Communists in the Jim Crow South [Archive]

Communist

22nd February 2010, 18:51

An article on an upcoming book. Be forewarned, it includes a chapter excerpt.

_____________________

THE EYES OF WILLIE MCGEE (http://www.portside.org/?q=showpost&i=7338): A Tragedy of Race, Sex,
and Secrets in the Jim Crow South
By Alex Heard
TBR May 11, 2010
ISBN 9780061284151 / 416 pages

"The case of Willie McGee became one of the most
celebrated causes at the dawn of the Civil Rights
movement. In this riveting personal journey of discovery
and investigation, Alex Heard explores the political and
social forces at play and then peels them away to reveal
the fascinating human drama under it all. It's like a
real-life To Kill a Mockingbird, but with even more
subtleties, drama, and complexities."

--Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and
Universe

"Alex Heard's The Eyes of Willie McGee ought to win a
slew of prestigious awards. A stout case can now be made
that the execution of McGee in 1951 launched the civil
rights movement. A stunning narrative achievement based
on a bevy of new documentary evidence. Essential reading
for all Americans."

--Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge

[below is an excerpt from the book]

{CHAPTER 10}

Communists Coming Here

On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy
began to make his first national splash, telling an
audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, that the State
Department was infested with Communist spies. No
recording of the speech survived, and people argued
forever after about whether McCarthy actually said "I
have here in my hand" a list of 205 known infiltrators.

Three days later, in a follow-up speech in Reno, Nevada,
he lowered the number to 57 but repeated the theme:
America was losing the global conflict with Communism,
thanks to enemies within. The Soviet Union was in
control of eastern Europe, China had become the People's
Republic on October 1, 1949, and East Germany was
established on the 7th. Two weeks before that, on
September 23, President Truman announced that "an atomic
explosion had occurred within Russia in recent weeks," a
preface to the world's learning that the Soviet Union
definitely had the bomb.

To McCarthy-and to millions of people who believed in
him-that many losses in such a short time couldn't have
been an accident. He said the people on his list, all
burrowed inside the State Department, were "individuals
who would appear to be either card-carrying members or
certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who
nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign
policy." These people were like Judas, selling out the
United States to its enemies, but they were even more
dangerous because they were motivated by ideology, not
greed. "One thing to remember in discussing the
Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing
with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the
blueprints of a new weapon," he said. "We are dealing
with a far more sinister type of activity because it
permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy. . . ."
He focused particular wrath on Alger Hiss, the former
State Department official who on January 21 had been
found guilty of two counts of perjury, one of them for
denying that he had ever passed secret government
documents to ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers.

Alas, the United States was about to begin dealing, very
publicly, with the problem of spies who stole new
weapons-a story that began to unfold on February 2, when
British theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on
the Manhattan Project, was arrested in London and
charged with giving A-bomb secrets to the Russians.
Over the next few months, it came out that American
citizens were involved. David Greenglass, a machinist at
Los Alamos who was originally from New York, was
arrested in June. July and August saw the arrests of
Greenglass's brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, and his
sister, Ethel, both of whom were eventually executed for
conspiracy to commit espionage. Julius's lawyer was
Emanuel H. Bloch, a New Yorker who, up until the moment
of Julius's arrest, was devoting much of his time to the
defense of Willie McGee.

Capping the first half of 1950, on Sunday, June 25, the
North Korean Army turned a simmering conflict into a hot
war when it crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel and
invaded South Korea. The United States would be
entangled in combat operations there for the next three
years, at an eventual cost of more than thirty-six
thousand American lives.

Although there was never a good time for Communists to
show up in Jackson, Mississippi, the summer of 1950 was
as bad as it got. Nonetheless, that July, rapidly moving
events-pegged to McGee's July 27 execution date-forced a
confrontation between the CRC and city and state
authorities.

During 1949 and early 1950, things had changed rapidly
in terms of public awareness about McGee's situation.
Thanks to Patterson's tireless efforts, he was no longer
obscure, and his story was now being covered in
publications like the New York Times, the Washington
Post, and Newsweek. Recognizing this, Patterson decided
to build on what the CRC had done during its anti-Bilbo
fight in 1946 and 1947. This time, it would send a
sizable out-of-state delegation of protesters to Jackson
to sound off in hopes of stopping the execution. Once
these plans became known, the city bristled in
anticipation of a conflict that seemed likely to turn
violent. Setting the tone was a legendary local
newspaper editor who loved nothing more than a good
battle: Frederick Sullens.

"Probably no U.S. editor is quite so tough, colorful,
eloquent, prolific and unmindful of editorial niceties
as 65-year-old, 185-pound Frederick Sullens of the
Jackson (Miss.) Daily News," Time said in a 1943 profile
marking the newspaper's fiftieth anniversary. ". . . [F]
or 38 of those 50 years [it] has come wet from the
presses bristling with Sullens's own pugnacious
personality. He is perhaps the only survivor of the old
Southern-womanhood-must-be-defended school of
journalism, whose exponents backed up their words with
their fists and divided all office visitors into two
classes: 1) those without horsewhips; 2) those with."

Born in 1877 in Versailles, Missouri, Sullens came to
Mississippi in 1897 to cover a murder trial. He didn't
like Jackson at first, but he stuck around and took a
job on the city's oldest daily, the Clarion-Ledger. The
place he came to love wasn't much to look at-population
five thousand or so, it was a backwater city with dusty
streets and shabby buildings, still smarting from its
Civil War days as "Chimneyville," when it was conquered
and burned before and after the fall of Vicksburg.

Jackson's natural setting was scenic but buggy. A muddy
river, the Pearl, slithered past to the east, where
water moccasins wriggled about in dark, soggy woods that
you could see from the bluffs downtown. There were
yellow fever outbreaks every year from 1897 to 1899, and
Sullens caught the disease himself. He also launched an
editorial campaign to clean the city up, getting behind
a $100,000 sewer system that critics considered a
boondoggle.

"You can imagine my surprise and disappointment to
discover it was a dingy, dreary- looking country town,"
Sullens told one interviewer. ". . . I've been here ever
since, and, having written millions of words in praise
of Jackson, it is now rather safe to draw the conclusion
that I like the place. In fact, I love it. Today I'd
rather own a magnolia sapling in Jackson than the Empire
State Building in New York."

Sullens quit the Clarion-Ledger in 1905 after a fight
with his publisher, who cut one of his pieces-a
theatrical review-in half. ("I tore up the galleys and
told him he could take his job and go to hell.") He
signed on as city editor of the Jackson Daily News; the
following year he became editor and later bought the
paper. There he reigned for the next half century,
focusing mainly on Mississippi matters-especially
politics and race-but always with an eye on national and
world events.

