Willie McGee (c. 1916 – May 8, 1951) was an African American man from Laurel, Mississippi, who was sentenced to death in 1945 and executed on Tuesday, May 8, 1951, after being controversially convicted for the rape of a white woman on November 2, 1945.

[1] [2][3] McGee's legal case became a cause célèbre that attracted worldwide attention, as it was roundly decried as a miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow south.

[5][6] On November 3, 1945, McGee was arrested in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on a charge of grand larceny for stealing a truck owned by the Laurel Wholesale Grocery, where he was employed.

[1] On Monday, December 3, 1945, McGee was indicted by the grand jury on a charge of rape, was arraigned in the circuit court, and a plea of not guilty was entered for him by the district attorney.

[1] The prosecution charged that McGee kept the money from a Laurel Wholesale Grocery delivery he made, and used it to buy whiskey.

The next morning, police claimed that employees of the grocery store found McGee asleep in the delivery truck.

[1] Attorney Forrest B. Jackson stated that McGee's constitutional rights were violated during his trial and filed an appeal.

Senator from Mississippi for 42 years) granted the motion and the case was moved to Forrest County (Hattiesburg).

Judge Burkitt Collins again sentenced McGee to death by electric chair, to be carried out on December 20, 1946.

This time it ruled that Jones County's practice of excluding African-American citizens from its grand juries violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

For the first time in Jones County history, African Americans were registered as part of the 18-man grand jury.

However, decades after the trial, one of the prosecutors allegedly boasted that they had changed the roll of grand jurors to falsely include two Black doctors whom they knew would remain silent.

The prosecution played on the racial fears of a southern white jury by appealing to the stereotype of a sexually deviant and rapacious Black man.

[1] After his conviction, McGee was defended by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which mounted a public campaign as well as filing legal appeals of his case.

[2] The son of the prosecutor in the case has stated that McGee told his father that he had consensual sex with Willette Hawkins.

[1] Wright was an ardent white supremacist and segregationist, and these claims of 'Communist Agitation' were commonly used in the Jim Crow South.