern Justice: The Rosa Lee Ingram Case,” American Journal of Legal
History XXIX (July 1985) 251-268. Eric W. Rise, “Race, Rape, and Radicalism: The Case of the Martinsville
Seven, 1949-1951,” The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 3 (August 1992) 461-490. Charles H. Martin, “The
Civil Rights Congress and Southern Black Defendants,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXXI (Spring 1987) 25-52.
Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (Rutherford: Associated University Press,
1988).
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social integration and legal equity.10 This legal strategy is evidenced, in part, by Abzug’s
argument for a new trial and reversal of McGee’s conviction on grounds of the Civil Rights Act
of 1875. To support Abzug’s courtroom activism, the Civil Rights Congress initiated a direct
action campaign in the tradition of their predecessors, the International Labor Defense. Unlike
the strategy of liberal civil rights groups like the NAACP, the Left legal community sought to
work inside and outside of the court system, believing that the courts would respond to public
pressure.11 They hoped the dual force of legal and direct action would push U.S. civil rights into
the forefront of domestic and foreign policy debate. 12 In a sense, Left attorneys like Abzug
demanded that the Supreme Court take an activist role in reforming the imbedded injustices in
the Southern court system; however, the Vinson Court was not prepared to mandate broad legal
and social change.
***
Abzug’s heightened interest in civil rights legal work at the onset of the Cold War
mirrored a general shift within the Left legal community of New York.13 Despite a rise in anticommunist activity in the late-1940s, the New York Left remained a large, vibrant community
A rich account of this shift from economic to race-oriented civil rights is: Risa Lauren Goluboff, “The Lost
Origins of Modern Civil Rights,” (Dissertation, Princeton University, November 2003).
11
For the divide between liberal civil rights groups, such as the NAACP and the Left organizations like the Civil
Rights Congress, refer to the classic works: Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1951). Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington
Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1959).
12
As U.S. foreign policy centered on extending democracy abroad, the publicity of the Willie McGee case helped
expose the prevalence of racism at home. For the link between the expansion of African American’s civil rights
from the late-1940s through the 1960s and the Cold War, refer to: Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line:
American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Yet, at the same
time, anti-communism limited the possibilities of the Left achieving an ambitious civil rights agenda and curbed the
potential for a reversal of convictions in cases like that of Willie McGee; Refer to: Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial
Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: The Free Press, 1989).
13
Evidencing the fluidity of Left organizing that enabled activists like Bella Abzug to shift between labor and civil
rights legal work, leaders in the Left legal defense group Civil Rights Congress, such as Aubrey Grossman and
founding member Milt Kaufman, had a background in the labor movement. Refer to: Horne, 32.
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interested in local and national politics. 14 Leading the fight for civil rights and civil liberties,
New York City was the nucleus of Left activism in the late-1940s and early-1950s. The Leftlabor alliance had been shattered, yet radicals were not closed out of all venues in the New Yorkcentered civil rights movement of the post-World War II era. As Martha Biondi observes, “The
anticommunist purge in the New York labor movement undermined the dynamic Black-laborleft nexus at the heart of the city’s civil rights movement,” leaving primarily radical Blacks and
Jews to carry on the cause.15 Indeed, horrific accounts of legal lynching, race riots, and unAmerican hunts in the Daily Worker and People’s World gave the New York Left many reasons
why they should challenge white supremacy and anti-communism. Clearly, the forces behind
anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacy were inextricably linked. How could the
Left remain silent about these infringements of personal freedom and republican values? To be
sure, the Left was easily compelled to advance civil rights. Yet, they faced the difficult task of
locating and mobilizing around an issue that would enrage the public and stimulate an interest in
change.
The Left legal community had a persuasive, controversial example to draw upon, that
being the Scottsboro boys’ rape trial that captivated the nation in the 1930s. 16 The Scottsboro
trial had taught the Left, first, that rape cases involving Black male assailants and white female
accusers exposed saliently the hypocrisy of the Southern justice system. Second, mass defense
Joshua Freeman observes of the resilience of the New York Left during this period, “Nowhere did left-wing and
left-leaning ex-Communists have more influence than in New York. Those in the know. . . . could find them
holding positions in the most likely and unlikely places.” Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and
Labor Since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000) 94.
15
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003) 147. On the Black-Jewish alliance: Biondi, 15, 16.
16
James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe. Dan T.
Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). On
similar cases in the 1930s: Charles H. Martin, “Oklahoma’s ‘Scottsboro’ Affair: the Jess Hollins Case, 1931-1936,”
South Atlantic Quarterly, LXXIX (Spring 1980), 175-188. Steven F. Lawson, David R. Colburn, and Darryl
Paulson, “Groveland: Florida’s Little Scottsboro,” Florida Historical Quarterly, LXV (July 1986), 1-21.
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strategy, as employed by the International Labor Defense during the Scottsboro case, was an
effective political tactic that allowed for activism to occur both in the streets and the courts. 17
Upon forming the New York-based legal defense organization Civil Rights Congress in 1946,
the Left legal community determined to carry on the efforts of the International Labor Defense
by focusing their campaign for civil rights on rape cases in the tradition of Scottsboro. In so
doing, the Civil Rights Congress, with the help of the National Lawyer’s Guild, the Left legal
bar, sought to illuminate the long history of trials involving Black men falsely accused of raping
white women since the Postbellum era.18
For the Left legal community, the Jim Crow South became their main civil rights
battleground and the Willie McGee case was the grandest experiment since Scottsboro. The
McGee case encapsulated everything rotten about the Southern Jim Crow system: corruption,
intolerance, mob violence, and white supremacy. According to Gerald Horne, “the case of
McGee. . . . carried all the elements of a tragedy that could illuminate larger issues-the case was
17
In his introduction to the Papers of the Civil Rights Congress at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black
Culture, historian Charles H. Martin states, “As its basic philosophy, the CRC adopted the ILD’s [International
Labor Defense] strategy of ‘mass defense.’ . . . The role of a defense organization was thus to shift the balance of
forces in favor of the defendant by providing the best technical assistance possible inside the courtroom while
simultaneously developing ‘mass pressure’ outside the courtroom.” Refer to: Charles H. Martin, “Introduction,” A
Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Black Studies Research Sources: Papers of the Civil Rights Congress, Part I: Case
Files, ed. by August Meier and John H. Bracey, Jr. (Bethesda, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1992)
vi.
18
There is a rich, growing historiography on the link between white supremacy, paternalism, and rape law in the
South. Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women,
Rape, and Racial Violence,” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, et al. (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1983). Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the
Women’s Campaign Against Lyching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). On rape law in the
Antebellum South: Diane Miller Sommerville, “The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,” The Journal of
Southern History 61, no. 3 (August 1995) 481-518. Peter W. Bardaglio, “Rape and the Law in the Old South:
‘Calculated to Excite Indignation in Every Heart,” The Journal of Southern History 60, no. 4 (November 1994) 749772. On Southerner’s project of constructing whiteness and its link to lynching and rape law: Grace Elizabeth Hale,
Making whiteness: the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). A
classic, but problematic take on the link between lynching and rape law: Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will:
Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
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a microcosm, a cross-section, a sliver of Americana.”19 Taking on the defense of McGee in
1948, the Civil Rights Congress made this local tragedy a national spectacle, hoping that public
interest would help the case gain legal momentum. They also shifted the legal make-up of the
McGee defense team from one of the Southern liberal bar to a collaborative effort between local
Left attorneys supported by national litigators. Bella Abzug would lead this defense team
beginning in late-1948, significantly shaping the legal direction of the McGee appeals. However,
prior to Abzug’s entrance, the worlds inhabited by Bella Abzug and Willie McGee could not be
more distant.
Just as Abzug embarked on a promising career in New York City as a public interest
attorney, McGee unknowingly began an inauspicious journey toward the death house in rural
Laurel, Mississippi. Returning from a poker game in Hattiesburg, McGee was arrested on
November 4, 1945 for the rape of white woman Wiletta Hawkins, with whom he was known to
have a long-standing extramarital affair. When Laurel residents picked up their newspapers that
morning, they were probably not phased by the headline “Another Negro Jailed in an Assault
Case Investigation.”20 This article announced the arrest of Willie McGee for the alleged rape of
Willetta Hawkins, who had reported to police two days before that an intruder had entered her
house at 4:30 a.m. She claimed a man “with a bushy Negro head” raped her in a room adjoining
her husband’s as she slept next to her infant.21
The day prior to Willie McGee’s arrest, the
police began a search for an assailant, and questioned a number of Black men. McGee was first
arrested on the grounds that he stole his employer’s grocery truck, but the charges were soon
19
Horne, 74.
“Another Negro is Jailed in Assault Case Investigation,” Laurel Leader-Call, November 4, 1945. The following
account of the first and second trials relies on: Zaim, 217-222. Horne, 79-80.
21
“This is State’s ‘Case,” an excerpt from Mrs. Hawkins testimony included in the following Civil Rights Congress
publication: “Exclusive: The Story of Willie McGee: A Negro Feels Mississippi Justice as Told by His Wife,” Civil
Rights Congress, n.d. Box 90, Folder 18, “Civil Rights Congress,” J.B. Matthews Papers, Duke University.
20
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switched to the rape of Hawkins. The police told the press that McGee’s truck was sighted near
Hawkins residence around the time of the rape, and they had secured a confession of the crime.
These initial events did not cause great alarm among Laurel residents, but rather seemed like a
typical occurrence in a society that often convicted Black men of raping white women. For the
residents of Laurel still believed lynching to be a sufficient remedy for overstepping the bounds
of the Jim Crow system, and Willie McGee had done just that.
McGee’s alleged confession marked the first sign that justice would not be a governing
factor in his first trial. After being held in the Hinds County jail, with mobs heckling McGee
outside, he was escorted by state militiamen to court for his two-day trial beginning on
December 6, 1945. Even though he could barely sit straight at his trial, since he was beaten
badly before appearing, the judge declared him fit for trial.22 McGee’s attorneys, from the local
firm Koch and Boyd, claimed the fact that Wiletta Hawkins’ husband did not awaken during the
rape suggested that she did not resist intercourse.23 Nevertheless, the jury took no time to find
him guilty, determining in a few short minutes that McGee should be sentenced to death.
The main component missing in the court record December Seventh was the truth. As
the events of Willie McGee and Wiletta Hawkins affair would unfold over the course of the trials
and appeals between 1946 and 1951, the court record would reveal a more complicated truth than
described in the prosecution’s first confession of McGee. To be sure, the truth in the McGee
case highlighted the complex history of sexual relations in the South, in which affairs gone awry
often resulted in claims of rape. As McGee would later reveal upon being represented by Bella
Abzug, a long-standing relationship between McGee and Hawkins was well known in the
community of Laurel. While this fact was common knowledge, it was left unsaid by defenders
“Willie McGee Declared Sane After Sanity Hearing and is on Trial for Life for Rape,” Laurel Leader-Call, 6
December 1945: 1.
23
Zaim, 220.
22
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of McGee and witnesses of both parties in the first and second trials. For Willie McGee violated
a central taboo in Southern society, and when Hawkins brought her affair into the public by
crying rape, her lover was prosecuted for his unacceptable liaison.
Why did the jurors, government officials, and white majority of Mississippi claim that
justice was served by convicting Willie McGee? The legal lynching of Willie McGee did not
occur without reason. Legal lynching of African-American men like Willie McGee restored
what Grace Elizabeth Hale calls the “culture of segregation” in the post-World War II era.24
Building on a tradition dating back to the days of slavery, Southern officials policed the
boundaries between whiteness and blackness and maintained economic order through the use of
rape law.25
Indeed, McGee’s trial was vindication for Mississippi whites who were alarmed by the
advances in economic and political power that African Americans had achieved in the last
decade. World War II was a watershed moment for African Americans, who gained access to
industry and social services as a result of war production demands and the New Deal program.
