Irrepressible (24 page)

Decca had a full, fast, busy life, as characterized by the exclamatories (Rush! Essential! Imperative!) that headed much of her mail. Every day, there were new alerts of leftists under attack, requests for more money needed for defense campaigns, more leaflets to mail, protests to announce, petitions to circulate. She was good at what she did, but she did it all the time and was starting to tire of the routine. It was satisfying to feel competent and useful, but there just wasn’t as much adventure as before. Was it that she was older? She was thirty-three. The party was squarely opposed to adventurism, considering it a manifestation of left-wing infantilism. But left-wing infantilism was the spark that lit her spirit from time to time and gave her joy.

Meanwhile, she wasn’t getting on with the thing she’d hoped to do—write. She rarely found the time to revise what she might scrawl in a rush, although she took care with her personal letters when she could. Even first drafts seemed pretty good to her. Then one day in her mail, she found an imperative to her liking, which would shortly send her off on an adventure and require that she write seriously.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Willie McGee, a black man convicted of raping a white woman, was sentenced to die. Decca had no doubt that McGee’s confession had been forced and his trial unjust and inadequate. When one of Bob’s law partners, Aubrey Grossman, went to Jackson as part of a delegation to support McGee’s appeal, a group of segregationists had attacked Grossman in his hotel room and then harassed him all the way to the hospital (where he had needed sixteen stitches in his head). Grossman carried home firsthand tales of McGee’s case and the brutal mood in Jackson. Mississippi was the new battleground, the center of something magnetic. Decca wanted to be a
frontline soldier again, and this was the moment when motive met opportunity. New evidence had come to light: Williametta Hawkins, the accuser, and McGee had had a consensual affair, which she had not wanted to end.

The imperative that Decca received was a request from the CRC’s national leadership that she assemble a quota of four women to participate in a nationwide delegation of white women to travel to Mississippi. She was ready to take a leave from local politics and family concerns, and she went all out to comply.

Decca and her friends recognized that McGee’s story, like the Scottsboro case (in which nine black teen-agers wrongly accused of raping two white women were unjustly imprisoned) had the potential to move people. With enough support, their campaign could influence policy and result in more civil rights protection nationally. Things were changing. Black soldiers fighting in Korea were rejecting the old status quo and demanding equal rights in the armed forces and back home. More than anything, the McGee case was a human tragedy. Decca spoke to Grossman, read the literature, and wrote leaflets and resolutions, but it was really when she heard McGee’s wife, Rosalee, speak that “the realities of Mississippi began to come alive” for her. The CRC set up speaking engagements for Rosalee across the country. In churches, trade union halls, and private homes, her indignation and eloquence moved her audience. Decca thought she was “one of the bravest people” she’d ever met.

By the spring of 1951, Willie McGee’s attorneys, Bella Abzug of New York and John Coe of Florida, had tried the case three times, and each trial had concluded with a verdict of guilty. While the defense petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, the campaign rested on a national call for clemency. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions asking for justice, for freedom, for mercy—all of which the governor denied. Decca and her friends believed that by visiting Jackson themselves, they might influence local residents to pressure their governor. They had the optimistic, grand idea that by speaking one-on-one to locals, they might change hearts and minds. The trial had been so tainted, the new evidence so clarifying,
that anyone who learned the real facts couldn’t help but join the outcry. At the same time, Decca saw their journey as an opportunity to attack the underlying roots of the maddening system of segregation. They would talk about the dual standard of justice in the courts and, most importantly, “challenge the rape myth that every Negro man is a potential rapist and any act of intercourse between races is rape.” From the contemporaneous reports that Decca filed about her travels to Mississippi, she and her comrades planned to counter this “cornerstone of jim-crow ideology” by relying on another myth: “the sanctity of white womanhood,” which presumed that a respectable white woman was unassailable as long as she played her role and avoided disgrace. The four Communist women intended to disarm their opposition by dressing in distinctly feminine styles (seamed stockings and flowered hats) and acting at first with modesty and discretion.

