The Eyes of Willie McGee
A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South
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Narrated by:
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J.D. Jackson
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By:
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Alex Heard
About this listen
A gripping saga of race and retribution in the Deep South and a story whose haunting details echo the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird.
In 1945, Willie McGee, a young African-American man from Laurel, Mississippi, 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 Daily Worker. 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 spoke out on McGee's behalf.
By the time the case ended in 1951 with McGee's public execution in Mississippi's infamous traveling electric chair, "Free Willie McGee" had become a rallying cry among civil-rights activists, progressives, leftists, and Communist Party members. Their movement had succeeded in convincing millions of people worldwide that McGee had been framed and that the real story involved a consensual love affair between him and Mrs. Hawkins—one that she had instigated and controlled. As Heard discovered, this controversial theory is a doorway to a tangle of secrets that spawned a legacy of confusion, misinformation, and pain that still resonates today.
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Story
On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, was bombed, killing four young girls. Who were the perpetrators? Due to reluctant witnesses and racial prejudice, the FBI closed the case without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bending Toward Justice is a detailed account of this key moment in our national struggle for equality and the long road to prosecuting those responsible for the tragedy, related by an author who played a major role in the investigation.
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Great piece of History
- By rita on 03-08-19
By: Doug Jones, and others
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Anatomy of Injustice
- A Murder Case Gone Wrong
- By: Raymond Bonner
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case.
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A miscarriage of justice if I've ever seen it
- By Education is KEY on 10-11-17
By: Raymond Bonner
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At the Dark End of the Street
- Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
- By: Danielle L. McGuire
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
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Difficult topic, trigger warnings apply
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-22
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Little Shoes
- The Sensational Depression-Era Murders That Became My Family's Secret
- By: Pamela Everett
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1937, a California crime stunned an already grim nation. Three little girls were lured away from a neighborhood park to unthinkable deaths. After a frantic week-long manhunt for the killer, a suspect emerged. Justice was swift, and the condemned man was buried away with the horrifying story. But decades later, Pamela Everett, a lawyer and former journalist, starts digging, following up a cryptic comment her father once made about losing two of his sisters. Everett unearths a truly historic legal case that included the genesis of modern sex offender laws and the last man sentenced to hang in California.
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Masterful presentation of secrets and crime case!
- By deb on 05-31-18
By: Pamela Everett
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A Death in Belmont
- By: Sebastian Junger
- Narrated by: Kevin Conway
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1963, with the city of Boston already terrified by a series of savage crimes known as the Boston Stranglings, a murder occurred in Belmont, just a few blocks from the house of Sebastian Junger's family, a murder that seemed to fit exactly the pattern of the Strangler. Roy Smith, a black man who had cleaned the victim's house that day, was convicted, but the terror of the Strangler continued.
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Excellent
- By Susanna on 01-13-15
By: Sebastian Junger
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Good Kids, Bad City
- A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America
- By: Kyle Swenson
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1970s, three African American men - Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Rickey Jackson - were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. Almost four decades later, the men were exonerated. But while their exoneration may have ended one of American history’s most disgraceful miscarriages of justice, the corruption and decay of the city responsible for their imprisonment remain on trial.
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Life is not fair, but the hearts of these men!
- By Maureen Delaney on 03-24-19
By: Kyle Swenson
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Hate Crime
- The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas
- By: Joyce King
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within 24 hours of the discovery of the murder, would be inextricably linked in the nation's imagination to an exceptionally brutal, modern-day lynching. In this superbly written examination of the murder and its aftermath, award-winning journalist Joyce King brings us on a journey that begins at the crime scene.
By: Joyce King
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Conviction
- The Murder Trial That Powered Thurgood Marshall's Fight for Civil Rights
- By: Denver Nicks, John Nicks
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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On New Year's Eve, 1939, a horrific triple murder occurred in rural Oklahoma. Within a matter of days, investigators identified several suspects: convicts who had been at a craps game with one of the victims the night before. Also at the craps game was a young black farmer named W. D. Lyons. Political pressure mounted to find a villain. The governor's representative settled on Lyons, who was arrested, tortured into signing a confession, and tried for the murder. The NAACP's new Legal Defense and Education Fund sent its young chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, to take part in the trial.