McGee’s home state experienced a growth in Black activism as result of greater social and
economic opportunity during World War II. More than 85,000 Blacks from Mississippi
returned from serving in World War II to impoverished conditions and wide-spread white
24
Hale, 231.
Peter Bardaglio argues persuasively that the antebellum courts’ treatment of rape law formed the “legal bedrock of
these infamous twentieth-century trials” (Bardaglio, 750). Blacks gained more due process in rape trials in the
Colonial jurisprudence since whites stood to lose economically from a death sentence or extended conviction of
slaves. Additionally, white women’s sexuality was weighed evenly next to the slave’s testimony, and at times,
called into question; as such, class as well as race shaped rape law. Bardaglio, “Rape and the Law in the Old
South,” 763-765, 772.
25
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supremacy legitimized by the educational, legal, political, and economic systems. 26 Yet, rather
than welcome economic and political disparities, African-Americans began to demand change.27
Newly elected Dixiecrat politicians quashed any hope for Black advancement after World
War II. This vocal minority of Southern Democrats held significant positions in Mississippi,
such as Senator Theodore Bilbo and Governor Fielding Wright, who became Governor during
McGee’s first trial.28 These politicians condoned legal lynching, just as they supported the Klu
Klux Klan, disenfranchisement of Blacks, and segregation. To be sure, white supremacist
politicians and their police forces reinstated the reign of rape law as a means of enforcement of
black’s subordination. As the McGee case evidenced, when the strict gender, race, class, and
sexuality roles enforced by Mississippi officials were called into question, retribution would be
swift.
Considering the odds against McGee, it is no wonder that his local counsel were reluctant
to continue representing him. To make matters worse, they were often subject to threats of
violence. After his first conviction, McGee’s future seemed bleak indeed until the Civil Rights
Congress approached his mother Bessie McGee about taking over the case.29 Upon its founding
in 1946, the Civil Rights Congress had been monitoring court dockets in search of a test-case for
its Southern legal defense agenda. When the Civil Rights Congress sent a few of its lawyers to
Mississippi to support the anti-Bilbo campaign in court, they discovered in Mississippi a
26
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994) 17.
27
Dittmer, 19. The most compelling example of this increase in organized resistance was the successful campaign
to oust Dixiecrat Senator Theodore Bilbo. After Senator Bilbo publicly announced his interest in keeping Blacks
from the polls during the primaries, fifty Mississippi residents filed a complaint with the U.S. Committee to
Investigate Campaign Expenditures, demanding an investigation. Refer to: Sullivan, 218. Biondi, 56-57.
28
For how the citizens of Laurel, MS embraced Governor Wright, see: “New Governor Awaited in Capital City,”
Laurel Leader-Call, 5 November 1946: 1.
29
Letter from Bessie McGee to Maurice Isserman, August 22, 1946. This is first of a long running correspondence
between the Civil Rights Congress and the McGee family that continued after Willie McGee’s death. Reel 10: 381.
Papers of the Civil Rights Congress.
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burgeoning organic Black movement, little organizational presence on the part of the NAACP,
and the story of Willie McGee’s unjust first trial making headlines in local Black papers.30 The
McGee case, the Civil Rights Congress decided, would be a perfect case for its Southern legal
lynching campaign.
Initially backing Southern attorneys Dixon Pyle and Dan Breland financially, the Civil
Rights Congress did not invest significant energy in the legal strategy or publicity of Willie
McGee’s second trial in Hattiesberg, Mississippi in November 1946. Not suprisingly, the second
trial did not go much better than the first; in large part because McGee’s attorneys, intimidated
by mobs waiting outside the courthouse, failed to raise all of the evidence.31 Pyle, in fact, was
ordered out of town after the trial and essentially blacklisted in Mississippi, destroying his ability
to practice in his home state. But despite threats of violence, Breland and Pyle continued to
represent McGee during his second appeal and leading up to the third trial. Yet, at the eleventhhour, both attorneys became so concerned about their safety, they quit the case a few weeks prior
to the third trial date of February 1948. This left the leaders of the Civil Rights Congress
scrambling to put together a trial team after their motion for continuance was denied. A few
weeks before the trial, they enlisted local trial attorneys who would be supported by a New
York-based defense team compiled of Jewish attorneys Emmanuel Bloch, Aubrey Grossman,
and Bella Abzug.32
Biondi, 56. Evidencing the Civil Right’s Congress’ monitoring of Southern rape trials, they collected a press
release on the Willie McGee case from the Southern Negro Youth Congress, “Willie McGee One of a Tire Trying
Flee Jaxon Jail,” dated February 27, 1946. Reel 10: 572. Papers of the Civil Rights Congress.
31
“Willie M’Gee in Hub Court,” Laurel Leader-Call, November 13, 1946. Trial transcript, State of Mississippi v.
Willie McGee, Record Number 36411, filed 4/4/1947 in Forrest County, Mississippi. Box 44, folder 5, Mary
Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
32
For the complete court record of the third trial and appeal, including pre-trial pleadings, refer to the appellate
record of the U.S. Supreme Court: “238 OT 1949,” Box 41 and 42, Entry 21, 237 OT 1949-238 OT 1949, Appellate
Case Files, Records Group 267: Records of the Supreme Court of the U.S., National Archives.
30
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The end of 1948, Abzug soon found herself immersed in the activities of the Civil Rights
Congress, to which she was introduced through her work with the National Lawyers Guild.33 As
a prominent, fresh voice in the National Lawyer’s Guild, Abzug no doubt gained attention of
Civil Rights Congress leaders, African American attorneys William Patterson and Ralph Powe,
and Jewish attorney Aubrey Grossmann. Upon their founding, Powe, along with prominent Left
litigators Emmanuel Bloch, Carol King, Herman Rosenfeld, and Abraham Isserman, formed a
Legal Committee to monitor and recruit promising attorneys noted for “creative, precedentbreaking legal thinking and acting” for their cause. African American lawyers were natural
recruits, but the Legal Committee also actively sought women, recognizing that “there are many
spots where women lawyers play a very leading civil rights role-Los Angeles, Chicago,
Cleveland, New York. . . .”34 Considering Abzug’s outspoken style, creative vision, and strong
presence in New York Left litigation circles, it is not hard to see why the Civil Rights Congress
was interested in enlisting her to Willie McGee’s defense team. Yet, they likely did not know
what a natural she was for the part.
Abzug’s commitment to social justice dated back to her youth in the South Bronx. Born
in 1920, her childhood was shaped by her family’s conception of Jewish ethics, which she
recalled to be “the philosophy that if there were discrimination or poverty among other groups, it
was not enough to seek a way out of poverty or a way out of discrimination for ourselves, but for
others.”35 Young Bella actively engaged in politics at an early age, as a member of the Zionist
youth group Hashomer Hatzair, and broadened her social activism as a student leader at Walton
Since the Civil Rights Congress’ founding, they had drawn upon the membership of the National Lawyers Guild
to support their civil rights campaigns and serve on their defense teams. Horne, 225.
34
The Civil Rights Congress Legal Committee minutes from November 14, 1946, as quoted in: Horne, 33.
35
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 1-38. For background on Abzug’s youth, especially relating to her Jewish heritage,
see: “Bella Abzug’s Chapter in ‘First Generation Americans,” Box 110, “Administrative files, Public Relations:
Literary,” Bella Abzug Papers, Columbia University. Oral history of Bella Abzug, William E. Wiener Oral History
Library of the American Jewish Committee, New York Public Library. Bella Abzug, “Bella on Bella,” Moment 1,
no. 7 (February 1976).
33
13
High and Hunter College. Upon graduating college, she determined to become a labor lawyer.
“Somehow I believed if I could become a lawyer, I could set things straight,” she wrote. 36
Abzug attended Columbia Law on scholarship when the school opened its doors to women
during World War II, and excelled as a top student of her class and editor of the Columbia Law
Review. Nevertheless, she experienced difficulty attaining a job and finally settled on the labor
law firm Witt and Kammer, where she recalled, “they didn’t ask me if I could type and they were
respectful of me as being a lawyer.”37 As a young attorney, Abzug could finally combine her
personal dedication to social justice with her professional work. From 1946 to 1948, Abzug
balanced her work representing unions ranging from the Mine & Smelt Workers Union to UAW
local #259 with pro bono cases in civil rights that she engaged in as a member of the National
Lawyer’s Guild of New York.
Abzug likely believed the Civil Rights Congress to be an ideal organization in which to
further her civil rights activism. Its strong recruitment of female attorneys was refreshing for a
woman who had previously found the sexism among her fellow labor lawyers to be stifling.
That the New York chapter of the Civil Rights Congress consisted of predominantly Left Jewish
activists made it a welcoming community for Abzug since her Jewish identity framed her sense
of social justice.38 Additionally, the many African Americans and Jews in leadership positions in
the organization offered her a unique opportunity to contribute to the growing Black-Jewish
alliance in New York City.
Abzug was also attracted to the McGee case because of its growing national and
international recognition. Twenty-eight years old in 1948, she was a capable, ambitious lawyer
Bella Abzug as quoted from a book proposal she completed in the early 1990s. Abzug, “Book Proposal,” 6.
Private papers of Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Oral History Research Office, Columbia University. On file
with the author.
37
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 2-83. For her experience in labor law, refer to: 2-82 – 2-91.
38
Horne, 247.
36
14
searching for challenge and recognition. That she would be the first female attorney to work on
the case was not at all daunting. If all went well, Abzug hoped the McGee case would strengthen
her reputation as skilled public interest attorney, causing other potential clients to consider her
for noteworthy cases.
After consulting on a few of McGee’s appeals prior to the third trial, Abzug was asked by
leading attorneys in the National Lawyer’s Guild and Civil Rights Congress to increase her
contribution to the case. With Pyle and Breland having quit and pressure mounting, both
organizations believed that the case’s appeals would have to be handled primarily by their
attorneys in New York. What they needed was an energetic, persistent attorney to lead the New
York defense and who could also locate local counsel to argue the third trial; Bella Abzug was
their woman.
As Abzug remembers it, she was cornered by senior lawyers—including Sam Rosenweig,
Harold Karma, and Nathan Witt, her former employer—who “said that the Southern lawyer who
had tried the first case was unwilling to go on.” According to her, “A white lawyer could get
enough money from the northern civil rights organizations to do it once around, and if he wanted
to continue living and practicing in a white southern community, he couldn’t do it twice.”39
With the impending trial and no attorney for McGee, Abzug’s professional elders pushed her to
go to Mississippi and find him counsel. At first, she was not at all interested, remembering later
that she reacted by stating, “What? Are you crazy? I don’t know the first thing about Mississippi.
I’ve never been there. . . .,” and then worrying, “I’m going to get down there and get killed?”40
Yet, she was coaxed into becoming chief counsel when she was told that no one else with
39
40
Abzug, “Book Proposal,” 12.
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-128, 3-129.
15
knowledge of the case would take it. Finally, she realized “the poor man was going to get
reindicted and not have a lawyer” if she did not find him one.41
When Abzug arrived in Mississippi, she felt as if she had walked into “a whole other
world from the one I had been raised in.”42 Jackson was in a foreign country to this Left Jewish
New Yorker.43 Word of the “outsider’s” arrival spread quickly in local legal circles. When
Abzug met outgoing counsel Dixon Pyle, he cautioned that “the whole town, in Jackson, is
talking about the fact that some white, young woman lawyer has arrived to help Willie McGee.”
He urged her to leave town fast, saying, “I don’t know that it will be safe for you to be here.”44
Yet, Abzug was determined to complete her first mission – meeting with Albert
Easterling, the District Attorney of Laurel, Mississippi. Despite Pyle’s warnings, she drove to
Laurel alone, and in this hour of solitude, was awakened to one of the realities of life for Willie
McGee and his fellow Mississippians – the intense poverty of rural life.45 Her education about
life in the deep South continued during her conversation with Easterling, in which she was first
exposed to the racist and sexist thinking of the attorneys and officials who dominated the justice
system in Mississippi. “Do you really think anybody here is going to pay any attention to you?,”
she remembers him saying to her in between spitting into a spittoon behind her.46 Needless to
say, she did not persuade Easterling to stall the reindictment.
