Race relations journalist James Leeson dies; recording of execution of black man helped book

Race relations journalist Leeson dies in Tenn.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — James Turner Leeson Jr., a Nashville journalist whose recording of a broadcast describing the questionable execution of a black man convicted of raping a white woman in Mississippi led to a book on the subject, has died. He was 79.

Leeson worked for The Associated Press, the Southern Education Reporting Service and its successor, the Race Relations Reporter, during the 1960s and 1970s. He died Monday at his home, according to Crawford Mortuary and Funeral Home.

In 1951, Leeson made an audiotape of a broadcast about the execution of Willie McGee. His trial took place after a five-year legal battle that happened in the very early days of the Civil Rights movement, garnering attention across the U.S. and world. McGee insisted he was innocent and said at his appeals that he was having an affair with the woman and she panicked when her husband found out.

Leeson would sometimes play the tape for some of his students at Vanderbilt.

Years later one of those students, Alex Heard, used the tape as reference for a book, “The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex and Secrets in the Jim Crow South.” It is to be published by Harper next week.

On the tape was a local radio station broadcast that described the atmosphere around the execution. McGee was put to death in a traveling electric chair at a courthouse in Laurel, Miss. A generator that supplied the electricity was set up outside with tubes running to the courthouse. Official spectators were inside and a crowd of somewhere between 500 and 1,500 assembled on the lawn, sidewalks, and streets, according to Heard’s website.

“It’s the only piece of audio that survived. It’s priceless but not the whole story,” Heard said Thursday. Heard said on his blog that he and Leeson stayed close over the years that he was working on the McGee project.

Heard said Leeson committed suicide.

The tape is also mentioned in a radio documentary about the case scheduled to be aired Friday on National Public Radio.

The McGee case drew protests from prominent Americans including Albert Einstein and William Faulkner. One of the defense attorneys was Bella Abzug, who later represented New York in the U.S. House. People referred to the execution as “legalized lynching,” according to Heard’s website.

Leeson also was the consulting journalist for Vanderbilt University student communications — the school newspaper, radio station and arts magazine — for some 10 years. His work there led to his inclusion in new examinations of a racially tinged capital case from the 1950s.

“He was a mentor to many people,” Bill Armistead, a Nashville attorney and close friend, recalled Thursday.

Leeson also had been a longtime broker of farm property in Williamson County.

Leeson was born in North Carolina and raised in southern Mississippi. He was a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy.

Friends said he had worked for The Associated Press around 1960 in Nashville.

Survivors include two nieces. A wake is scheduled at his home on May 13 on what would have been his 80th birthday.