His style of journalism was personal, vitriolic, biased,
often sentimental, and he kept readers well-informed
about his attachments to Mississippi's natural
splendors, Pekingese dogs, and Christmas. (A holiday
tradition was Sullens's Christmas Eve editorial,
described in his obituary as "lasting literature . . .
almost Biblical in its purity.") He could be funny in a
Menckenesque way. Once, after reading that President
Warren G. Harding liked to pour gravy on his waffles, he
wrote, "Henceforth and hereafter suspicion and dread
will dog his footsteps. . . ." But too often he wasn't
funny at all, ranting about race, Yankees, and
Communists in ways that sounded like open incitements to
violence.

According to legend, Sullens would get so agitated while
writing his front- page column-"The Low Down on the
Higher Ups," launched in the 1930s-that he would shed
articles of clothing while he typed, ending up nearly
naked. "The following item published years ago probably
best exemplifies the tenor of his column," Colliers said
in a 1947 profile. "`Jim So-and-So (naming a prominent
state official) came to my office today. I beat hell out
of him, his son, and his dog. If anybody else is looking
for trouble, he'll find a well-preserved man in his
middle fifties well able to take care of himself."

He meant it. It was said that no session of the
Mississippi legislature was complete without Sullens
getting into a fistfight with an elected official. The
most famous scrap happened in 1940, when Sullens was
sixty-two, and it grew out of an old feud he had with
Mississippi's governor at the time, Paul Johnson Sr. In
1931, Johnson had run unsuccessfully for governor
against Martin Sennett Conner (the winner) and Sullens's
preferred candidate, Hugh L. White. During the primary
campaign, Sullens railed against Johnson so often that
Johnson bundled his grievances into a libel suit, which
the Daily News settled out of court, reportedly paying
$18,000. During Johnson's campaign in 1939, he bragged,
"I'm still spending that buzzard's money. I'm liable to
be spending some more of it too when this campaign is
over."

The clash of the titans happened on the evening of May
2, 1940, in the lobby of an upscale downtown hotel
called the Walthall, where Sullens lived in a penthouse.
Johnson was in the lobby with friends, including one
named Major G. W. Buck.

Sullens was about to enter an elevator with his dog when
the sixty-year-old governor- who was six feet three
inches tall and 195 pounds-saw him, rushed past Buck,
and smashed the back of Sullens's head with a cane. "He
jumped over me so fast I didn't know what was happening
until blood was shooting every which way from Sunday,"
Buck told reporters.

Sullens turned and charged like a speared gorilla. "The
editor whirled, knocked away the cane, and pitched the .
. . Governor across a chair, smashing it, dropped
astride him, landing furious rights and lefts in his
face," Time reported. "The embattled editor was hauled
off, and trumpeting that it was `a cowardly attempt to
assassinate me from the rear,' was rushed to the
hospital for scalp stitches. The Governor was put to bed
at the Executive Mansion a block away." Sullens was a
Democrat and a white supremacist, of course, but he held
some unexpected views. He always hated Bilbo, who struck
him as a low-class crook. He loathed Communists
("sneaking Bolsheviki"), but he also disdained the
widely popular Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, writing once
that its philosophical basis was little more than "flub-
dub." He worshipped Woodrow Wilson, partly because he
had served under Wilson's banner as an intelligence
officer in Washington during World War I. (This was how
Sullens picked up a nickname he cherished: Major.) He
despised Herbert Hoover for supposedly being too liberal
on race. Three days before the presidential election of
1928, the Jackson Daily News published a front-page
cartoon showing an apelike black man chasing a terrified
white girl off a cliff, with captions that said
"Remember her at the polls!" and "Why the South is
Democratic."

By the summer of 1950, the Major, at seventy-two, was
past his prime, a Santa-bellied figure with thin, gray
hair plastered down on a bumpy skull. But he was more
than ready when the showdown with the CRC took shape.
Within days of the Supreme Court's refusal to hear
McGee's appeal, the CRC had sent out a call to "members
of trade unions, church groups, negro people's
organizations and all Americans," asking them to "write
and wire Gov. Fielding Wright, Jackson, Miss., asking
executive clemency for Willie McGee." The response was
impressive: By Wright's own reckoning, he heard from
fifteen thousand people before the summer was over. The
weeks leading up to July 27 also saw an ominous flow of
court maneuvers, blasphemous Yankee journalism, and
rumors about mysterious CRC activity in Laurel and
Jackson.

Some of McGee's growing national support was little more
than background noise, negated by its own shrillness. In
the July 1950 issue of Music Business ("The Official
Organ of the American Society of Disk Jockeys"), one
broadcaster asked his fellow jocks to "boycott . . . or
smash" copies of a popular Ella Fitzgerald song called
"M.I.S.S.I.S.S.I.P.P.I.," to convey their disgust with
the state's treatment of McGee. Though Fitzgerald was
black and the song was an ode to the river, not to
Mississippi's racial caste system, its popularity was
still unacceptable.

"There are some who will say we have no right in mixing
up the legal lynching of a man with a song," the writer
argued. "In that case perhaps we should overlook the
death and maiming of millions of Allied troops and write
a love lyric to the melody of `Deutschland Uber Alles' .
. . ."

Some of it had impact. Starting on June 14, the New
York-based Compass started publishing its multipart
McGee series. The articles were important because the
Compass, unlike the Daily Worker, had a place in the
mainstream, however tenuous. Its founder, Theodore O.
Thackrey, had edited the New York Post. He launched the
new "liberal crusading" paper in 1949 with a cash
infusion from Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, a Chicago-
based International Harvester heiress who, like
Thackrey, had been a Henry Wallace supporter.

This isn't to say the Compass was starchy. Accompanied
by urgent display type ("Wife Tells of Frameup," "The
Invisible Bloodstains," "`In Sweatbox You Sign
Anything'"), the stories were every bit as emotional as
anything the Daily Worker published. They relied on
interviews with Rosalee and Bessie McGee to convey the
CRC's defense of McGee as it existed in the summer of
1950. There were no public allegations about a love
affair just yet; those came later. Instead, the attack
was aimed at the implausibility of Mrs. Hawkins's story
and the physical abuse of McGee at the hands of his
jailers.

"A white woman says she was `raped' while her husband
and children slept nearby," read an editor's
introduction to the stories that ran on June 15. "She
says it was pitch dark and she couldn't see who attacked
her, but that it was a Negro.