Upon arriving back in Jackson, Pyle was surprised that she had returned safely since his
phone had been ringing off the hook as more locals sighted Abzug during her visit in Laurel.
41
Abzug, OHRO-Columiba, 3-129.
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-133.
43
Upon her initial visit to the Deep South, Bella Abzug’s impression of the South was framed by her identity as a
New Yorker. Understandably, she was unaware initially of the active engagement of Southerners combating white
supremacy. Refer to: Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: Southerners at War with White Supremacy, 1919-1948 (New
York: W.W. Norton, forthcoming).
44
Pyle as quoted retrospectively by Abzug: Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-130.
45
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-130.
46
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-130.
42
16
Moreover, he refused to help her find a lawyer for McGee because he believed no local attorneys
would be crazy enough to take on the case. Left to her own resources, she called a friend of her
brother-in-law at the Jewish Welfare Board to get a list of Jewish attorney in Jackson. Then, she
“literally went from building to building where lawyers were housed and looked at the boards,
and tried to pick a lawyer.”47 Finally, she came upon two attorneys just crazy enough for the
cause. First, she retained A.N. London, an affiliate of the Jewish Welfare Board. Since he was
not a trial attorney, he recommended John Poole, who was “a southern kind of personality” to
primarily represent McGee in Court.48 Surviving the first test of her will in the McGee case,
Abzug returned to New York City, feeling a sense of accomplishment.
Back in New York, she monitored the Willie McGee case from a seemingly more
familiar world. Yet, her transformative experience as a witness of the Peekskill riots of
September 1949 taught her that her familiar New York home had more in common with the
white supremacist, repressive system of Southern justice than she had thought. Paul Robeson
was scheduled to perform in Peekskill, New York on August 27, 1949 at a fundraising event
sponsored by the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress. Robeson had concerts in
Peekskill each summer since 1946 to an audience of predominantly Jewish summer residents and
inhibitors of the Left colonies. While previous concerts had not attracted attention, Robeson’s
public praise of the Communist party and a rise in ethnic tension between local and summer
residents came to a head in 1949.49 As anti-communist sentiment heightened after the
establishment of President Truman’s Loyalty Program in 1947, radical groups who were
supportive of the Communist Party were especially susceptive to violent backlash. The Civil
Rights Congress was singled out by Peekskill residents to be a pro-communist organization
47
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-132.
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-132.
49
Svonkin, 136-137.
48
17
unwelcome in their town. Not only did the Peekskill Chamber of Commerce and the Peekskill
Joint Veterans’ Council actively voice their disdain for Robeson and his supporters, the press
encouraged locals to disrupt the concert in vehement editorials. 50 After learning that the first
concert “was broken up by violence as epithets against Communists, Jews, and Negroes were
hurled,” Abzug joined approximately 15,000 Robeson supporters who attended a second concert
on September, 4, 1949. 51 Held a few miles away from the first concert, Paul Robeson, Pete
Seeger, and others performed among a crowd of supporters monitored by over 1,000 police and
television cameras ready for footage if violence should again unfold. Attending with Martin and
her sister Helene, Abzug observed violence erupt for a second time, which literally hit home
when a stone shattered the windshield of her car while police complacently looked on.52
The violence in Peekskill enraged Abzug to the point that she went to hospitals and
police stations that night to offer legal assistance to those injured in the riots. She later
represented twenty-eight plaintiffs in a 2.02 million dollar suit sponsored by the Civil Rights
Congress, along with William Patterson and others.53 Foreshadowing her final argument in the
Willie McGee case, she asserted that the Peekskill violence occurred as a result of an
infringement of the civil rights law, alleging “the violation of civil rights were conducted with
the aid of state and local police and the district attorney under ‘color of state authority.”54
Though many liberal Jewish organizations were cautious to condemn the Peekskill riots in fear
For example, one Peekskill Evening Star editorial warned “It becomes evident that every ticket purchased for the
Peekskill concert will drop nickels and dimes into the till basket of an Un-American political organization. . . .
Peekskill wants no rallies that support iron curtains, concentration camps, blockades, and NKVD’s, no matter how
masterful the décor, nor how sweet the music.” Peekskill Evening Star, August 23, 1949, as quoted in: Svonkin,
137-138.
51
Abzug, “Book Proposal,” 11. For more background on the Civil Rights Congress response to the Peekskill
violence at the first and second Roebeson concert, as well as Abzug’s role in the litigation that unfolded as a result
of the violence at the second concert, see: Horne, 235-238. For the varied responses of the Jewish community to the
Peekskill violence, see: Svonkin, 136-147.
52
Abzug, “Book Proposal,” 11.
53
Horne, 238.
54
Abzug, “Book Proposal,” 11.
50
18
they would be associated with groups labeled as un-American, Abzug did not hesitate to take a
public role in demanding retribution for the riots. While many were silenced and terrified by
what they saw in Peekskill, Abzug left the event more impassioned and outspoken about the
harms of anti-communism. For Peekskill revealed that white supremacy fueled the Cold War
fire, and Abzug was determined to extinguish this backlash against Jews, African Americans,
and radicals.
When the leaders of the Civil Rights Congress asked Abzug to draft her first solo brief
for Willie McGee’s initial appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall of 1949, she was
delighted to offer her support. As she researched and wrote this brief just as the Peekskill riots
unfolded, this latest affront to the values of the New York Left community underscored how
crucial civil rights litigation was to the nation’s future progress. McGee as a Black man was
subjected to racial oppression embedded in the Southern justice system, just as those injured at
Peekskill were victims of State authority in the form of police inaction and government
complacency toward the Peekskill rioters, of the former, Abzug observed:
Every custom, every usage, every teaching surrounding the relations
between Negro and white persons in the state of Mississippi for a hundred years
not only made McGee a victim, but brutalized the judges in the state courts, the
district courts and deprived them of that freedom of conscience and judicial calm
which prevails among them except when the issue of social segregation is
involved.55
By representing McGee, Abzug determined to fight a triangle of oppression—anti-Semitism,
anti-communism, and racism—that had blighted the nation in the late-1940s.
Abzug, “Book Proposal,” 12. Abzug believed that not only African-Americans, but white Southerners were
victims of the Southern system of segregation. She argued that whites “were the victims of the same ruthless
system, even though they had risen above poverty. . . . These people were degraded, so they could not allow an
opening up of their minds to behave in the way you would expect a judge or an attorney general or a lawyer to
behave. . . . They were really a ‘slavocracy,’ still.” Refer to: Oral interview of Bella Abzug, Oral History Research
Office, Columbia University, 6-305. (Hereafter, this document is referred to as: Abzug, OHRO-Columbia).
55
19
Abzug’s Petition for Rehearing, filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on October 24, 1949,
provided her first opportunity to engage in legal strategy.56 Having exhausted all avenues in the
lower courts, the Civil Rights Congress hoped to compel the U.S. Supreme Court to review the
case. Preparing the Petition for Rehearing over the summer’s tumultuous events, Abzug was
acutely aware of how close McGee had come to death. She also recognized that McGee’s
experience during his three trials and three convictions reflected a history of unjust treatment of
African Americans involved in rape cases. Strategically, she believed that her best hope of
gaining a hearing in the Supreme Court lay in presenting evidence of the historical bias
engrained in the Mississippi Constitution and statutes that sanctioned the exclusion of Blacks
from juries. In order to support this argument, Abzug poured over Federal and state case law and
statutes that pertained to the jury system. She also looked at articles that analyzed the impact of
poll taxes on African American voter enrollment in Mississippi. In addition, she examined over
political publications that addressed the discrepancy between Black and white voter turn-out in
Mississippi in the reelection campaign of Senator Theodore Bilbo in 1946.
Rather than treating McGee as unique, Abzug framed her argument by situating her
client within a long history of Black men convicted of raping white women. Seeing rape
convictions as a tool of oppression, she argued:
This case thus follows a familiar pattern of Southern repression against the Negro
people – a frame-up charge of rape against a white woman, a lightening indictment by an
all-white jury, mob hysteria and a lynch atmosphere, long imprisonment, without
opportunity for consultation, and forced confession, a quick unseemly trial, relentless
pursuit of the victim to the point of the imposition of the death penalty.57
From her opening statement, Abzug made clear that the Southern judicial system had a uniform
way of dealing with African American men and white women who transgressed established
Petition for Rehearing, October 24, 1949, Willie McGee v. State of Mississippi, No. 238. “238 OT 1949,” Box 42,
Entry 21, Appellate Files, U.S. Supreme Court, National Archives.
57
Abzug, Petition for Rehearing, October 24, 1949, 2.
56
20
racial and gender norms. Just as Blacks had been historically subjected to lynching for alleged
rapes, so they had been discriminated against by voting laws that purposefully excluded them
from being qualified voters and jury members.58 The poll tax, she argued, affected the inclusion
of Blacks in the jury system because it determined the qualified electors for the jury pool.
Accordingly, this statutory system of jury selection was inherently discriminatory and violated
the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.59
Shortly after Abzug submitted the Petition for Rehearing, the U.S. Supreme Court issued
a decision in Cassell v. Texas that significantly substantiated her argument.60 As a result, she
submitted a Supplemental Petition for Rehearing in May of 1950 that encouraged the U.S.
Supreme Court to view the McGee rehearing request in line with their recent opinion in Cassell.
She argued that the McGee case was similar to Cassell on two accounts. First, Cassell
determined that any evidence which indicated jurists were selected on the basis of race rather
than individual qualifications was unconstitutional.61 Second, the Cassell case questioned the
validity of the poll tax requirements.
Abzug hoped that by drawing out the parallels between the McGee and Cassell cases, she
would persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a rehearing. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court,
unwilling to hear the case, denied certiorari May 15, 1950. According to the bench memos
drafted by the Supreme Court clerks who reviewed certiorari requests, they were unmoved by
Abzug’s argument and did not feel it extended the argument put forth in the Certiorari the
Supreme Court had denied previously. As one memo put it, “The method by which this alleged
exclusion took place, would appear to be less important than the fact of exclusion, an issue which
58
Abzug, Petition for Rehearing, October 24, 1949, 5.
Abzug, Petition for Rehearing, October 24, 1949, 8.
60
Cassell v. Texas, 339 U.S. 282 (1950).
61
Supplemental Petition for Rehearing, May 1950, Willie McGee v. State of Mississippi, No. 238. “238 OT 1949,”
Box 42, Entry 21, Appellate Files, U.S. Supreme Court, National Archives.
59
21
conceivably has been decided against petitioner. . . .”62 The caution of the Supreme Court clerks
surely reflected the conservatism of the Vinson court. Serving as Chief Justice until his death in
September 1953, Fred Vinson, a Truman loyalist, was thought to be a weak, conservative leader
of the Court.63 Joining Vinson in the conservative camp were three Justices appointed by
Truman—Harold Burton, Sherman Minton, and Tom Clark—and three Justices nominated by
Roosevelt—Felix Frankfurter, Stanley Reed, and Robert Jackson. Justice Hugo Black and
Justice William O. Douglass stood out as the lone liberals of the Vinson court. Over the course
of McGee’s cases, these two Justices offered support for his cause by granting stays of
execution, but since they were a minority, they could not decide his fate. Unwilling to intervene
in Southern politics in 1949, the Court choose to leave McGee to the Mississippi justice system.
Abzug took to heart the denial of the first brief she had ever submitted to the high court.
Clearly, the Justices were not ready to take an interventionist role in state jurisprudence, nor
were most overly receptive to civil rights cases, and fewer still shared her vision of using the
courts to bring about social change. Yet, Abzug recognized that the McGee case was just
beginning to gain national and international recognition. Public awareness was a powerful force.
