Willie McGee (convict)

Willie McGee (died May 8, 1951) was a married African American man from Laurel, Mississippi, who was sentenced to death in 1945 for the rape of Willette Hawkins, a white housewife in town. McGee's legal case became a cause célèbre. The Civil Rights Congress handled McGee's defense and appeals; he had two new trials and stays of execution.

Willie McGee was born in Laurel, Mississippi, and attended local, segregated schools for a short time before starting to work as a youth. He married Eliza Jane Patton, April 15, 1935. McGee had four children with Patton: Willie Earl, Della, Gracie Lee and Mary. During the trial a woman named Rosalee McGee claimed she was the mother of the children and McGee's wife. She only appeared after the charges were filed and the date of the alleged marriage would have occurred while McGee and Patton were still married.

One writer, author Alexander S. Heard, believes he solved the mystery of Rosalee while researching the book The Eyes of Willie McGee. Heard states: "So who was Rosalee? I was able to figure out what her real name was (Rosetta Saffold), where she came from (the area around Lexington, Miss., which is far from Laurel, where Willie McGee lived), and that she moved to New York after the case ended and kept an affiliation with the Civil Rights Congress, the Communist-backed group that paid for McGee’s defense. I think she met him in the late 1940s, through the bars of his jail cell in Jackson, Miss.—while visiting a cousin of hers who was on death row in the same jail. I also think she legitimately cared about him, and grew to care about the civil-rights and civil-liberties causes pushed by the CRC".

In 1945 McGee was arrested for the alleged rape of Willette Hawkins, a 32-year-old white housewife in town.

As was typically the case, he was quickly tried, within a month. He was convicted by an all-white jury after less than three minutes of deliberation, and sentenced to death for the rape. A disproportionate number of black men were executed in the state for rape; no white men had been executed for raping black women. McGee contended that he was innocent, and that he had been beaten during questioning by police.

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