"The place is Laurel, Miss., and the white woman's
statement results in the arrest of Willie McGee on Nov.
3, 1945. For 33 days, McGee is held incommunicado,
beaten, starved, tortured. He signs a confession.

". . . In yesterday's installment, [Mrs. Willie McGee]
related how McGee was arrested and how, after
`confessing,' he was nearly lynched. THE COMPASS is
presenting her story exactly as she related it, without
altering her simple but eloquent language."

Patterson knew the timing was perfect for protest
action, and he alerted CRC chapters about the need to
step it up. "The Willie McGee case is really beginning
to boil now," he wrote on July 12 to the Detroit branch.
"Harvey McGehee, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Mississippi, has a letter in the [New York Compass] for
Wednesday, the 12th. . . . He stated in the letter that
he has been bombarded with telegrams, special delivery
and air mail letters urging a new trial for Willie
McGee. Well, this should be only the beginning. They
should be literally deluged with this kind of material."

For Sullens, red-alert time came with the CRC's official
mid-July announcement that activists from ten states
would assemble in Jackson on July 25 to plead for
clemency with Governor Wright. Patterson promised a
delegation of seventy-five or so. The Reverend R. H.
Harris, an African-American who ran the CRC branch in
Dallas, upped it, claiming that one thousand people were
on their way and that he was bringing a mixed-race
group.

That day, the Major fired his opening volley, an
editorial headlined "Communists Coming Here." After
brushing off Reverend Harris's rhetoric as "gross
exaggeration by a loose-lipped Negro," he wrote, "For
sublimated gall, triple-plated audacity, bold insolence
and downright arrogance, this proposed invasion of the
Capital City of our state by a gang of Communists truly
passes all comprehension.

"These invaders are just as much enemies of the United
States government as are soldiers fighting under the
Communist banner in Korea- fighting with Russian arms
and ammunition. . . .

"[I]f any hotel in Jackson furnishes shelter for this
motley crew," he closed, ". . . then that hostelry
should have the rooms they occupy thoroughly cleansed
with the most powerful disinfectants. "Carbolic acid and
concentrated lye, combined with DDT, will hardly be
adequate for the purpose."

Abzug wasn't happy about the protest plans, seeing them
as a drag on her courtroom work. There was often
friction between her and the CRC-in her oral history,
she referred to the group's members, only half-jokingly,
as "lunatics" and "egomaniacs"-and she thought the
clemency hearing was bad strategy. She'd seen enough of
the South to know that verbal harangues from New York
weren't going to help. "It was a very explosive case,"
she said, "and they didn't give a damn what I thought
should happen or how it should happen, even though I
broke my neck to put it together, in a very hard way."

Patterson had his own complaints, once writing of Abzug,
"She knew her law. She was, however, strong-willed and
egotistical." The tension points to an important
reality about McGee's defense: for better or worse, two
people were in charge. Lacking Samuel Leibowitz's
experience and clout, Abzug wasn't able to dictate terms
about the wise use of protest machinery. Patterson, with
his long history as a street fighter, figured he knew
best when to twist the knobs.

For Abzug, Emanuel Bloch, and John Poole, the courtroom
challenge was immediate and daunting: saving McGee from
electrocution on the 27th. Having been rejected by the
U.S. Supreme Court, she tried an unusual legal strategy,
filing a petition for a writ of error coram nobis.

In a legal context, the phrase means "the error before
us." It refers to a rarely used plea, derived from
English common law, in which a lawyer asks that a case
be reopened on the grounds that significant mistakes
occurred during earlier trials and judgments, usually
owing to incompetence, fraud, or suppressed evidence.
Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyers filed a coram nobis plea in
1927, but the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
rejected it, calling the doctrine "obsolete." It was
used during long-after-the-fact appeals in cases
involving Hiss's perjury conviction, Watergate burglar
Frank Sturgis, and Japanese internment during World War
II. But in 1950, coram nobis wasn't recognized in
federal procedures, a position that remained in place
until 1954.

In the McGee petition, filed in the Jones County Circuit
Court on July 21, his lawyers argued that virtually
everything about the first three trials was a sham. They
recapped the familiar list of problems: the mob
atmosphere, the all-white juries, the third-trial rush
job, the coerced confession, and the threat of violence
that prompted Poole and London to leave town. They
didn't spell out the affair allegation, but they hinted
at it, saying that prosecutors had used "perjured
testimony as to the essential charge of rape. . . ."
This testimony "was submitted by the complaining witness
with the knowledge that it was false and that she was
not raped by the defendant . . . ."

The meaning of that was murky. Was this Dixon Pyles's
old argument that Mrs. Hawkins's "failure to resist"
amounted to legal consent? Or was it something new?

A story in the Laurel Leader-Call tried to read the tea
leaves, saying the argument was thought to be based on
McGee's claim that he'd worked as a yardman in the
Hawkins's neighborhood, and on his assertion that he
"met and knew the ravished woman long before the night
of the rape." But that too was unclear.

Paul Swartzfager's answer, filed the next day, denied
all the major claims, including things that were
obviously true-one being that the case generated angry
emotions among the Laurel public. It had, and on the
21st-when Poole and Bloch traveled to Laurel to submit
the petition's paperwork-it did again.

In subsequent sworn statements, Poole and Bloch said
they tried to file their petition at the Jones County
Courthouse just before noon, after coming down from
Jackson by car. The circuit clerk said they would have
to deliver it themselves to Judge Collins, who was
sitting on the bench in Hattiesburg. They made the trip,
weren't able to find Collins, and drove back, getting
additional runarounds in Laurel. Poole finally reached
Collins by phone at his home, and the judge set a time
for argument on the petition: 9:00 a.m. the next day.

According to Poole, as he and Bloch left the courthouse,
he was approached and attacked by Troy Hawkins. "He was
very angry when he saw me and called me `a dirty son of
a *****,'" Poole said. "Almost simultaneously he lunged
at me in a threatening manner, but I was able to side
step him. He then swung with his right hand at my face
and I successfully ducked this blow."

Poole climbed into the car with Bloch and tried to drive
away. Hawkins got in his car too, and to Poole this was
a sign that he intended to "follow me and cause
trouble." Poole and Bloch got out of their car and tried
to get assistance from Laurel officials, including Mayor
Carroll Gartin, who refused them. Poole said Gartin was
hostile, telling him "he would not believe me on a stack
of bibles," and that he was on his own.