Perhaps if there were enough telegrams as well as future cases involving civil rights, and
especially race-based jury exclusion, directed toward the Supreme Court, the Justices would
change their stance.
MLS, “Petition for Rehearing,” No. 238, OT 1949, 4/28/1950. “Law Clerks’ Memoranda, Appellate Docket:
Certs. Denied and Appeals Dismissed, Nos. 234-254,” October Term 1949, Box 138, Folder 9, Harold H. Burton
Papers, Library of Congress. It is worth noting that some clerks did support granting Abzug’s Supplemental Petition
for Rehearing. For example, Justice William O. Douglas’ clerk Warren Christopher in 1949, supported granting the
petition, stating: “Use of the voting lists as the basis for jury selection may result in unfairness in the South, quite
apart from other factors. The standard for jury selection need not be as low as the standard for elector selection.
Due process seems to require something better than the perpetuation of the infamously unbalanced voting lists as the
basis for jury selection.” Warren Christopher, “Supplemental Petition for Rehearing,” May 12, 1949. “Misc. Nos.
250-299: O.T. 1950,” Box 201, William O. Douglas Papers, Library of Congress. In his memo, clerk Marshall L.
Small did express that Cassell raised substantial question of the jury selection system in McGee’s trials. MLS,
“Supplemental Petition for Rehearing,” No. 238, OT 1949. “Misc. Nos. 250-299: O.T. 1950,” Box 201, William O.
Douglas Papers, Library of Congress.
63
Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court (New York: Penguin Books, 1999) 367.
62
22
Meanwhile, the third trial concluded in Laurel, Mississippi much like the others, with a
guilty verdict and death penalty sentence delivered as mobs gathered outside the courthouse. In
fact, Poole’s defense was so strongly impeded by the threat of violence that he left the
courthouse through the backdoor without delivering a closing argument in order to escape
vigilantes waiting for him after the trial. Not surprisingly, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld
the third trial verdict, and set an execution date of July 27, 1950.
With the execution nearing, the Civil Rights Congress appealed to Governor Wright for
clemency. Expressing little sympathy, Wright responded, “It is my opinion that the judgment of
the court is correct, and this man’s act justifies extreme penalty.”64 Willie McGee’s end seemed
all but inevitable. Fainting at the jailhouse after the clock struck midnight, Rosalee McGee
thought her husband had been executed. Yet, when she awoke she learned that his attorney John
Poole had saved him with just minutes to spare, having secured a stay of execution from acting
Chief Justice William G. Roberds.65 McGee was saved for now, but Poole’s act cost him his
practice as the Mississippi bar association voted to have him disbarred in 1950.66 But if
Mississippi lawyers were distinctly unimpressed with Poole’s valiant midnight run on behalf of
McGee, at least one New York attorney was.
Abzug, preparing to lead the case in Poole’s absence, vowed to emulate his courage and
commitment to social justice. She believed Poole’s pending disbarment to be an affront to the
legal profession and spoke publicly in his support, stating:
When it takes a hero to represent an accused Negro the right to counsel is
nearly destroyed. And the McGee case is undoubtedly not untypical of such
64
Letter from Governor Fielding C. Wright to the Civil Rights Congress, November 7, 1949. Reel 10: 575, Papers
of the Civil Rights Congress.
65
“How a Midnight Chase Saved McGee from the Chair,” The Sunday Compass, 5 June 1949. Box 44, Folder 4,
Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
66
“Disbarm’t of McGee’s Lawyer Asked,” Laurel Leader-Call, 22 July 1950. Box 44, Folder 4, Mary Metlay
Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
23
cases. . . . Such violence, threats and attempts at intimidation degrade the
administration of justice for they strike at the essentials of a fair trial, the
independence of the bar, and its right and duty to provide vigorous advocacy of a
clients’ cause.67
No doubt her passionate call for the public to rally behind Poole, and a growing number of
attorneys in his predicament, was brought about by her own sense of duty as an attorney as well
as by her first-hand exposure to the environment in which Poole practiced law. She had
corresponded closely with Poole during McGee’s third trial, and heard unnerving stories of his
run-ins with vigilantes who waited for him outside the court each day.
Prior to Poole’s disbarment, Abzug returned South in late July, 1950 with Emanuel Bloch
one week prior to the date of a second clemency hearing with the Governor. During their visit
they supported Poole, who had a Writ of Error Coram Nobis hearing, in which he hoped to
compel the court to review their opinion and consider a fourth trial on account of new evidence.
Last, they completed research that further substantiated that black men were executed in greater
proportions than white men for rape convictions in Mississippi historically.68
To support Abzug and Bloch’s visit to Mississippi, the Civil Rights Congress planned to
send to Jackson a delegation of McGee supporters from across the country. Yet, when the
Mississippi press and state officials got whiff of the Congress’s plans, they sounded the alarm.
Days before Abzug and Bloch’s arrival, the Jackson Daily News warned advocates of McGee in
an editorial, “Communists Coming Here,” that “Jackson will be the finest place on earth for you
to stay away from next Tuesday.”69 Governor Wright’s sentiment was not much different, as he
Abzug as quoted on page 2 of: “Attorney for Willie McGee Asserts Constitutional Rights Impaired In
Mississippi” Press Release, n.d., Box 44, Folder 4, Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
68
This is confirmed in: “CRC Attorney Charge the Daily News With Printing ‘Inflamatory Remarks,” Jackson Daily
News, 21 July 1950. Box 44: 4. Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
69
This scalding editorial linked the McGee defense to Communist Russia, stating: “The one thought in the minds of
these persons, both men and women, is not the mere saving of Willie McGee from a deserved death, but to
overthrow all semblance of law and order in our state and nation, and to make easy our conquest by Communist
67
24
cautioned “we will not tolerate a wild-eyed, howling mob of Communists and sympathizers,
gathered by the Civil Rights Congress to stage a demonstration in Mississippi.”70 Since Wright
refused to see Civil Rights Congress attorneys unless they came without a large entourage, the
delegation was limited to ten advocates.
Mississippians had reasons to be anxious about the growing attention placed on the
McGee case. 1950 marked the beginning of the Civil Rights Congress’ extensive “Save Willie
McGee” publicity campaign. Headlining this campaign was Rosalee McGee, who traveled from
New York City to Oakland, California on a speaking tour and contributed to Civil Rights
Congress pamphlets such as “The Story of Willie McGee: A Negro Feels Mississippi Justice as
Told by His Wife.”71 Besides local Civil Rights Congress’ vigils and letter writing campaigns,
notables from Albert Einstein to Josephine Baker publicly offered their support.72 With the
national and international press monitoring the case and telegrams and phone calls pressuring
Governor Wright, the national and international attention was perceived by Wright and his
cohorts as a major threat for it riveted a high spotlight on Mississippi governance.
If Abzug’s first trip to Mississippi did not provoke a feeling of fear, she was surely rattled
this trip after hearing of Poole’s run in with Wiletta Hawkin’s husband Troy. Upon returning to
Russia.” While this editorial was written almost a year prior to Abzug’s ill-fated night in a Jackson bus station, the
press was clearly threatening local hotel managers this early as to what would happen if they housed members of the
Civil Rights Congress. “Furthermore, if any hotel in Jackson furnishes shelter for this motley crew during their brief
visit in Jackson-and it should be made mighty brief-then that hostelry should have the rooms they occupy thoroughly
cleansed with the most powerful disinfectants.” “Communists Coming Here,” Jackson Daily News, 19 July 1950.
Box 44, Folder 4. Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
70
Governor Wright as quoted in: “Governor Warns Civil Rights to Mind Their Own Business,” Jackson Daily
News, 20 July 1950. Box 44, Folder 4. Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
71
“The Story of Willie McGee: A Negro Feels Mississippi Justice as Told by His Wife,” Civil Rights Congress,
1950. Box 90, Folder 18, J.B. Matthews Papers, Duke University.
72
William Patterson to Josephine Baker, 31 May 1951. Reel 10:272. “Albert Einstein Supports Protests Against
Execution of Willie McGee,” press release from the National Council, Arts, Sciences, and Professions, n.d. Reel
10:936. Papers of the Civil Rights Congress. For a greater discussion of the “Save McGee” campaign, especially
addressing the international activity, see: Horne, 84, 87, 90-92. The New York Times began to cover the case in
1950, reporting about the motorcade of civil rights advocates planning to visit Mississippi to prevent McGee’s
execution. See: “Group Joins in Fight for Execution Stay,” New York Times, 20 July 1950.
25
Abzug’s hotel, Poole and Bloch accounted the violent confrontation Poole had with Hawkins.
Poole was on his way to his car after filing the Writ of Error Coram Nobis at the Jones County
courthouse on July 21, 1950. When Poole was approached by Troy, he recalled Troy “swung
with his right hand at my face” and attempted to follow Poole in his car.73 Realizing he was not
going to get far with Troy on his tail, Poole visited the district attorney, police chief, and mayor
of Laurel to plead for protection, but gave up after the mayor told him “that he would not believe
[him] on a stack of bibles.”74 Since Abzug and Bloch were due to meet with the Governor the
following morning, they encouraged Poole to attend the meeting prior to the late-morning court
hearing to describe the run-in with Hawkins. In spite of their appeal, the Governor did not offer
protection. This appalled Abzug, who warned if “any harm comes to anyone, we will hold you
personally responsible.”75 With no support from state officials, Poole decided to prioritize his
safety and did not appear at the hearing before Circuit Judge F. Burkett Collins, who dismissed
the Writ of Error Coram Nobis, causing Abzug, Bloch, and Poole to re-file July 25, 1950 in the
circuit court.
This confrontation weighed heavily on Abzug, making it all the more clear that she
would face tough obstacles in the upcoming months. Nevertheless, undaunted, she plunged
ahead, exhausting all avenues in the courts from the U.S.D.C. to the Supreme Court, doing “all
the things you have to try to do in a case where the world is against you.”76 And throughout did
the Civil Rights Congress continued to send Abzug South. Why? Abzug maintained that she
73
As quoted on page 3 of Exhibit B of the Petition for Writ of Error Coram Nobis filed with the U.S.D.C. of
Jackson, July 24, 1950. Petition for Writ of Error Coram Nobis, McGee v. State, “254 Misc. OT 1950,” #6539, Entry
21, Appellate Case Files, Papers of the Supreme Court of the United States, National Archives. See also: “Writ of
Coram Nobis Petition for Willie McGee Dismissed When Defense Fails to Appear,” Laurel Leader-Call, 22 July
1950. Box 44, Folder 4. Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
74
As quoted on page 4 of Exhibit B of the Petition for Writ of Error Coram Nobis filed with the U.S.D.C. of
Jackson, July 24, 1950.
75
Abzug as quoted in: “Governor to Hear ‘Save Willie McGee’ Delegation of Ten,” Jackson Daily News, 23 July
1950. Box 44, Folder 4. Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
76
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-133.
26
was the only attorney young, energetic, and naively brave enough to remain committed to the
cause as the doors to McGee’s freedom closed and the potential for violence directed toward his
attorneys increased. Putting it candidly, she replied, “Well, honey, I was doing fabulous job.
Who were they going to get to be so crazy as to spend two years, from 1949 to 1951, in and out
of the South?”77
Yet, Abzug did not brave the streets and courts of Mississippi entirely alone. Shortly
after Poole’s departure, the Civil Rights Congress retained John Coe from Pensacola, Florida in
early 1951 to assist on the McGee case. Abzug considered Coe to be “a fabulous, thunder and
brimstone southern type lawyer,” and “a very progressive guy, who was marvelous.” 78 Coe’s
engagement in the McGee case marked the beginning of a long friendship between the two not
only because he was an attorney who remained committed as “others were just in and out,” but
she also found him to be “the guy I cared most about.”79 Equally fond of Abzug, Coe believed
her to be “a very able and intelligent woman lawyer--with a conscience.”80 With Coe on board,
Abzug gained a legal partner with whom she developed a new legal strategy for the McGee
appeals, and an ally outside of the New York legal Left. As a leader of the Florida Progressive
party who began practicing law in 1917 at twenty years old, Coe was a stately, liberal attorney
seasoned at navigating within the Southern courts, practiced at dealing with white supremacist
government officials, jurists, and a hostile public. A strong advocate of African American’s civil
rights, Coe had a winning record since the late 1930s, successfully appealing the conviction of
Will Lewis, a black man tried for rape. He also received negative publicity and threats of
violence for his involvement in two suits that forced white county officials to lift restrictions that
77
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-132.
