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Author of Book that Includes Story of Millsaps Alumni to Speak in Jackson

Alex Heard

Alex Heard, author of The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South, will speak at noon on June 1 at the Winter F. Winter Archives and History Building at 200 N. State St.

Millsaps student Claire Crawford assisted Heard with research for the book that focuses on Jackson-based lawyers, Dixon Pyles and John Poole, who defended Willie McGee during his three trials in Laurel. The book is a history of the Willie McGee case, which involved an alleged interracial rape that happened in Laurel in late 1945.

Though it was barely noticed outside Mississippi at first, the case became quite famous during the late 1940s and early 1950s and grew into a news story that was covered all over the world, Heard said. By the end, President Harry S. Truman was receiving dozens of letters and telegrams every day, demanding that McGee be pardoned, and people as far away as Europe and Asia were closely following news about the case. After it ended it rapidly faded from collective memory, as the civil rights movement kicked into higher gear in the mid-1950s and other stories replaced it, he said.

Heard called Pyles and Pool "as close as you'll get to real-life versions of Atticus Finch, the defense attorney in To Kill a Mockingbird."

Dixon Pyles attended Millsaps in the 1930s and served in World War II as a combat officer during the invasion of Europe. Having survived all that, he still called the McGee case one of the most frightening experiences of his life, because there was so much hostility in Laurel, Heard said.

John Poole was at Millsaps in the 1940s, and he is probably the most important single lawyer in the case, Heard said. "He was a well-known campus figure during his time there. He was very active, and though he had lost a leg as a teenager during a train-hopping accident, he somehow managed to compete as an amateur boxer in Golden Gloves," he said.

The event is free and a segment of the History is Lunch series. For more information, phone 601-576-6850.