Eventually, Poole and Bloch made it out of town. Back in
Jackson, they conferred with Abzug and decided it wasn't
safe to return. Poole called Collins on the morning of
the 22nd, asking that the hearing be moved out of
Laurel. Collins said no.

Poole then called Governor Wright, who agreed to an
impromptu hearing on whether Poole deserved state
protection in Laurel. Poole, Bloch, and Abzug met with
Wright and other officials, asking for a state escort.
They were denied again, and they didn't go back to
Laurel the next day.

In Laurel, Collins dismissed the petition for "lack of
prosecution," and a Jones County judge named B. Frank
Carter swore out a statement saying that Poole was
lying, that he'd seen Poole and Hawkins cross paths at
the courthouse and nothing happened. Back in Jackson,
Laurel officials countered with an aggressive play of
their own. Gartin, Swartzfager, Albert Easterling, and
E. K. Collins filed a petition with the Mississippi
State Bar Association to have Poole disbarred for
consorting with "subversive and Communistic elements."

Jackson had gotten a paint job since Sullens took his
first doubtful look in 1897. By 1950 it was a rapidly
growing city with a metropolitan-area population of
142,000. The influx came mainly from in-state
immigration and the baby boom, as people of both races
left farms and small towns to benefit from an expanding
urban economy. In an early-1950s report in the Memphis
Commercial Appeal, Jackson-based reporter Kenneth Toler
assessed the growth with pride, harking back to the
Civil War ransacking as he wrote, "The chimneys of
destruction . . . have become the smokestacks of a new
industrial empire."

That was a stretch. Jackson never became an industrial
center on the order of Memphis or New Orleans, but there
had been significant development, which Toler
illustrated with upbeat statistics: retail spending had
quadrupled since 1940; several new hospitals and schools
were under construction; and "195 diversified industries
[are] now operating in the manufacture of about 300
different products."

Downtown Jackson was an attractive, orderly grid
bordered by State Street to the east and Mill Street to
the west. Pascagoula Street to the south and High Street
to the north formed a rough rectangle that contained
most of the city's hotels, public buildings, churches,
and stores. Much more so than today, central Jackson in
1950 hummed with businesses. On Capitol Street alone-the
half-mile-long main commercial drag, which ran east to
west past the antebellum governor's mansion-there were
five movie theaters, more than a dozen places to eat,
and at least eighty clothing and jewelry stores.

Two blocks north of the mansion stood the state capitol
building-called the "New Capitol" to distinguish it from
the Greek Revival "Old Capitol" that it replaced in
1903. Its architectural style was similar to the U.S.
Capitol, scaled to about half the size. One of its most
striking features is a central interior dome that rises
to more than 180 feet, its arches illuminated by
hundreds of fat, round lightbulbs that cast a warm glow
on plaque-mounted depictions of "Blind Justice."

Elsewhere downtown, rising over everything, were several
landmark office buildings and hotels, including the
eighteen-story Tower Building (an art deco structure
renamed the Standard Life Building in 1952); and
"Jackson's first skyscraper," the ten-story Lamar Life
building, completed in 1925 and built under the watch of
Christian Welty, an insurance company executive and the
father of Eudora Welty. The most notable hotels were
the Edwards, the Heidelberg, the Robert E. Lee, and the
Walthall, each with at least two hundred rooms. Blocky
buildings that jutted above low-slung downtown stores,
they were emblems of a time when every city worth its
salt had central lodgings that functioned as one-stop
business and leisure depots. Heidelberg stationery from
that era boasted of "Night club dancing and broadcasting
in the sky . . . South's most beautiful ladies' lounge,
see the mural . . . Garage capacity 500 cars, none other
like it."

"An asset to . . . Jackson, the Hotel Heidelberg offers
the finest in hotel convention facilities and
hospitality and comfort to its guests," said the author
of The Story of Jackson, a civic history published in
1951. "The entire organization reflects the true
hospitable spirit of the city. . . ."

It was all strictly segregated, of course. Only a few
blocks from the New Capitol, due west and northwest,
stood a separate district of relatively plain-and
sometimes ramshackle-residences, businesses, and
churches. Its namesake thoroughfare, Farish Street, was
the main artery of African-American life in Jackson.
Between 1948 and 1951, Rosalee McGee lived at three
different addresses in the Farish Street neighborhood,
which was also home to Percy Greene's weekly newspaper,
the Jackson Advocate.

Greene had been involved in the CRC's anti-Bilbo
campaign in 1946 and was still serving as the go-between
for its dealings with Rosalee. (She reconnected with him
right after her return from Washington.) But he seemed
to be losing his taste for the McGee cause, at least
publicly. Greene was no radical to begin with-he was the
go-slow type, closer in spirit to Booker T. Washington
than William Patterson- and he was rattled by the coming
of the CRC because its Communist ties were politically
dangerous. In an Advocate editorial published a few days
before the clemency hearing, he held out a stiff-arm for
all to see, writing that the CRC "is not going to do any
good for the case of Willie McGee, and it would be just
as well if all the delegates planning to come to
Mississippi would stay at home."

July 25, a Tuesday, was a bright, hot, humid day in
Jackson, with a possibility of afternoon thunderstorms
and a 100 percent chance of midday shouting. City
officials were flexing as if an army of Visigoths were
coming. Police Chief Joel D. Holden canceled all
vacations and days off, while American Legion posts in
Jackson and Laurel pledged to help maintain order
against any "subversive and communist individuals."
Governor Wright issued a statement letting the CRC
delegates know they'd better behave. He dismissed their
pleas in advance as "lies and propaganda."

Amid the drumbeats, there were even rumors of Ku Klux
Klan activity, which was unusual. The Klan was a
national force in the 1920s, and it would be important
again in the 1960s. But in 1950 it was a marginal
outfit, treated as a joke by Mississippi journalists. On
July 17, 1950, an A.P. story outlined a Klan power
struggle going on in Jackson between Dr. Lycurgus
Spinks, a "white-maned" eccentric who ran for governor
in 1947, and Thomas J. Flowers, a retired New York
policeman originally from Mississippi. In late May,
Spinks held a small rally at his "white frame `Imperial
Palace'" on the outskirts of Jackson-"the first Klan
extravaganza here in the memory of veteran newsmen," the
story said-but it was a weak display. Policemen told
Spinks he couldn't burn a cross on his lawn, so he
didn't. Among the spectators was a "Negro boy [who]
watched wide-eyed without being molested."