Abzug, OHRO-Columiba, 3-132.
79
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-310.
80
Letter from John Coe to Mrs. Pitt Fessenden, April 12, 1951. Box 36, #4631, Papers of John M. Coe, Emory
University.
78
27
hindered blacks from voting in the Democratic primaries in Escambia County, Florida.81 Indeed,
Coe’s natural instincts of how to maneuver in the South provided Abzug with a strong mentor in
her early years of civil rights legal activism.
Coe and Abzug’s greatest collaborative project was to revamp McGee’s defense
argument, which they presented first in March 1951 in a Writ of Habeas Corpus in the U.S.D.C.,
and later that month in the third Certiorari filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. They hoped to
compel the Supreme Court to hear the McGee case, and correspondingly, tried their hand at
getting a rehearing in the circuit courts on account of new evidence.82 Their new defense
strategy centered on highlighting the inter-racial affair of Willie McGee and Wilmetta Hawkins,
as well as illuminating how the case provided evidence of how Mississippi rape law served as a
tool of oppression of African Americans.
Abzug sought to expose the McGee conviction for what it was--a Black man’s
punishment for engaging in an affair with a married white woman. She recognized that there
were deep cultural roots underlying Southern rape law that mandated “you don’t question a
woman’s veracity who claims she’s been raped by a Negro.” Nevertheless, she believed that
bringing to light McGee’s sexual relationship with Wiletta Hawkins would support her argument
that this case was part of a long line of rape convictions in Mississippi used solidly to keep
African Americans in subordination. Abzug’s interest in enhancing the Willie McGee defense
by introducing to the record his affair with Hawkins mirrored a general interest among civil
On Coe’s personal and early professional background: Sarah Hart Brown, Standing Against Dragons (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998) 42-49. On Coe’s involvement in the McGee case: 103-105.
82
Petition and Brief for Writ of Habeas Corpus And/Or Writs of Certiorari, McGee v. State, filed March 20, 1951.
“417 Misc. OT 1950,” #6562, Entry 17, Appellate Case Files, Records Group 267, Papers of the Supreme Court of
the United States, National Archives. A similar argument was first presented in: Writ of Error Coram Nobis, filed in
the U.S.D.C. of the Southern District of Mississippi, March 6, 1951.
81
28
rights attorneys in uncovering the underlying race, gender, and class tensions of rape cases. 83
Feminist Susan Brownmiller critiqued this legal strategy as being male-centric and treating white
women as passive victims of the system. Yet, Abzug’s conception of rape law clearly suggests
that the Left’s interest in exposing inter-racial marriages and relationships was primarily to
combat both the patriarchal and white supremacist practices condoned by the discriminatory rape
laws. As she and Coe wrote in their brief to the Supreme Court, “In essence, petitioner has been
forced to participate with the prosecution in a nefarious conspiracy against himself. This
conspiracy is engendered by the distorted mores of the State of Mississippi which makes sex
relations voluntarily entered into between a Negro man and a white woman a greater offense
than the crime of rape itself.”84 If she could prove the facts in the case were skewed and relied
on perjured testimony, then perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court would repair rape law so that it
protected woman from assault rather than policed inter-racial relationships.
To bolster her discussion of the affair in the Supreme Court brief, she encouraged
McGee to write an affidavit that confirmed his relationship with Hawkins, and even gained
testimony from his wife Rosalee to support this fact.85 Remarkably, Rosalee was willing to
83
Lisa Lindquist Dorr highlights this trend in White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960.
She argues that civil rights attorneys in the 1940s and 1950s began to call into question the sexuality of white
women accusers, often exposing inter-racial relationships that were the underlying issue in Black-on-white rape
cases. Dorr, 227, 231, 242. Susan Brownmiller’s central argument is that “the left, in its increasing paranoia and
raging impotence, vilified and excoriated the hapless white woman whose original charge had wreaked such total
destruction upon the hapless black. The standard defense strategy for puncturing holes in a rape case was (and is) an
attempt to destroy the credibility of the complaining witness by smearing her as mentally unbalanced, or as sexually
frustrated, or as an oversexed, promiscuous whore” (Brownmiller, 238). Grappling with how to reconcile the fact
that feminist Bella Abzug was lead counsel in the McGee case, she interviews Abzug, trying to corner her into
admitting that Wilmetta Hawkins was victimized in the McGee case, and secondly, that the case was dominated by
men. Yet, clearly, Abzug did not take Brownmiller’s viewpoint, arguing: “I believe that the white woman was
always the pivot, the excuse. The black man was played off against the white woman and the white woman was
played off against the black man, to keep both oppressed groups down.” Abzug as quoted in: Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will, 244.
84
Petition and Brief for Writ of Habeas Corpus And/Or Writs of Certiorari, McGee v. State, filed March 20, 1951, 8.
85
Upon meeting with Abzug and Coe, McGee provided testimony transcribed by Coe, stating, “I became well
acquainted with Mrs. Troy Hawkins and one day after I had worked their [at the Hawkin’s house] off and on for
about a year, I was waxing floors with her in the house and she showed a willingness to be familiar, and let me have
intercourse with her in the back room” (McGee Testimony, 1). Confirming her husband’s story, Rosalee stated “So,
29
speak candidly about her husband’s affair in public, offering an account of the relationship on
speaking tours and in the press throughout 1951. Perhaps her frequent correspondence with
Abzug, as well as Civil Rights Congress leaders, helped encourage her to speak on her husband’s
behalf.86
In addition, to the first formal testimony of Willie and Rosalee McGee obtained in the
case, Abzug and Coe gained an alibi for Willie in February 1951 by chance. Late that month,
Coe received a letter from Oakley C. Johnson, a local Florida civil rights advocate, who claimed
to know a woman who had pertinent information in the McGee case.87 That woman turned out
to be Hattie Johnson, a friend of the McGee’s who allegedly had a card party at her home with
Willie in attendance during the time of Hawkin’s supposed rape. Apparently Johnson had been
considered as a witness in the case prior to the Civil Rights Congress’ involvement in the case,
but had not been asked to appear in court. Naturally, Abzug and Coe jumped at the opportunity
of gaining Johnson’s testimony, and believed that her account, along with that of the McGee’s
would provide new factual grounding to the case.
Besides persuading the McGee’s to testify, Abzug strengthened Willie’s defense by
expanding her argument that McGee’s civil rights had been violated because of an inequity
between the convictions of Black and white men accused of rape. She maintained that McGee’s
conviction denied him equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment since “the death
when I heard Troy Hawkins testified at Willie’s third trial that he never saw Willie until he saw him in court, I knew
he wasn’t telling the truth” (Rosalee McGee testimony, 1). She went on to reveal how Willie accounted to her how
Mrs. Hawkins pressed him to maintain their affair after Mrs. Hawkins approached Willie in her presence. While she
was less than happy with the affair, she stated in her affidavit “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” (Rosalee McGee’s testimony, 2). For the testimony of Willie and Bessie
McGee, and Hattie Johnson in its original form: . “417 Misc. OT 1950,” #6562, Entry 17, Appellate Case Files,
Records Group 267, Papers of the Supreme Court of the United States, National Archives.
86
See especially: Letter from Rosalee McGee to Bella Abzug, June 20, 1950, in which R. McGee stated, “Your
letter came Sat. Glad was I to hear from you and to know that you are still working to save my hus. Life.” Reel 10:
471, Papers of the Civil Rights Congress.
87
Letter from Oakley C. Johnson to John M. Coe, February 25, 1951. Box 36, #4631. Papers of John M. Coe,
Emory University.
30
sentence for rape has never been imposed upon a white man in the State of Mississippi but has
been solely reserved for Negroes, and that such sentence was pronounced upon him for the
reason that he is a Negro, and for that reason alone.”88 By questioning the fairness and integrity
of the Mississippi courts, she hoped to persuade the Supreme Court to scrutinize the Southern
justice system as a whole. To evidence the historical discrimination of African Americans
embedded in rape law, Abzug presented an affidavit in which she examined all of the rape
convictions in Mississippi since 1868.89
It is probable Abzug thought to argue that McGee’s civil rights were infringed upon
because the death penalty was applied only to African American men by reading the briefs from
the Martinsville Seven case. In this Virginia rape trial, the NAACP argued in a Writ of Habeas
Corpus filed July 26, 1950 that alleged assailants had been denied equal protection under the
Fourteenth Amendment because no white men had been executed for rape in Virginia since
1908.90 The Civil Rights Congress had been monitoring the legal defense of this case, and had
supported the NAACP’s effort with a separate publicity campaign. Secondly, Abzug’s friend
Constance Motley was an NAACP lawyer and kept in close contact with her during the McGee
trial, perhaps keeping Abzug informed of the NAACP’s legal strategy.91
When completing research on Mississippi rape laws, Abzug did not find any surprises.
As she likely expected, ninety African Americans, in comparison to eighteen whites, had been
88
Petition and Brief for Writ of Habeas Corpus And/Or Writs of Certiorari, McGee v. State, March 20, 1951: 3.
This affidavit of Bella Abzug was included as an exhibit to the Writ of Habeas Corpus filed in the Southern
Mississippi District of the U.S.D.C. on March 5, 1951. For a copy of this Writ: “417 Misc. OT 1950,” #6562, Entry
17, Appellate Case Files, Records Group 267, Papers of the Supreme Court of the United States, National Archives.
90
The Civil Rights Congress had promoted a publicity campaign to save the Martinsville Seven, and expressed an
interest in joining the NAACP on the defense team after the NAACP took up this race-based argument. They were
clearly impressed by the civil rights argument that the NAACP developed late in the case. Eric W. Rise, “Race,
Rape, and Radicalism,” 481-490.
91
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-312.
89
31
executed in Mississippi between 1930 and 1948.92 Of these individuals, six Blacks and no
whites had been executed for rape charges. As a recent mother, Abzug was surely shocked when
she learned that five of the white rapists had been convicted for assaulting girls under thirteen
years old, one as young as five years old and another being the man’s daughter. Indeed, she
included these facts in her statement, perhaps to uncover the inhumanity of rape assailants while
distinguishing the equally unjust practice of infringing upon African Americans’ civil rights. 93
Regardless of how Abzug developed this race-based argument, she was part of a trend among
civil rights attorneys in the late 1940s and early 1950s to argue rape cases as racial
discrimination.94
Despite their compelling new defense strategy, Coe and Abzug faced a series of denials
in March which culminated with a final execution date set for May 8, 1951. The month began on
bad footing, with a hearing before Judge Sydney Mize of the Southern Mississippi district court
on March 5, 1951.95 Abzug’s trip South for this hearing proved to be the greatest emotional and
physical toll she would experience during her representation of McGee.
92
Affidavit of Bella Abzug, Writ of Habeas Corpus, McGee v. State, March 5, 1951: 1.
Affidavit of Bella Abzug, Writ of Habeas Corpus, McGee v. State, March 5, 1951: 2.
94
Dorr, 206.
