James Turner Leeson | Southern journalist, 79
James Turner Leeson Jr., 79, 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.
James Turner Leeson Jr., 79, 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.
Mr. 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 & Funeral Home.
He took his life, according to a friend, Alex Heard.
In 1951, Mr. Leeson made an audiotape of a radio station broadcast reporting the execution of Willie McGee. McGee's trial, after a five-year legal battle in the arly days of the civil rights movement, garnered attention around the world. McGee insisted he was innocent and said at his appeals he was having an affair with the woman and she panicked when her husband found out.
Mr. Leeson would play the tape for his students at Vanderbilt University. Years later one of those students, Heard, used the tape as a reference for a book, The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex and Secrets in the Jim Crow South, to be published by Harper this week.
Mr. 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 also was a Navy veteran. - AP