The FBI wasn't so sure the Klan was irrelevant.
Throughout the five-day period bracketing the 25th, as
the situation in Jackson shifted from unruly to
dangerous, agents and informants circulated throughout
the city, taking notes, hanging out in government
buildings and hotel lobbies, and writing reports. The
Bureau's file on the McGee case contains dozens of
revealing pages about the events that ensued, including
a detailed, unsigned summary document that says the FBI
believed local Klansmen were responsible. Whether these
were Spinks men, Flowers men, or unaffiliated
freelancers remains unknown. After all these years, the
names of any alleged Klansmen are still blacked out.

As it happened, Reverend Harris's thousand-man army
never materialized. The CRC had negotiated with Governor
Wright, who agreed to grant an audience to a manageably
sized group, numbering around a dozen, which consisted
of liberal Democrats, former Wallace supporters, and
even a Communist or two-though nobody advertised that
affiliation. Behind the scenes, there were a few black
CRC members in Jackson that week, but everybody who
appeared before Wright was white, including the
delegation's leader, CRC attorney Aubrey Grossman.

There were several women, among them the most prominent
delegate, Dr. Gene Weltfish, a Columbia University
anthropologist who had studied under the late Franz
Boas, an early proponent of the scientific view that no
race was inherently inferior. Weltfish's research
specialties were the customs and languages of Indian
tribes like the Pawnee, but she became well-known for a
1943 pamphlet, called The Races of Mankind, that she co-
wrote with a Columbia colleague, Ruth Benedict. Using
plain language to describe contemporary research into
human traits like skin color, cranial shapes, and
intelligence scores, Races championed Boas's egalitarian
racial views against the backdrop of World War II, at a
time when America's stance on race was painfully
contorted, its government condemning Hitler even as it
sent a segregated army to fight him.

"All races of man are shoulder to shoulder," the
pamphlet said. "Our armed forces are in North Africa
with its Negro, Berber, and Near-East peoples. They are
in India. They are in China. They are in the Solomons
with its dark-skinned, `strong'-haired Melanesians. Our
neighbors now are peoples of all the races of the
earth."

Races was supposed to be a positive unifying tool,
countering Nazi superman theories, but American race
theories killed its chances of becoming a government
publication. Both the USO and the Army decided against
distributing the pamphlet, because Southern congressmen
raised so much hell over some of its contents.

The problem was Benedict and Weltfish's argument about
intelligence, which they said was influenced more by
opportunity than skin color. Citing 1917 test results
from black and white soldiers in the American
Expeditionary Force, they pointed out that blacks from
New York, Illinois, and Ohio outscored whites from
Mississippi, Kentucky, and Arkansas. This happened, they
said, because the Northern blacks in the sample
generally had better access to education. They tried to
put it delicately-"Negroes with better luck after they
were born got higher scores than Whites with less luck"-
but this still infuriated powerful Southern legislators
like Kentucky's Andrew J. May, chair of the House
Committee on Military Affairs.

The clemency delegation's rank and file also included
less prominent people who were picked because they were
young, idealistic, and clean-cut. Frank Stoll was a
former bomber pilot, originally from Oshkosh, Wisconsin,
who had flown some forty-five bomber missions in the
South Pacific. He and his wife, Anne, met in Chicago
after the war and fell in with a group of progressives
centered at the University of Wisconsin, among them
Lorraine Hansberry, the African-American poet and
dramatist who would later write A Raisin in the Sun.
Sidney Ordower was a veteran from Chicago who'd fought
in Normandy, where he won two purple hearts as an
infantry captain. Among his interests, Ordower was a
gospel-music lover; he became a Chicago fixture in later
years by hosting a TV program called Jubilee Showcase.

Some of the delegates were fated for Red Scare conflicts
with the federal government as the 1950s ground on. In
1952, Weltfish was attacked for stating publicly that
the United States was using germ warfare in Korea, which
echoed the propaganda of the Soviet Union. That year,
she told a Senate subcommittee that all she'd done was
hand out a statement from a Canadian peace activist who
had made the charge, but she refused to answer questions
about whether she agreed with this claim or had ever
been a Communist. Columbia's trustees weren't pleased.
Though they denied that politics were a factor, they
terminated her contract as a lecturer in 1953.

Another woman in the group was Winifred Feise, who still
had clear memories of the clemency hearing when I
interviewed her by phone in 2005. Feise was a former
New Yorker who, at the time of the hearing, was living
in New Orleans with her husband, Richard Feise. They'd
moved there when Richard took a wartime job with Higgins
Industries, builder of P.T. boats and the Higgins boat,
a landing craft used on D-Day. Both had been involved in
leftist politics since college, and both would wind up
on the government's watch list of suspected subversives.
In New Orleans, they got to know activists like Oakley
Johnson, an English instructor who'd been fired from New
York's City College because of his left-wing political
beliefs, and James A. Dombrowski, who was director of
the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an
interracial progressive group.

Up until the summer of 1950, Winifred hadn't paid much
attention to the McGee case. But the CRC needed bodies
in the field, so she signed up. Before going to Jackson
for the hearing, she'd been part of a small group that
went to Laurel from New Orleans to knock on doors and
ask questions about Mrs. Hawkins. These visits were
noticed, and the visitors' movements were reported in
Laurel and Jackson newspapers. On July 14 the Laurel
Leader-Call published sketchy details about "two men and
two women," who turned up in the Magnolia Street
neighborhood looking for evidence that McGee had done
yard work on the Hawkins's block. A man named F. S. Ford
said the strangers were told repeatedly that McGee was a
truck driver, not a yardman, but they persisted. As the
story ominously put it, "The men who accompanied the two
women remained in a high-powered and expensive
automobile as the contacts were made at the doors of the
homes within the crime vicinity."

Winifred was in that group, and she remembered knocking
on the door of the Hawkins's next- door neighbor, the
Jensens. While the men talked to Mrs. Jensen, Winifred
carefully studied the driveway between the Jensen and
Hawkins homes. It was her understanding that Mrs. Jensen
had testified that she saw McGee run down this driveway
during his escape. That's not quite right, but Winifred
seemed certain that this was part of the prosecution's
case. "The whole story was made up anyway," she told me.
"These two, this woman and McGee, had known each other
since they were kids playing on the tracks and stuff. At
least that's the story we had. He had an affair with
her. Nobody ever denied that. It was not a rape."

On the morning of the clemency hearing, Feise came up by
train from New Orleans, arriving with another woman,
Martha Wheeler, at the Illinois Central Depot, a sturdy
brick building on Mill Street, in the shadow of the
Hotel Edwards. Walking east into the heart of downtown,
she was armored against the day in a sundress and wide-
brimmed straw hat.

