Willie McGee’s story wouldn’t have been very unusual were it but for a few factors. After all, he was black, and it was Mississippi, and it was 1945, and he was accused – then quickly convicted – of raping a white woman. There were allegations of an affair, with the woman pointing the finger in the courtroom suspected of actually being McGee’s lover…yes, yes, it sounds lots like the plot for To Kill A Mockingbird, doesn’t it? Typically he would’ve waited a short while, been executed, and then lost amongst the many many many other similar sad cases of his day.
But! Here are some curveballs about Willie McGee’s story that have led to The Eyes of Willie McGee: well, first of all, a lawyer from New York was hired for him by the Civil Rights Congress and so he got loads of attention. His case was actually pleaded – and Americans like William Faulkner and Norman Mailer began speaking out about it. This was the budding (if that) Civil Rights movement, though, and despite going all the way to the Supreme Court and being investigated by the FBI, Willie McGee still faced the death sentence. He was executed in Mississippi’s ‘Travelling Electric Chair” in 1951. It was – another curveball – recorded by a 20-year-old college student named Jim Leeson, who wasn’t at the execution but rather recorded it off of the radio. Leeson was later a professor at Vanderbilt, and played the recording for some of his students – among them Alex Heard. Twenty-five years later, Heard began investigating a bit more into McGee’s story, found out nobody had ever spent too much time investigating it, and began working on what is now his book. It’s a fascinating story, unusual but familiar in so many sad ways. NPR did a feature on McGee’s story recently – read about it here.
Susie
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