Listen To A Short Clip Of The Archival Tape

In the fall of 1945, in the small town of Laurel, Miss., [Willie] McGee, a young black man, was arrested on charges of raping a white housewife. . . . McGee's case covered six years before his appeals were exhausted. On the night of May 7, 1951, McGee was executed in Mississippi's portable electric chair. The traveling chair was moved from county to county, set up in local courthouses, and connected to generators that supplied the power that drove the chair. After an execution, the chair would be dismantled and brought back to the state capital. The chair is now housed at the Mississippi Law Enforcement Training Academy, where McGee-Robinson found it gathering dust in a corner, surrounded by softball trophies.

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

By John Lewis  and Michael D’Orso

Lewis, an Alabama sharecropper's son, went to Nashville to attend a Baptist college where, at the end of the 1950s, his life and the new civil rights movement became inexorably entwined. First came the lunch counter sit-ins; then the Freedom Rides; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Lewis's election to its chairmanship; the voter registration drives; the 1963 march on Washington; the Birmingham church bombings; the murders during the Freedom Summer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1964; and the march on Montgomery. Lewis was an active, leading member during all of it. Much of his account, written with freelancer D'Orso, covers the same territory as David Halberstam's The Children. Halberstam himself appears here briefly as a young reporter but Lewis imbues it with his own observations as a participant. He is at times so self-effacing in this memoir that he underplays his role in the events he helped create. But he has a sharp eye, and his account of Selma and the march that followed is vivid and personal. He describes the rivalries within the movement as well as the enemies outside.