"We put on our gloves and our hats and knew that we had
to behave and be good," she recalled. "The few blacks
who were on the street saw us coming and nodded or
blinked or let us make eye contact to let us know that
they knew we were there. It was an absolutely eerie and
amazing sensation and experience."

When the women got to their hotel, the Heidelberg, a
surprise was waiting. Feise assumed the meeting would
take place in some nondescript state office building,
but she was told Governor Wright had decided on a
fancier setting-the House of Representatives chamber in
the New Capitol. The hearing was going to be a public
show.

Some 150 to 200 people assembled in the House chamber at
11 a.m. Roughly 25 CRC members were on hand, with 10 of
them serving as official delegates, but only 4 men and 2
women ended up speaking. Abzug wasn't there. She'd done
her part the day before, when she, along with Poole and
Bloch, argued the error coram nobis petition before the
Mississippi Supreme Court. Chief Justice Harvey McGehee
turned it down on the morning of the 25th, by which time
Abzug was already in Washington, preparing to ask for a
last-minute stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme
Court. McGehee said the defense was offering no new
evidence for its claim that Mrs. Hawkins had perjured
herself. He called the charge "wholly unsupported by any
proof other than that the petitioner himself had sworn
to such general allegation."

Along with local and regional reporters, the Northern
press was represented by John Popham of the New York
Times, Stephen Fischer of the Compass, and Harry Raymond
of the Daily Worker. A Jackson Daily News photograph
taken that morning showed Raymond, with a sly look on
his face, walking into the House chamber-next to Wright,
McGehee, Attorney General John Kyle, and Colonel T. B.
Birdsong, the state commissioner of public safety.

A caption identified Raymond as a reporter for "the
Daily Worker of New York, a Communist publication," but
that didn't quite cover it. In fact, he was exactly the
kind of person Fred Sullens was so worried about: an
old-school Communist agitator, one who used journalism
the same way Sullens did-as a tool for advancing his
political beliefs, often at the expense of accuracy.
Raymond's real name was Harold J. Lightcap. During his
long career on the left he'd done time for violent
rioting in Union Square (he was arrested in 1930 along
with Communist leader William Z. Foster), had reportedly
served prior sentences for burglary and auto theft, and
had been married to a radical labor organizer from
Russia, Rose Nelson (alias Rose Lightcap), who was
indicted in 1950 on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy to
overthrow the U.S. government. As a Daily Worker
reporter, Raymond was tireless and fearless, a hard-
drinking man who'd covered everything from the race
riots in Columbia, Tennessee, to the Willie Earle
lynching to the Smith Act trials.

The House chamber was an ornate space with high
ceilings, dark furniture, and a color scheme that bathed
its inhabitants in soft light. The CRC delegates were
seated in big swivel chairs on the front row of the
legislators' floor area, facing a lectern with a
microphone. Wright and McGehee sat in the second row,
interrupting when they felt like it-which was often-
through mikes mounted at their desks. Spread out in
seats behind the main group, or leaning against walls,
were dozens of local spectators, American Legionnaires,
and even a reputed Klansman or two-many of them visibly
hostile to the visitors from the North.

The hearing lasted just over two hours. Dressed in a
wide- lapel suit, his graying hair slicked down on the
sides, Aubrey Grossman led off, starting out calmly but
getting frustrated as it became obvious that his
arguments weren't doing any good. "[Grossman] delivered
the opening address in tempered language," Popham wrote
in the Times, "but . . . made the closing talk in a
shouting voice, and was shaking his finger at Chief
Justice Harvey McGehee. . . ."

Both sides contributed to the futility of what took
place, but much of the blame goes to Wright, who had no
interest in a productive discussion. In essence, the
hearing was a strategic (and effective) means of
bottling up the opposition while giving the appearance
of fair play. He'd managed it so that there were only a
handful of CRC delegates in town rather than hundreds.
Now he had them cooped up in a government building, a
setting he controlled, instead of marching around on the
streets.

On the CRC's side of the gap, there were two problems.
At least one person in the group should have taken the
time to read the transcript of the third trial, which
was stored right there in the Capitol. Judging by the
back-and-forth that day, it's apparent that the
delegates gleaned their knowledge of the case almost
entirely from newspaper stories or, as Winifred Feise
had done, from word of mouth. "Some claimed they had
read portions of the record," a Jackson Daily News story
said, "but admitted that what they read was printed
either in the leftist newspaper, the Daily Compass, or
in Civil Rights publications." The group's skimpy
knowledge base left them vulnerable when Wright and
McGehee, lawyers both, pounded them about not having
their facts straight.

The other problem was the same thing that hobbled Abzug,
something that only she or Patterson had the power to
change. The CRC kept implying that it had electrifying
new evidence proving that Mrs. Hawkins had lied. But
they wouldn't say what it was, insisting that the place
to do that was inside a courtroom during a fourth trial.
Grossman ran into this wall almost immediately.

"Let me make this clear," he said. "We feel positively,
definitely, strongly that Willie McGee is innocent. And
an innocent man should not die. . . . The evidence,
excluding the confession, is meaningless. As time
passes, facts will come out to show Willie McGee is
innocent."

What facts? He didn't say, so his plea came down to
telling hostile state officials that they were cruel and
unfair. Grossman threw in a general indictment of
Mississippi itself, touching on Jim Crow laws, lynchings
and legal lynchings, and the state's racist
congressional delegation. He said it was "no accident"
that the McGee case happened in the home state of a man
like Representative John Rankin, whose ideas were
"totally false."

Wright bristled. "I assume that your group came in good
faith to present reasons why I should stay the execution
of Willie McGee," he said. "You have criticized
everything, including the administration of justice in
the state of Mississippi. I'm not going to have any more
criticisms of our courts, of our customs. Stick to this
case!"

It went like that with speaker after speaker. Frank
Stoll, the veteran from Wisconsin, said he didn't know
all the facts but asked that the state allow a new trial
anyway, one "where there isn't a mob yelling outside."

Ordower also admitted he hadn't read the transcript, but
said that basic knowledge of the trial was enough to
show any thinking person that the evidence was
inadequate.

McGehee peppered him with questions about the trial,
touching on fine-point details like the break-in method
used by the rapist and the location of the parked
grocery truck. Ordower replied that everything
introduced by the prosecution was "very circumstantial
evidence." He happened to be right, unless you counted
the confession, which McGehee did count. He reminded
Ordower that it was, after all, his court that had
recognized the confession's legitimacy. Did Ordower not
understand that it was judges who decide whether a
confession was free and voluntary?

