Rosalee McGee, a diminutive 28-year-old woman who looked much older, had never before been out of Mississippi. On the first lap of her plane journey from Jackson to New York, many hours in those pre-jet days, she had forgotten to bring the lunch that neighbours had packed for her, and arrived famished. Stewardesses had solicitously offered meals which she refused, having no idea they were free.

From her account of life in Laurel, and the genesis of the rape charge against her husband, one began to see the macabre contours of oppression in the deep South. If McGee were executed, she said, he would be the third man in her family to die violently at the hands of white Mississippi. "I saw my my nephew lynched by six white hoodlums, and my first cousin was put to death in the electric chair."

Mrs. Hawkins, the white accuser, had pursued McGee relentlessly for years, said Mrs. McGee. "People who don't know the South don't know what would have happened to Willie if he told her no. Down South, you tell a woman like that no, and she'll cry rape anyway. So what else could Willie do? That's why I never got angry at Willie."

Eventually, after years of acquiescence to Mrs. Hawkins, McGee did decide to break off the affair. It was at this point that she pressed the rape charge. According to her testimony at the trial, McGee had come into her bedroom in the middle of the night; she did not cry out, she said, for fear of waking her husband and baby who were sleeping in the next room.

The recent Willie McGee case was a striking illustration of the desperate tactics Communists use to gain ground for their cause. They spent at least $100,000 in defense of Willie McGee, a proven rapist, not because they cared anything whatever about the defendant, but they were boldly and impudently seeking to create disrespect for law and order among Negroes throughout the nation, and especially in Southern states. The Communists tell the Negro's plight in all the far corners of the earth. It is their greatest weapon against the Marshall Plan and places us in a false light, especially to the yellow and black races.

To Communists all over the world, the case of Willie McGee had become surefire propaganda, good for whipping up racial tension at home and giving U.S. justice a black eye abroad. Stirred up by the Communist leadership. Communist-liners and manifesto-signers in England, France, China and Russia demanded that Willie be freed. Not only Communists took up the cry. In New York, Albert Einstein signed a newspaper ad protesting a miscarriage of justice. Mrs McGee, a captive of the Communists, addressed party rallies.

There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing. But whatever I am - and this ought to be made very clear at the outset - I am a very serious woman.