95
For hearing testimony: Argument of Counsel, McGee v. State, March 9, 1951. “417 Misc. OT 1950,” #6562,
Entry 17, Appellate Case Files, Records Group 267, Papers of the Supreme Court of the United States, National
Archives. Note that the Writ of Error Coram Nobis was originally filed with the district court of Laurel, Mississippi
on February 28, 1951, but Judge F. Burkett Collins refused to take judicial action. Chief Justice Harvey McGehee
also refused to hear the case, and wrote a statement, but did not file it with the court. In his statement, he argued: “I
am now declining to hear or consider any further petition for a write of error coram nobis in that case for the reason
that an appeal was taken to the Supreme Court of the United States from our action of July 25, 1950, declining to
issue the writ and that Court has in effect affirmed our action in so doing.” See: On Request for a Hearing for the
Presentation of Another Petition on Behalf of Willie McGee for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis, McGee v. State, “417
Misc. OT 1950,” #6562, Entry 17, Appellate Case Files, Records Group 267, Papers of the Supreme Court of the
United States, National Archives. As a result, Coe and Abzug decided to file the action in the U.S.D.C., and were
scheduled for a hearing before Judge Sidney Mize to hear the matter on March 9, 1951.
93
32
The night before she was scheduled to deliver her strongest argument for McGee’s civil
rights yet, she was forced to spend the night alone in a public bus station in Jackson.96 For
months, she had been perfecting her argument that only Black men had been executed for rape in
Mississippi’s history, which she planned to expound upon in court. Despite her husband
Martin’s plea not to travel since she was in the early stages of pregnancy and had been much
slandered in the Mississippi press, she was determined to deliver her argument. The locals had
other plans. When she arrived at her hotel in Jackson, she was refused a room, as occurred at
every hotel she tried. Finding herself in Jackson as the evening hours approached with nowhere
safe to go, she decided to sit up all night in the local bus station. However, she soon realized she
was being closely watched even there, remembering, “They paged me, so then I knew I was
right; they had been trying to—I don’t know, do something—scare me. Maybe they were going
to do more.”97 Frightened to death, she did not answer the page, and spent the night in the
women’s restroom.
Unfazed by this sleepless night, she “arrived in court fresh as a daisy” the next day
determined to deliver a lengthy argument.98 The Attorney General of Jackson, J.P. Coleman,
was sure surprised to see Abzug that morning. She recalled that she greeted him, saying, “Well,
I’m here, and I want you to know I’m going to be here, and if this happens again I am going to
96
It is important to note that there is considerable discrepancy over the exact point in the Willie McGee case that
Abzug spent a night in a Jackson bus station. In her oral history completed on 11/30/1995, Abzug remembers the
event to have occurred the night before the hearing of the second Writ of Habeas Corpus before Judge Mize of the
U.S.D.C. in Jackson, Mississippi. Refer to: Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-137-138. While Abzug’s account seems to
be the most accurate and detailed, many historians and popular writers have offered different explanations of the
event. For example, Debra Schultz and Joyce Antler seem to rely on popular journalist’s Doris Faber’s 1976
account that Abzug spent the night at the bus station the final night before McGee’s execution in May 1951, upon
which she spent six hours arguing before the U.S.D.C. for a final stay of execution. Scholar Judith Neis describes
this incident as occurring in 1950 when Abzug argued her second appeal, and tells essentially the same story as
Schultz, Antler, and Faber otherwise. Debra L. Schultz, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement
(New York: New York University Press, 2001) xiii. Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped
Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1997) 267-279. Doris Faber, Bella Abzug (New York: Lothrop, Lee &
Shepard Company, 1976)53-55. Judith Neis, Nine Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 254.
97
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-138.
98
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-138.
33
report you to the U.S. Attorney General. You are depriving not only my client but me of my
civil rights.”99 That day in court, she was especially passionate about her fight for civil rights.
Her brush with white supremacist scare tactics made African American’s experience in the Jim
Crow South all the more real for her. While she was shaken by her sleepless night, she remained
poised in her delivery, arguing that McGee’s case should be retried on grounds of due process
since she demonstrated “that a class of people, namely, negroes, have been subjected to the death
penalty for a crime, whereas no white man has ever been subjected to death for that crime.”100
She closed her lengthy argument speaking directly to Judge Mize, advocating, “an opportunity
exists for this court to enable this relator, who was a member of the oppressed classes, to have a
full and complete opportunity to see to it that he will get the maximum justice before his life is
taken away. . . . . Let’s be frank about it. Let’s give him the opportunity.”101 Regrettably, Judge
Mize dismissed her personally, ordering, “There must be an end to litigation and when a person
has had every opportunity of a full, fair, complete and honest hearing, then the case ends. This
defendant had that opportunity.”102 No doubt Governor Wright, in the audience of this hearing,
took Judge Mize’s dismissal as consent for execution.
With an impending execution date of March 25, 1951, Abzug did not take Judge Mize’s
dismissal in the circuit court to be the final draw, and appealed the opinion in the Fifth Circuit’s
Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana. Yet, that hearing on March 13th proved
unfruitful.103 Since they had already been preparing a third Certiorari for the Supreme Court,
Abzug and Coe believed they could compel the high court to grant a stay of execution. Five
99
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-138.
Bella Abzug, Argument of the Counsel, McGee v. State, March 9, 1951: 35.
101
Bella Abzug, Argument of the Counsel, McGee v. State, March 9, 1951: 41.
102
Judge Sidney Mize as quoted in: Charles M. Hills, “Stay of Execution Denied Willie McGee by US Judge,”
Clarion-Ledger, 6 March 1951. Box 44, Folder 4, Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College.
103
Relator’s Memorandum of Law, McGee v. Jones, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, New Orleans,
LA, March 13, 1951.
100
34
days prior to McGee’s scheduled execution, Abzug and Coe, along with Civil Rights Congress
heavyweights Vito Marcantonio, Ralph Powe, James T. Wright, and George Parker, met with
Justice Hugo Black to urge him to grant a stay. While J.P. Coleman attended to represent
Mississippi’s interests, this meeting was clearly dominated by McGee’s counsel, who had the
willing ears of liberal Justice Black, himself a Southerner, as well as Justice Burton. Perhaps
urged by the hundreds of telegrams and personal letters Justice Black received daily in support of
McGee, he granted the stay “pending final action by this court on a certificate of certiorari.”104
This eased the worries of both Abzug and Coe, for, as Coe wrote to Abzug, “I can’t help but
believe that the unhappy fate of the Martinsville ‘7’ has brought a reaction that will make the
court a little reluctant to shock public opinion by other unjustifiable executions of like kind.”105
The glimmer of hope Abzug gained from this favorable meeting with Justice Black came
crashing to a halt when she received the Supreme Court’s denial and learned the Mississippi
court had set the execution date for May 8, 1951. What would she do now? It seemed that all
possibilities in the courts had been exhausted, and her entire legal strategy had failed. Should
she call it a day and resume her practice back in New York? With Martin and young daughter
Eve at home, Bella had very strong personal incentives for leaving the case at the end of March.
What is more, she had suffered a miscarriage just a few weeks earlier and had not had one
moment to process and grieve from the loss.
If a failed pregnancy was not enough, she also had not yet come to grips with how hostile
locals had been to her during her last trip South. Rebuking Abzug’s argument before Judge
104
Justice Hugo Black as quoted on page 2 of the Civil Rights Congress newsletter: Chapter Bulletin 2, no. 11
(March 19, 1951). Letters poured in droves to Justice Black’s office during the week of March 13 th to 19th, 1951, at
the urging of Civil Rights Congress chapter drives. This pressure tactic was repeated the week prior to May 8, 1951.
Refer to: Box 308, Folders 6-11, “O.T. 1950: McGee v. MS,” Supreme Court Case File, Papers of Hugo Black,
Library of Congress.
105
Letter from John Coe to Bella Abzug, March 23, 1951. Box 36, Folder 5, #4361, John Coe Papers, Emory
University.
35
Mize, the Jackson Daily News editor Frederick Sullens threatened her directly in his column
“The Low Down on the Higher Ups.” Speaking for the white supremacist ruling class of
Mississippi, he warned: “If Mrs. Abzug ever again appears in Mississippi, either as a lawyer or
as an individual, it will be one time too often. She’s the sort of person for whose company we
care less than nothing at all.” If this statement was not caustic enough, Sullens ended his
column, admonishing, “Too bad the courts don’t have authority to send some lawyers to the
electric chair along with their clients.”106 While this violent threat would send most packing,
Abzug was more resolute than ever. Rosalee McGee had suffered great hostility as well; she had
lost her job, had four kids to support, and had to leave Mississippi out of fear she would be
killed. As a mother and a wife, how could Abzug leave this fellow sister high and dry? She
would fight to the bitter end.
Yet, maintaining the role as chief counsel on McGee’s defense team had become more
complicated in 1951. Abzug believed, along with Coe, that the McGee case should continue to
be fought in the courts primarily. But the leaders of the Civil Rights Congress, William
Patterson and Aubrey Grossman, became less confident that courtroom activism could succeed
and wanted to focus primarily on demonstrations outside of the courts. As the case moved more
and more beyond the control of Abzug, she fought to maintain the legal integrity of the case,
often butting heads with the Civil Rights Congress leadership. She did not agree with some of
the sensationalist tactics of the Civil Rights Congress, such as having statements from
international activists sent to Mississippi officials. While she supported the idea that civil rights
were human rights, she felt that this was not the way to deal with “a bourbonist state that is not
even—that is within its borders and objects to anything that’s outside its own borders, let alone
Frederick Sullens, “The Low Down on the Higher Ups,” Jackson Daily News, 7 March 1951. Box 44, Folder 4.
Mary Metlay Kaufman Papers, Smith College. Abzug remembered this editorial years later, recalling it almost
verbatim. Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-306.
106
36
outside of the country.”107 She was also critical of the Civil Rights Congress for exploiting the
mother, wife, and kids of Willie McGee in their publicity tours and publications for the case,
without offering much financial support for the family.108 Last, she did not appreciate being kept
out of the loop in terms of the publicity aspects of the case in as much as she believed that direct
action and courtroom action needed to be connected and mutually supportive.109
Abzug’s contentious relationship with the Civil Rights Congress leaders became most
apparent in May of 1951. Disputes between Grossman and Patterson on one side, and Abzug
and Coe on the other, came to a head during the development of a suit in the Federal courts
centering on the Reconstruction Civil Rights Act of 1875. The planning of a mass rally
scheduled for the day Abzug and Coe intended to appeal to Governor Wright for clemency also
proved divisive.
Having exhausted all avenues in the courts, leaders of the Civil Rights Congress were
looking for another legal alternative and believed that a civil rights suit in Federal court to be a
viable vehicle. As a last resort, Grossman had been toying with the idea of submitting a suit in
the Federal court that argued the officials of Mississippi had violated the Civil Rights Act of
1875. Contacting his Left legal cohorts especially in labor firms across the country, he began to
shop this idea. Harriet Bouslog of Bouslog and Symonds in Honolulu, Hawaii, for example,
believed that the Civil Rights Act had been a fruitful vehicle for their union injunction cases and
could be similiarly applied to the McGee case.110 With only a clemency hearing as a final option
107
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-313.
Abzug, OHRO-Columiba, 6-307.
109
Evidencing that her hard feelings about her treatment by the leadership of the Civil Rights Congress, she
lamented years later, “They didn’t give a damn what I though should happen or how it should happen, even though I
broke my neck to put it together, in a very hard way.” Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-309. See also: 6-306.
110
Letter from Harriet Bouslog to Aubrey Grossman, March 26, 1951. Box 44, Folder 2, Mary Metlay Kaufman
Papers, Smith College. See also: Letter from Harriet Bouslog to Aubrey Grossman, April 11, 1951, Reel 10: 267,
and telegram to Grossman from Bert, n.d., Reel 10: 270. Papers of the Civil Rights Congress.
108
37
for McGee, Grossman decided that the Civil Rights Act suit was worth a shot. He just had to get
Abzug and Coe behind the idea.