During her turn, Weltfish tried an anthropological
argument, which came off as condescending. She told
Wright and McGehee that their "customs and background"
made it impossible for them to look rationally at a rape
case involving a black man and a white woman. "Your
stresses and anxieties don't permit for objectivity,"
she said.

"It is your opinion that there should be no death
penalty for rape?" Wright asked.

Weltfish answered with a question. "Do you know how many
places in the world rape is punished by death?"

"I don't, but I'm not interested," Wright said. "I'm
interested only in Mississippi law."

"Has a white man ever been condemned to death for rape
in this state?"

"I don't know. But it wouldn't make any difference."

Wright also attacked Rosalee McGee's trustworthiness.
During his heated exchanges with Feise, he made it clear
that he knew Rosalee wasn't Willie's first spouse. He
referred to the Compass stories as "a pack of lies
written by Willie McGee's so-called wife." "Is she not
Willie McGee's wife?" Feise said.

"I don't know which one she is," Wright countered.

Feise got some licks in too, shocking the audience with
the audacity of her questions. "It was obvious
throughout that Mrs. Feise . . . disturbed Gov. Wright
and his supporters most deeply," Fischer wrote in the
Compass. While some women "turned their heads or hid
their faces in handkerchiefs," Feise said she'd given
the entire controversy deep consideration-from a woman's
perspective. Though she was thin herself, it was her
belief that Mrs. Hawkins should have, and could have,
fought off the rapist.

"Could I allow myself to be raped in bed with one of my
children by my side?" she asked. "Just lie there and let
myself be raped? If so, it would mean that I permitted
it." After the gasps died down, Feise scandalized the
crowd again with questions about such topics as Mrs.
Hawkins's menstrual period.

When the time came for a final appeal, Grossman
collected his thoughts and asked Wright to issue a stay.
"I'm saying to you, Governor, unless you have some
interest in putting McGee to death immediately, what
human hurt can be done to delay it, so people throughout
the world will never say you refused to grant a stay
when McGee's attorneys assure you they have new evidence
to present? I ask only for a stay so the evidence can be
presented and the issue proved."

No chance. "The meeting is adjourned," Wright said. Then
he got up and left.

As the gathering dispersed, Fischer heard ominous sounds
from a spectator: "I never did believe I would see a
thing like this in all my life, arguing and shaking
fingers at the governor in public." The meeting, he
wrote, ended in "an angry and tense atmosphere."

The tensions boiled over quickly. The FBI report said
that about one hundred people, upset by what they'd just
witnessed, followed some of the CRC delegates back to
the Heidelberg. Later in the afternoon, a few unnamed
CRC delegates were walking through the hotel lobby when
an "aged Jacksonian" decided he couldn't take it
anymore. He ran up and swatted them with a newspaper.

That was harmless, but by the end of the day on the
26th, three separate episodes of real violence had taken
place. One of them, an attack against Aubrey Grossman
inside his room at the Heidelberg, could have ended with
serious injury or death.

The journalists in town reported these events in tune
with their newspapers' tones and political stances.
Popham discreetly placed details of the attacks in the
bottom half of a Times story. The Jackson Daily News
thought it was all very cute: "Willie McGee Defenders
`Mussed Up' In Three Fist Fight Disturbances," a typical
headline said. And both the Daily Worker and the Compass
made it sound as if severed human heads were bouncing
off the pavement.

"Jackson streets began to look like violent wards of a
madhouse," wrote Harry Raymond, who, understandably,
felt threatened by the presence of roving group of anti-
Communist vigilantes. Raymond was staying at the Robert
E. Lee. Late in the afternoon of the 25th, he wrote, a
friend called and "suggested I get out of my hotel room.
He said: `They are coming up to get you.'

"My friend, a local white man, said he heard a group
talking about getting the Daily Worker man. He insisted
I go with him and stay the night under his roof, leaving
my bag and typewriter in the hotel.

"Today I feel deeply indebted to this fine Mississippi
citizen."

Raymond's counterpart at the Compass, Stephen Fischer,
wasn't as lucky. He and a group that included Winifred
Feise and Sidney Ordower, were at the Illinois Central
station around 8:30 p.m. on the 25th, waiting to put the
New Orleans women on a southbound train, when they were
surrounded by what Fischer described as a band of twenty
men, some holding wrenches.

"The train was announced and we filed out and walked up
to the platform," Fischer wrote the next day from New
Orleans. "As we did, the men closed in, some shouting
obscenities, others walking with determined silence.
Some were drunk. Some were only 20 years old. Others
were about 60. One threw a lighted cigarette which hit
me on the cheek. . . .

"About 20 of the crowd ringed me, forced me down the
platform and closed in with blows and kicks. I blocked
some, but not all. My greatest fear was being tossed
under the train or forced off the platform."

The women and Ordower were left unharmed. A few minutes
into the attack, a policeman showed up, the men
scattered, and Fischer and the women got on the train.
Fischer was so shaken up that he took his Compass
credentials and "flushed them to the tracks." He had no
doubt that the Compass series, along with the various
editorial incitements in Jackson newspapers, had gotten
him singled out for the beating.

Ordower was attacked later that night at the municipal
airport, three miles northwest of the city center. He
went there with John Poole, who'd been in New Orleans
working on a plea to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals,
which failed. Ordower was heading back to Chicago;
Poole was on his way to Washington to help with the
final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

They traveled by cab from the Heidelberg, and they were
met at the airport by what the Jackson Daily News
described as "eight to ten men dressed in white sport
shirts." Ordower was pulled out of the car, beaten, and
kicked, and Poole ducked a couple of punches. The police
weren't around to stop the assault, but the attackers
voluntarily took off after landing a few blows.

Both incidents gave off a similar feel: they were well-
organized, and the violence was limited by the attackers
themselves. Whoever was behind them knew when and where
to find the CRC delegates. According to the FBI report,
Grossman believed that Jackson police were tipping
attackers off about their movements. After midnight on
the 26th, Ordower called the U.S. Attorney's office in
Jackson to register a complaint along similar lines.
Grossman followed up and demanded federal action and
arrests. Nothing came of any of it.

Grossman's turn came on Wednesday. He was still at the
Heidelberg, where his day began with a 9 a.m. visit from
an official delegation that included Governor Wright,
the Jackson chief of police, and the chief of the state
highway patrol. Wright strongly suggested that Grossman
get out of town. Grossman told Wright he had legal
business to attend to and demanded law-enforcement
protection while he did his job.

