Fire Talk

A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South Alex is the author of The Eyes of Willie McGee.  The story is about Willie McGee, a young African-American man from Laurel, Mississippi, who in 1945 was "sentenced to death for allegedly raping Willette Hawkins, a white housewife. At first, McGee's case was barely noticed, covered only in hostile Mississippi newspapers and far-left publications such as the DailyWorker. Then Bella Abzug, a young, New York labor lawyer was hired by the Civil Rights Congress--an aggressive civil rights organization with ties to the Communist Party of the United States--to oversee McGee's defense. Together with William Patterson, the son of a slave and a devout believer in the need for revolutionary change, Abzug and a group of white Mississippi lawyers risked their lives to plead McGee's case. After years of court battles, McGee's supporters flooded President Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Supreme Court with clemency pleas, and famous Americans--including William Faulkner,