Initially, both Coe and Abzug were against the idea of initiating another suit, since they
felt this would infuriate Governor Wright and curb any possibilities of winning clemency. As
Coe expressed to Abzug in early April, “it seems analogous to bringing an action for malicious
prosecution after a defendant has been convicted.”111 Abzug also told William Patterson that she
did not believe the complaint would be considered favorably in court, and favored submitting a
Writ of Habeas Corpus in the Federal court; eventually, however, she agreed to support the new
tactic.112 As of April, Mary Metlay Kaufman of New York and Earnest Goodman of Detroit,
seasoned Left attorneys, were retained to develop and draft the civil rights argument, and Abzug
finalized the complaint.113 With Abzug hesitantly supporting the Civil Rights Act suit, and Coe
adamantly against it, these friends were forced to part ways before the culmination of the case.
Standing by his convictions, Coe decided to divorce himself from the McGee v. Coleman suit,
telling Abzug, “I would not hang back, but in the beginning. . . . I made the reservation that I
would reserve the privilege of saying when my duty was done. I think it will be done when we
present our application for clemency.”114 While Abzug was supportive of Coe’s decision, she
wished that the Civil Rights Congress could be less contentious. “It seems unfortunate,” she told
Coe, “that when we all are trying to work, without selfish motives, for the accomplishment of a
111
Letter from John Coe to Bella Abzug, April 9, 1951. Box 36, Folder 5, #4361, John Coe Papers, Emory
University.
112
In a letter from William Patterson to John Coe, April 23, 1951, he revealed that Bella Abzug had some
hesitations about the Civil Rights Act complaint. He asked if Coe would join the matter, but in handwriting at the
bottom of the letter he said that he had received Coe’s correspondence that expressed strong dissatisfaction with the
suit idea, and Patterson replied, “We will send complaint alone.” Box 36, Folder 5, #4361, John Coe Papers, Emory
University.
113
For Mary Metlay Kaufman’s research and legal thinking on Coleman v. McGee, see: Box 44, Folder 6. For her
proof of her retainment on April, 26, 1951,as well as a complaint drafted by Kaufman “Complaint for Injunction and
to Redress Deprivation of Civil Rights,” and the Complaint filed by Abzug, see: Box 44, Folder 3. Mary Metlay
Kaufman, Smith College.
114
Letter from John Coe to Bella Abzug, April 25, 1951. Box 36, Folder 5, John Coe Papers, Emory University.
38
good purpose that we cannot remain in harmony, and avoid those rancors that mar the ‘good
conscience’ which is the sole, (and very great) reward for such actions.”115 Despite Coe and
Abzug’s disagreement with the Civil Rights Congress, they traveled to Jackson together on May
5, 1951 to present an application for clemency that they felt Governor Wright would not be able
to refuse.
When Abzug and Coe walked up the steps toward the capitol building of Mississippi on
May 5, they were united in a common cause. They had spent months laboriously defending
Willie McGee’s right to life, and this was their last chance to persuade the Governor to let this
man live. Laying out the facts of the case once more, Abzug and Coe hoped to compel the
Governor to admit to the “flimsy foundation” upon which McGee was convicted.116 They
suggested that the State Department’s recent interest in the case proved that the U.S. government
had expressed a belief of reasonable doubt, therefore, the state of Mississippi should not act
against the nation’s interests.117 Additionally, Abzug and Coe once again raised the issue that
only African Americans had been executed for rape, which they felt devalued the punishment for
rape, arguing: “If rape per se is not justly punishable with death, is it just so to punish one class
of citizens only?”118 They urged Governor Wright to recognize the bias in Mississippi rape law,
and prevent the law from being applied as a tool of oppression. Seeking to turn the doctrine of
the Cold War on its head, they ridiculed Mississippi as potentially acting in an undemocratic
115
Leffter from Bella Abzug to John Coe, April 30, 1951. Box 36, Folder 5, John Coe Papers, Emory University.
John Coe and Bella Abzug, “In the Matter of the Application of Willie McGee for a Pardon Pursuant to Section
124 of the Mississippi Constitution and Sections 4004-15 of the Mississippi code, ann. or in the Alternative, the
Commutation of Sentence or Reprieve”: 3. [Hereafter: Mississippi Pardon] Box 36, Folder 5, #4361, John M. Coe
Papers, Emory University.
117
Coe and Abzug “Mississippi Pardon,” 4. For the State Department’s interest in the case, see: Letter from Bella
Abzug to Mr. Tom Elliston of the State Department, May 2, 1951. Reel 10: 579. Papers of the Civil Rights
Congress.
118
Coe and Abzug “Mississippi Pardon,” 4.
116
39
manner that would “appear before the world as unfaithful to those principles of our forefathers.”
They went on to question:
Could it embarrass a great State, or belittle its Chief Executive, to heed a
justly motivated and widely held opinion throughout the Nation, and to refrain
from a revengeful exaction of the ultimate penalty of death against its citizens,
thereby lifting from the Nation the reproach (justly or unjustly felt) that it
preaches from practices which are the residual of human slavery?119
They concluded, leaving Governor Wright with a cold visualization that Willie McGee’s death
would be a symbol of oppression, remembered not only by the U.S., but by the world
community.120 While this argument for clemency was Coe and Abzug’s most passionate
pronouncement on behalf of African Americans civil rights, the appeal fell upon dead ears. As a
Dixiecrat politician who vehemently despised the meddling of the Civil Rights Congress,
Governor Wright’s mind was made up before Coe and Abzug had even arrived at the Capitol.
Willie McGee had caused enough trouble on his watch, and his execution would go on as
scheduled.
Just as Abzug and Coe met with Governor Wright, a protest brewed outside the Capitol.
For some time, the leaders of the Civil Rights Congress had been planning a demonstration to
coincide the clemency meeting with Governor Wright. Since their last campaign to stall the
March execution date, they had been sending pressure groups to the White House and
Mississippi to bolster McGee’s legal defense. Two major delegations had convened for the
clemency hearings.
First, the white women’s delegation, a small, well-organized group of Civil Rights
Congress members from across the country, had gathered in Jackson to protest during the
clemency hearing. This group began in early March 1951 as four women, including Jessica
119
120
Coe and Abzug “Mississippi Pardon,” 6.
Coe and Abzug “Mississippi Pardon,” 7.
40
Mitford, from the Civil Rights Congress chapter of East Bay, California, and had fourteen
members at its height. During their last visit, this group had surveyed residents of white
neighborhoods about their view of the McGee case. This time, Aubrey Grossman hoped the
white women’s delegation would extend past fourteen members, for he believed “the importance
of the delegation on May 5th far outstands all others in importance.”121
Second, a member of the East Bay chapter who went by the Communist alias Buddy,
traveled South to coordinate a Black-led protest of the McGee case, to be held concurrent with
the clemency hearing. Acting with support from William Patterson, Buddy traveled to
Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi to mobilize local black activists to visit Jackson
on May 5th.122 Answering his call to action, many African Americans traveled to Jackson,
flowing into the city the night prior to the protest.
While all seemed quiet in Jackson, Jessica Mitford revealed that “shortly before dawn, it
became clear that something had gone wrong.”123 Police cars were sighted circling the Capitol,
which led Buddy to believe that the police knew that a demonstration had been planned for that
day. He decided it would be best to test his feeling that the police were on call, waiting to arrest
protestors. Sure enough, as the small group he gathered together walked toward the Capitol, they
were surrounded by over one-hundred officers and arrested. Throughout the morning, they were
met in jail by members of the white women’s delegation, who had also been testing the cops at
the Capitol in small convoys.
Grossman believed that the white women’s delegation would draw the most sympathetic attention from the press.
Aubrey Grossman to Mary Kalb, May 2, 1951. Reel 10: 263. See also: Reel 10: 262, 355. Papers of the Civil
Rights Congress. “Heroic White Women’s Delgation Makes Progress in Mississippi,” Civil Rights Congress,
Chapter Bulletin 2, no. 11 (March 19, 1951) 2. For more on the white women’s delegation, refer to: Jessica Mitford,
A Fine Old Conflict, 160-190.
122
Letter from Buddy to William Patterson, May, 1951. Reel 10: 365. Papers of the Civil Rights Congress. See
also: Mitford, 183-189.
123
Mitford, 186.
121
41
When Abzug and Coe left the Capitol, they found themselves in the midst of a protest
gone awry. Abzug knew that the Civil Rights Congress had been planning a mass mobilization
for May 5th and she had told Grossman and Patterson that she thought a protest would be
counterproductive. Yet, they sent a delegation to Mississippi anyway, and, as a result, she had to
take time away from her legal work on behalf of McGee to get the protestors out of jail. She was
less than thrilled by this, recollecting, “I had to interrupt what I was doing to call up the attorney
general and say these people had a right to petition, they had a right to speech, and you had no
right to arrest them.”124
While Abzug was not happy about having to bail out forty-one activists arrested, she left
an impression on quite a few of the white women delegates who were in jail.125 In her memoir,
Jessica Mitford mentioned that it was a “fortunate coincidence” that Abzug and Coe were in
Jackson when she was arrested, and remembered, “they rushed down to court . . . .and worked
out a deal with the authorities: charge would be dropped provided those arrested left town
immediately.”126 Accompanying Mitford in jail was Anne Braden, who had just experienced her
first arrest in protesting as part of the white women’s delegation. She was roughly treated by the
police officer who threatened her upon her arrest, saying she should be shot.127 Just twenty-six at
the time of her arrest, she likely looked favorably upon the leadership role Abzug took in getting
her charges dropped. Indeed, Braden continued to engage in civil rights activism, becoming a
role model for women who participated in the civil rights movement during the late 1950s and
early 1960s. Despite Abzug’s meeting of Braden and Mitford, her interaction with the white
women’s delegation was minimal since legal activism was her main interest. As such, she
124
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 6-306.
John N . Popham, “Mississippi Arrests 41 at Capitol as Willie McGee Plea is Studied,” New York Times, 6 May
1951: 1.
126
Mitford, 188.
127
On Anne Braden’s contribution to the Willie McGee campaign: Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner, 123-124.
125
42
quickly reconvened with Coe after leaving the jail, preparing to contact the White House to urge
President Truman to provide clemency for Willie McGee.
Although Governor Wright rejected their clemency appeal, Abzug and Coe hoped
President Truman would be more easily swayed to intercede. “From the first day of my arrest I
have felt a wall around me,” they wrote, in McGee’s voice, “not only the concrete of a prison
cell, but the impenetrable bars of prejudice and flagrant disregard of the command that all men
are created equal.” Describing McGee’s case from his vantage point, Coe and Abzug hoped to
pull at Truman’s heart strings in their appeal letter. They encouraged Truman to see the
correlation between democratic ideals and preserving a just legal system, arguing “the
Constitution of the United States is merely scrap paper. . . . where Negroes are involved.” 128 In
lynching territory, “equal justice under law’ is a hollow phrase, honored only in its breach by the
cynical proponents of white supremacy,” they lamented, “For it is they who have decreed that
only Negroes must die for rape, never a white man.” Reminding Truman of his Cold War goals
and pledge to promote civil rights, they appealed, “our own national security is inextricably
bound up in the security and well-being of all people and all countries.” They continued, “We
cannot deny the significance of our civil rights record as an issue in world affairs.”129
Referencing the U.S.’s commitment to the U.N. charter, they ended their plea, “We dare not
preach freedom abroad and tolerate its absence at home.”130 While Abzug and Coe clearly saw a
correlation between the goals of civil rights and democratic freedom, Truman was not easily
swayed. Upon calling the White House, his assistant David Niles informed Abzug and Coe that
he would not intervene.
Coe and Abzug, “To the Honorable Harry S. Truman, President of the United States,”: 2. [Hereafter: Truman
Pardon] Box 36, Folder 5, #4361, John M. Coe Papers, Emory University.
129
“Truman Pardon,” 7.
130
“Truman Pardon,” 8.