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What a piece of history 💕
- By Private on 01-12-21
By: Denver Nicks, and others
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Buried in the Bitter Waters
- The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
- By: Elliot Jaspin
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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"Leave now, or die!" From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Texas frontier, words like these have echoed through more than a century of American history. The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster: a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation.
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a compelling read with a disappointing conclusion
- By Gregory on 12-16-07
By: Elliot Jaspin
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The Savage City
- By: T. J. English
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Abridged
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In the early 1960s, uncertainty and menace gripped New York, crystallizing in a poisonous divide between a deeply corrupt, cynical, and racist police force, and an African American community buffeted by economic distress, brutality, and narcotics. On August 28, 1963 - the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. Dubbed the Career Girls Murders case, the crime sent ripples of fear throughout the city, as police scrambled fruitlessly for months to find the killer.
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I Highly Recommend This Book!
- By R on 05-15-13
By: T. J. English
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Helter Skelter
- The True Story of the Manson Murders
- By: Vincent Bugliosi, Curt Gentry
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 26 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial Vincent Bugliosi held a unique insider's position in one of the most baffling and horrifying cases of the 20th century: the cold-blooded Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by Charles Manson and four of his followers. What motivated Manson in his seemingly mindless selection of victims, and what was his hold over the young women who obeyed his orders? Now available for the first time in unabridged audio, the gripping story of this famous and haunting crime is brought to life by acclaimed narrator Scott Brick.
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Everything I remembered about the case was wrong..
- By karen on 06-22-12
By: Vincent Bugliosi, and others
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Race Against Time
- By: Jerry Mitchell
- Narrated by: Jerry Mitchell
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In Race Against Time, Mitchell takes listeners on the twisting, pulse-racing road that led to the reopening of four of the most infamous killings from the days of the Civil Rights Movement, decades after the fact. His work played a central role in bringing killers to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers, the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer, the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, and the Mississippi Burning case. Mitchell reveals how he unearthed secret documents and found long-lost suspects and witnesses, building up evidence strong enough to take on the Klan.
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Absolutely horrible reading
- By Grace O'Malley on 03-14-20
By: Jerry Mitchell
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Killing the Dream
- James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- By: Gerald Posner
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the three decades since April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis, scores of books and articles have questioned whether James Earl Ray, King's killer, acted alone or was part of a larger conspiracy. Now, based on explosive new interviews, confidential files, and previously undisclosed evidence, best-selling author Gerald Posner finally resolves the simple truth of the last great political murder mystery of the 1960s, definitively proving that Ray acted alone.
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Enlightening
- By Thornton Mellon on 05-19-19
By: Gerald Posner
What listeners say about The Eyes of Willie McGee
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Packman 334
- 04-05-15
How Far Have We Come
Having grown up in the south during the 1950s and 1960s, I must admit that I had not heard this story. We are still needlessly killing African-American men, but now by the gun in the hands of policemen.
We may never know the complete truth but, Alex Heard's outstanding research gives us insight into a very dark, brutal, and lawless time. If you are the father of a African-American son, or daughter for that matter, it's your duty to make them aware of the hidden history of this "great" nation.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Life
- 11-19-20
Saddening! Same thing going on today just in a different way!
Haunting; I had never heard of Willie McGee now I have. Over come with sadness and in the past several years it has felt like we are going backwards from where we should have come so far. Saddening as the story is black people are still being murdered even if they committed no crime. The legal system is still broken and attempts at genocide are still on going into today’s USA. Even more saddening and shameful in 2020
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1 person found this helpful
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- TM
- 06-15-24
Deep history
Such a thorough history and devastating story. It cleared up why many of my family refuse to go back to MS. I enjoyed hearing the multiple perspectives. This story could've really been told with from a single sided view.
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- Julie
- 04-08-16
Excellent
Loved the story and history. Sad but true unbiased account of southern justice. This audio had me looking up the other cases mentioned and finding other books related. 5 stars all the way!
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1 person found this helpful