Even as Hoover’s FBI and other scourges warned the citizenry of reds under beds or demons in the dark, Decca and friends dabbled in the language and imagery of the hero’s journey. There would be challenges and ordeals. The territory was a dangerous one, patrolled by monsters in Klansmen’s sheets. In disguise, Decca and company would stride among an oppressed population terrified by the giants of segregation: Ku Klux Klan dragons and vicious, tabloid trolls. At the time, Decca called Mississippi a “concentration camp of the mind.”

Their quest would take them away from families and friends for about three weeks. Bob was supportive, but some of the other husbands complained, seeing themselves as “the real sacrificers.”

The women’s gallant company included Eve Frieden, whom Decca dubbed “rollicking, jolly” Evie, a voluptuary in contrast to dour, top-rank politico Billie Wachter, whose piety and asceticism made for a female Sir Galahad. Finally, there was Louise Hopson, whom Decca called the “Youth Comrade” and whose quiet character seemed to mark her as the first likely snack for locals.

The four-woman delegation set out with the expectation that the national campaign, as organized, would at minimum provide them basic
information describing the state of the trial and assign them some particular project. Collectively, they had only a rudimentary knowledge of the area, so they would need maps, contacts, and, of course, lodging. But when they reached the campaign’s first gathering point in Saint Louis, they discovered that the four of them “were the whole delegation, the generals and soldiers of this great nationwide call to action.” Decca knew the resources of the CRC were stretched thin across the country, but there were not even leaflets to distribute and no guarantees of protection for anyone.

Decca saw this for the amateur operation it was, but there was something to be said for acting without all the creaky machinery of a big offensive. One could be more flexible and responsive to the situation on the ground, a guerrilla, unless perhaps like Sir Galahad, you had a harder time improvising.

Early on, the fellowship suffered an immediate clash of temperaments. Billie was a local leader and, as such, tried to assert her authority. It seemed she disapproved of gossip, of joking, of incorrect language. Decca thought they might be allowed a little fun; this was a road trip, not a suicide mission. Evie sided with Decca, but “the Youth Comrade said not a word.” In any case, it would have been hard to get a word in edgewise.

The four crusaders rode into hostile terra incognita in the full armor of postwar, Southern ladies: lightweight dresses, hats, gloves, and stockings. None of them knew the city of Jackson. This expedition may have felt to Decca a little like going to Spain without Esmond, but she could rely on the memory of his single-mindedness, watchfulness, and craft in their battle against “Klan doctrine.” As long as they stayed, there was always the threat of real danger, including (as they would later discover) a police department more responsive to the residents’ fear of strangers than the protection of white ladies, no matter how straight their stocking seams.

During the course of eleven days, they would speak to more than 150 people, including ministers, club women, community organizers, and one Nobel Prize winner in literature. They buttonholed teachers at a conference, canvassed door to door, and found somewhat to their surprise that
McGee and his accuser’s consensual affair had been common knowledge, not news at all and unlikely to stimulate a popular revolt. Timid voices told the women from California not to shake things up, that in Jackson, they would pacify the monsters in their own way.

Decca was elected the group’s scribe, which meant that before submitting her reports to the
People’s Daily World
for circulation back home, the group looked them over and offered “collective criticism.” But despite Galahad’s frequent requests for revision, Decca found the discipline of a deadline and word count exciting. She had been for some time sharpening her writing skills on leaflets, press releases, and memos. Her personal letters were wry and understated for the most part, but her memos florid, full of the L-speak (left-wing political rhetoric) she would later satirize to the hilt.