He didn't get any help, and everything changed in a
flash that afternoon. In Washington, Justice Harold
Burton had spent the morning reading written arguments
filed by McGee's attorneys and by the State of
Mississippi. Abzug and Poole presented oral arguments in
Burton's chambers starting around noon, opposed by R. O.
Arrington, Mississippi's assistant attorney general.
Poole argued that the recent violence in Jackson, and
the intimidation he received in Laurel, were proof
enough that a new trial was needed.

"[Poole] spoke with emotion as he related, again and
again, how tense feelings in Mississippi [are], and how
it has grown worse in recent weeks after incitement by
the Jackson Daily News," wrote the Compass's Katherine
Gillman. Abzug went next, arguing again that the defense
had new evidence. When presented at a new trial, it
would prove that the prosecution had purposely lied
about the facts of the case.

Burton listened quietly, taking notes on a legal pad in
a precise, tiny script. These show that Abzug and Poole
revealed a little more about their new information than
they'd done in Mississippi. "[Petitioner] . . . claims
newly discovered evidence that McGee had previously had
relations with the prosecutrix and is not guilty,"
Burton wrote.

He made the call at 1:05 p.m., Eastern time. "No
criticism of the courts of Mississippi [is] intended by
the decision I am about to make," he said. "But the ends
of justice shall best be served by granting a stay of
execution until the request for a writ certiorari is
disposed of by this court."

A telegram went out to Mississippi Attorney General John
Kyle within minutes. In short order, news of the stay
made its way around Jackson. Rosalee McGee was with
Percy Greene when she heard. She and a couple of CRC
people, both white, walked to a cafÃ© and made a phone
call to Laurel- probably to Bessie McGee. Later, a
policeman came in and warned them that they shouldn't be
sitting at the same restaurant table.

That afternoon, Grossman was in his room when he heard a
knock on the door. Whoever it was said "Western Union,"
and he bought it, opening the door to yet another
traveling beatdown. "[E]ight men pushed in and
immediately started attacking me," he told reporters
later. "All but the well-dressed leader were swinging
black-jacks-police blackjacks." He said he was roughed
up for ten minutes ("I was a bloody mess- bleeding from
a half dozen cuts on my head") when the men stopped of
their own accord and left.

Who did it? The Jackson papers were in a mood to
applaud, not investigate, and the left-wing papers
couldn't do anything but howl from afar. The most
detailed information shows up in the FBI report. Whoever
compiled it-the agent just calls himself "this writer"-
was either personally present for, or had sources at,
all the major events that week. He and his associates
gathered newsworthy material that was never published
anywhere.

The agent attended the coram nobis hearing before the
Mississippi Supreme Court, summarized the clemency
hearing in the capitol building, and reported on the
attacks at the train station and airport. When news
broke about the stay, he was moving around on the
streets downtown and inside the Heidelberg lobby. There,
he saw unmistakable signs of trouble-and he named names,
but they remain blacked out.

"Throughout the morning and early afternoon . . . [I]
observed --, the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Jackson,
Mississippi, accompanied by two or three men, in and out
of the Heidelberg Hotel. -- had also been observed by
the writer and -- at both the Supreme Court hearing . .
. and the Governor's hearing. . . .

"At approximately 2:00 p.m. on July 26, 1950," he went
on, "the writer observed two men, both of whom were
strangers, go up to the Desk Clerk at the Heidelberg
Hotel and ask if AUBREY GROSSMAN were registered at the
hotel. When told that he was, the men inquired as to his
room number, which they wrote down on a slip of paper,
and immediately left."

This agent had a hands-off attitude about the CRC
delegation: his only job was to monitor the activity of
suspected Communists. Still, his attitude at this moment
seems awfully cold-blooded. For all he knew, he'd just
witnessed the first step in a murder plot. But he chose
to believe what he'd been told by an informant on the
25th: the attacks were "movie" fights that were probably
"staged by the CRC delegates themselves for propaganda
purposes."

The agent was at a downtown post office when he heard,
at 3:55 p.m., that a woman staying in a room near
Grossman's had called the police to report a
disturbance. When detectives arrived, they found
Grossman staggering around in the hall, "very bloody,
waving a table lamp in his hand." Before long, the hotel
physician looked him over, after which he was taken by
ambulance to the Baptist Hospital, where he was x-rayed
and treated. Cuts over his left eye and on the right
side of his head were patched up.

The FBI agent still seemed to think it was a put-on,
that Grossman had smeared blood on his face to hype his
injuries. But the report indicates otherwise. As
Grossman tried to defend himself, he backed into the
bathroom for what, as far as he knew, might be his last
stand. The agent was told that "there were handprints in
blood on the wall" and that the bathroom "was smeared up
very much with blood spots on the walls, bathroom
fixtures, etc."

As the agent reported, there was one other outbreak of
violence that week. Around midnight on Wednesday, a gun
battle broke out that involved an attack by Klansmen on
a white citizen of Jackson. It happened several miles
north of town on a rural route called Pocahontas Road.
Neither the local papers nor the FBI figured out who was
behind it. The agent's best guess was that the attacks
on the CRC delegates spilled over into late-night
celebrations, drinking, and a need to find somebody else
to rough up.

Leonard R. Walters, a truck driver for a concrete
company, told police that, right around midnight, he
heard a racket in his front yard-"It sounded like a war
out there"-and he looked out through a screen door to
see hooded men setting up a cross. They were firing
pistols and calling his name, so he yelled back, asking
what they wanted. They wanted him to go for a ride. He
refused. Suddenly, his neighbor, a carpenter named O. L.
Bradley, came charging out of his house, letting the
intruders have it with a pump shotgun.

"The outlaws fled through a cornfield," the Jackson
Daily News reported, "and Bradley then got an old
Japanese rifle he had in the house and continued to fire
at the fleeing bed- sheeted group."

Bradley felt sure he'd hit somebody. He told law-
enforcement officials that he saw one man go down before
running off. Later, a mechanic named R. L. Sheppard
showed up at a Jackson hospital with pellets in his left
eye, left hand, forehead, and face. He denied knowing
who shot him or why. A car was shot up, too.

It seemed likely that Tom Flowers, the rival of Lycurgus
Spinks for control of the local Klan, had something to
do with all this, since he was a more effective leader
than Spinks. But he assured the Jackson Daily News that
this was probably the work of an outlaw Klan faction, or
of outright imposters. "We don't do business that way,"
he said.