128
43
With the President unwilling to save Willie McGee, the courts were uninterested in
intervening as well. Upon receiving word that the President would not step in, Abzug filed the
complaint based on the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on May 5th.131 Carrying out a final midnight
run, she argued before Judge Mize the following day for an injunction against Mississippi state
officials who she felt violated McGee’s civil rights. On May 7th, as Willie McGee was
transported from the Hinds County jail to the Jackson courthouse, where the electric chair
awaited, Abzug filed a final appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Yet, no judges, from
the lower courts to the highest court of the land, joined Abzug’s final fight.
When Willie McGee was executed shortly after midnight on May 8, 1951, Bella Abzug
was not among the thousands that turned out to witness his final moments. Even though she was
still in Jackson, she could not bare to watch the chilling event. Instead, she had a friend call her
at her hotel so she could hear the execution. From her room, she listened to the “bloodcurdling
screams of the [n]ight when he was executed.”132 Upon hearing the jubilant crowds react to his
death, she sat down and cried. Then and there, “I realized that there was something so terribly,
terribly wrong with our democracy,” she recalled years later, “that a state and its apparatus could
get away with killing people because of their race, their color.” 133
Perhaps receiving kind letters from Rosalee McGee and John Coe after the execution
provided Abzug with some condolence. A few days after her husband’s death, Rosalee wrote: “I
cant get over them Killing Pour Willie But that alright I going to keep on fight till all is in order I
131
In addition to filing the McGee v. Coleman suit, Abzug continued to pressure the Supreme Court to intervene,
and also sought matters in the U.S. circuit court. Justice Hugo Black refused to issue another stay of execution, and
Judge Wayne G. Borah of the U.S. circuit court of appeals refused to issue a temporary restraining order which
would postpone the execution. Refer to: “Eleventh-Hour Battle Fought to Save Rapist,” The Pensacola Journal, 8
May 1951: 1. Box 36, Folder 5, #4361. John M. Coe Papers, Emory University.
132
Abzug, OHRO-Columiba, 3-142.
133
Abzug,, OHRO-Columbia, 6-315.
44
am doing the Best I can.”134 Meeting at memorials for Willie McGee over the course of the next
year, both Abzug and Rosalee McGee remained committed to remembering why Willie died.
Likewise, Coe and Abzug helped each other come to grips with their client’s death. One month
after his passing, Coe wrote candidly that he hoped Abzug’s “confidence and trust born of efforts
and labours shared had not been entirely poisoned and forgotten” because he left the case at the
clemency hearing.135 Expressing a continued respect for Coe, Abzug replied, “Banish from your
mind any thought that there is any reservation whatsoever in my regard and admiration for you
by reason of your judgment concerning the latter proceedings in the case.” Rather, Abzug felt
only admiration for Coe, stating, “For me as a young person, comparatively inexperienced both
in the ways of the law and in the ways of the world, my contact with you was a rich thing from
which I gained much inspiration and courage.”136
While the interaction with Coe and Rosalee McGee compelled Abzug to continue
advocating for civil rights, the press’ coverage of McGee’s death was not as encouraging. By far
the worst article appeared in Life magazine. In “The End of Willie McGee,” she was pictured
walking out of the Jackson courthouse with Coe, above the caption “Willie’s lawyers, Bella
Abzug, John Coe, were imported from New York, Florida.” This slanderous caption enraged
Abzug since it implied that she was an outsider who was not committed to McGee’s case. She
was equally vexed by the anti-communist slant of the article, which alleged that “Willie McGee
suddenly became a pawn in a world propaganda war,” because she did not want to be dismissed
as a Communist with unscrupulous intentions.137
134
Letter from Rosalee McGee to Bella Abzug, May 10, 1951. Reel 10: 534. Papers of the Civil Rights Congress.
Letter from John Coe to Bella Abzug, June 13, 1951. Box 36, Folder 5, #4361, John M. Coe Papers, Emory
University.
136
Letter from Bella Abzug to John Coe, June 20, 1951. Box 36, Folder 5, #4361. John M. Coe Papers, Emory
University.
137
For both quotes from Life magazine, see: “The End of Willie McGee,” Life, 21 May 1951. Box 91, Folder 1:
“Civil Rights Congress, 1951,” J.B. Matthews Papers, Duke University.
135
45
Additionally, Abzug’s tense relationship with the leaders of the Civil Rights Congress
escalated after McGee’s execution, discouraging her to work on future civil rights campaigns
they promoted. Primarily, she became increasingly upset as the Civil Rights Congress refused to
pay her expenses. She sent them bill after bill, insisting that they were causing her financial
hardship. Angrily, she argued: “I cannot continue to allow myself to be imposed upon in this
manner and I therefore insist upon a prompt disposition of this bill.”138 It was known that the
Civil Rights Congress suffered great financial problems at the end of McGee’s case, failing to
meet their fundraising goals.139 Yet, Abzug felt that she was being taken for granted towards the
end of the case, and likely believed that the Civil Rights Congress leaders’ inability to meet their
financial commitment mirrored their insincerity in supporting her input during the case.
Nevertheless, Abzug continued to engage in civil rights work throughout the 1950s.
McGee’s execution discouraged her, in part, from taking on a civil rights case of its magnitude
again. Yet, the case also encouraged her to maintain a commitment to civil rights generally.
“I’m sure that [the case] intensified my general energies in the area of anti-democratic activities
of all kinds,” she reflected about the case’s impact on her thinking and activism.140 Her
continued interest in civil rights is evidenced by her work with the National Lawyer’s Guild over
the course of the 1950s especially. Most significantly, she helped draft legislation in 1952 and
1953 introduced by Congress members such as Jacob Javits, which laid the groundwork for later
civil rights law.141 She also fought for civil rights in her own backyard, promoting the
maintenance of an integrated neighborhood as a leader of the Graverhood Neighborhood
138
Letter from Bella Abzug to Civil Rights Congress, May 24, 1951. Reel 10:367. See also: Reel 10: 349, 372,
374. Papers of the Civil Rights Congress.
139
Of the $12,000 fund drive for Willie McGee’s defense, $1,763 had been collected by May 28, 1951. See: Civil
Rights Congress, Chapter Bulletin 2, no. 21 (May 28, 1951): 2. Box 91, Folder 1, “Civil Rights Congress, 1951,”
J.B. Matthews Papers, Duke University.
140
Abzug,, OHRO-Columbia, 6-315.
141
For the draft bills, memos written by Abzug, and conference materials from National Lawyers Guild conventions
on civil rights: Box 910, “Civil Rights, Historical Material, 1952-1952,” Bella Abzug Papers, Columbia University.
46
Association of Mount Vernon, a New York suburb.142 Abzug did not contribute extensively to
grassroots civil rights organizing in the 1960s primarily because she shifted her focus to antinuclear testing, peace activism. Accordingly, she chose not to create a practice centering on civil
rights litigation from the time between the McGee case and her run for Congress. Instead, she
supplemented her general practice with civil liberties cases, as red-baiting heightened over the
course of the 1950s. Yet, her Congressional work that focused heavily on immigrant, minority,
gay, and women’s rights, as well as international human rights, evidenced her life-long interest
in advancing the civil rights of subordinate people.
***
Although the Willie McGee case “was not exactly a fun case,” according to Abzug, her
representation of McGee left a profound imprint on her life, just as she shaped the legal direction
of the case considerably.143 Primarily, Bella Abzug contributed a unique form of legal activism
that was grounded by her belief that “law was the social instrument for change.”144 She felt that
legal activism was a highly effective form of organizing, and saw herself as a courtroom agitator
that pushed for social change within the system. While Abzug carried this sentiment well before
joining the Willie McGee defense team, this case enabled her to enact her legal strategy for the
first time at the national level. She tested out monumentally her belief that her role as a “lawyer
was to preserve the Constitution by defending the rights of individuals, and to expand the
protection of the Constitution particularly to those who were outside of it, like blacks.”145
Undeniably, the McGee experiment was an especially demanding first attempt at national legal
142
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 1-38.
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-139.
144
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-144.
145
Bella Abzug as quoted from an interview Amy Swerdlow conducted with Bella Abzug in September 1980:
Swerdlow, 145.
143
47
activism, yet Abzug’s empathy for the plight of African Americans provided her the courage and
stubbornness needed to brave any tribulations.
Additionally, Abzug contributed a woman’s perspective to the legal strategy that
strengthened the gender component of Willie McGee’s defense. She encouraged the Civil Rights
Congress to frame their legal argument by terms not only of race, but sex. For one, Abzug could
relate to the predicament in which Willie McGee and Willetta Hawkins found themselves. Just
as their interracial affair was an affront to patriarchy and white supremacy, her decision to be a
working mother was not acceptable Northern middle-class behavior. Her choice to engage in a
nationally known civil rights case with a new baby at home was itself an oppositional stance
against the proper roles of womanhood of the late-1940s. In addition, Abzug’s position as a
strong woman and advocate of women’s equality enabled her to deconstruct the gender dynamics
at play in the McGee case. She analyzed and exposed the power structures that supported, and
demanded, that a rape conviction be secured for Hawkin’s alleged assault. As a woman who
believed strongly in women’s rights, she could talk openly about rape, thereby adding greater
legitimacy to the claim that McGee was innocent. Most centrally, Abzug helped untangle the
complicated web of relationships between Willie McGee’s conviction, rape law, and Southern
codes of chivalry.
Moreover, Abzug’s double consciousness as a Jewish woman provided her with greater
insight into the experience of Willie McGee.146 Abzug drew upon her identity as an outsider in a
profession and society dominated by Anglo-Saxon, Christian men to personalize Willie McGee’s
life experience. When arguing for the civil rights of African American men who were pushed to
the periphery of the Jim Crow system, Abzug referenced her own experience as a Jewish woman
146
For a compelling discussion of the double consciousness of the Jewish people, and the simultaneous outsider and
insider position Jew maintain in the United States, refer to: Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism,
Ed. by David Biale, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
48
attorney who had trouble being taken seriously in the legal profession. She also recalled her
experience at the Peekskill riots, drawing a link between the destructive nature of anti-Semitism
and racism. Like her own interest in being accepted in New York, Abzug believed that McGee
deserved to be recognized as a member of the Black community from outside and within.
Abzug’s style of legal activism is exemplary of a greater Left legal movement who
worked to expand civil rights during the late 1940s and 1950s. She and her cohorts on the
McGee defense team attempted to persuade the Mississippi courts and U.S. Supreme Court to set
a legal precedence against racial discrimination. Yet, while Abzug was ready to advance civil
rights law in the late-1940s and early-1950s, the courts were not. She learned that the Supreme
Court in the early-1950s was not governed by fairness or a sense of legal activism, just as the
Southern courts were driven by power and white supremacy. As a result, Left attorneys focused
more and more on direct action and legislative campaigns over the course of the 1950s.
The McGee case was Abzug’s first national trial, placing her on the map among the top
litigators in the United States. While she was far from green, her arguments and actions on
behalf of McGee did reveal an early idealism. Barely pushing thirty, she tried the McGee case at
the start of her long legal career. She faced the Supreme Court for the first time, and argued her
claims for the Constitutional rights of McGee multiple times before the high court with great
force and conviction. During the intense final months of the case, Abzug overcame many
obstacles—death threats, a devastating miscarriage, conflicts with the Civil Rights Congress, and
the pressures of balancing a marriage, parenting, and legal work. Yet, her loyalty to the case
remained unaltered. Motivated by endless hope and an obstinate faith in justice, she recalled of
49
her steadfast support of McGee’s case: “You think any human being could go through something
like that unless you felt that there was hope?”147
While Bella Abzug’s optimism had the potential of being deflated, the final execution of
Willie McGee did not mark the end of her legal activism, but rather the beginning. With McGee
in heart and mind, Abzug maintained a life-long commitment to social justice in her work as a
public interest attorney, political activist, and New York congresswoman. Just as a she braved
the Southern courts, demanding court-based civil rights reforms at the height of the Cold War, so
too would Abzug conquer the streets of New York and the halls of Congress in pursuit of
international peace, equity among all Americans, and universal human rights.
147
Abzug, OHRO-Columbia, 3-143.
50