Toward the end of their sojourn and in an effort to claim some material success, Decca and her comrades decided to take their case to the “King of Yoknapatawpha County.” In 1950, William Faulkner was the recent Nobel Prize winner in literature. His position in American intellectual society was nonpareil. After their two-hour chat, during which Faulkner held forth with the women in “murky eloquence,” Decca had quotes galore on sex, violence, and race and even a few sympathetic words about Willie McGee. The next day, she returned just to make sure Faulkner approved his wording. What did he think, this master of solitude and sumptuous language, of Decca’s well-honed press release? He read the newspapers; he’d been in Britain during the war, so he must have known of the Mitfords. He offered her a drink; she sipped while he read casually, pencil in his hand. A comma from a Nobel laureate is worth something, but he wasn’t known for freebies. At their second meeting, Faulkner, either having thought more about it or becoming annoyed by his visitor, said, “McGee and the woman
both
should be destroyed.” “Oh,
don’t
let’s put that in,” Decca said, tucking her notebook away. After that encounter, the sisterhood raced home. She wrote to her mother about the entire experience: “We drove a total of 7700 miles, in my new car. It was the most thrilling experience I ever had.”

Back from the front, Decca continued to organize. She helped plan another tour for Rosalee McGee, this time with American-born, internationally regarded cabaret sensation Josephine Baker. About three weeks before McGee’s scheduled execution, she and others organized a motorcade. This uniquely Californian 1950s mobile protest demonstration included a convoy of about a hundred cars with pennants and banners; the convoy drove around Oakland to the areas where supporters of the campaign lived.

At that time, Decca’s friends the journalist Buddy Green and lawyer Dobby Walker (the former Dobby Brin Marasse, now remarried and using her new husband’s name), were in Mississippi. Buddy wanted to call a demonstration of other black supporters all across the South to march to the governor’s mansion. This visionary project anticipated the march to Selma by fifteen years, but the Communist Party leadership was fearful that Buddy’s plan “would end in a massacre” and withheld their support. (Decca, siding with Buddy, felt herself at odds with the party line.) Early on in the demonstration, something went awry, and Buddy was arrested. Dobby’s delegation was in Jackson at that time to lobby the governor’s clemency board. She and her companions were also arrested, and at their arraignment, they saw Buddy across the segregated courthouse.

Bella Abzug, the future congressional representative from New York, and co-counsel John Coe persuaded the judge to drop charges against the white women if they agreed to leave Jackson by midnight. Dobby and her friends refused to do so unless Buddy and his companions were also released. Once the deal was struck, the women stayed until the Memphis train arrived and Buddy and the others were safely on board. Then Dobby drove back west through Dallas to California. Decca was moved by her friends’ bravery.

On May 8, 1951, Willie McGee was executed. In his last letter to Rosalee, he wrote: “Tell the People the real reason they are going to take my life is to keep the Negro down in the South. They can’t do this if you and the children keep fighting.”

I
N 1951, THE Civil Rights Congress was having a bad year. The Smith Act trials (there were several around the country, including one in Los Angeles) had drained its national treasury. The National CRC under its trustees had raised money to post enormous bonds for all the Smith Act defendants, and its trustees were hauled up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to produce the names of funders and contributors. One of these trustees was the writer Dashiell Hammett, whose refusal to cooperate earned him a five-month jail sentence for contempt at age fifty-seven. Hammett’s prison stint broke his health; he died at the age of sixty-six.

At the end of July, on the day the Los Angeles Smith Act trial defense rested, J. Edgar Hoover released a supersecret intelligence report revealing a Communist Party plot to overtake the government and occupy the country. The Los Angeles press ran the story in massive-font headlines for days. It was, as Dalton Trumbo wrote, “not a good time in which to stand trial for a political belief that had been up-graded to treason.” Back in Oakland, one of Bob’s law partners at the time, Ed Grogan, was at City Hall when he passed two cops perusing the headlines about the revealed secret Communist plot. One cop said to the other, “Do you think Treuhaft really wants to overthrow the government by force and violence?” “Well, no,” was the reply, “but I think he’s trying to get somebody else to do it.”

In Oakland, Decca returned to the routine of family life and her job at the CRC in a time when civil rights were being violated in so many places and ways, it was hard to keep track. Her office was short-staffed, its funds earmarked for national defense campaigns. She’d seen deeds of prowess on the front lines in Mississippi, and if she was in the least bit worried about
when she would feel that thrill again, she hadn’t long to wait. Her own subpoena was about to be delivered, arriving less than one month after McGee’s execution.