Customer Reviews

The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Everytime I read a book like "The Execution of Willie Francis" I wonder aloud why I had never come across anything about this incident before. American history is replete with long forgotten and fascinating tales like this one and author Gilbert King has come up with a real winner here. "The Execution of Willie Francis" is a riveting book that paints a vivid portrait of life in the Louisiana bayou in the 1940's. And for the most part the picture is not a very pretty one.

Willie Francis was just 16 years old when he was charged with the murder of popular St. Martinville druggist Andrew Thomas. Willie did not deny that he had killed Thomas. The preponderance of evidence would seem to confirm it. But were there extenuating circumstances here? Willie had worked for Andrew Thomas at the drugstore doing odd jobs. In his written confession Willie Francis makes an extremely curious statement recalling that "it was a secret about him and me." Yet at his trial, which most objective observers would consider to be an absolute travesty of justice, his court appointed attorneys failed to mount any sort of defense at all on behalf of their client. Young Willie Francis was sentenced to die in the electric chair. On May 3, 1946 Willie Francis was strapped into the portable electric chair known as Gruesome Gertie and the switch was thrown. Remarkably, Willie Francis did not die! The execution had been badly botched and Willie Francis would live to see another day. At this point a young Cajun attorney named Bertrand LeBlanc would get involved in this case. LeBlanc's ancestors had been heavily involved in the white supremacy movement in Louisiana but young Bertrand rejected this way of thinking. Like so many other young men who had served alongside Negroes in World War II the war had changed his thinking on the subject of race. Much like Aticus Finch in Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "To Kill A Mockingbird", Bertrand LeBlanc would incur the wrath of his community to defend this young black man. Over the next year this story would take numerous twists and turns as the state of Louisiana sought to return Willie Francis to the chair a second time. In fact, Bertrand LeBlanc would succeed in taking this case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and the fate of Willie Francis would become a national story.

While Gilbert King certainly does a workmanlike job of presenting the facts surrounding the trial and subsequent execution of Willie Francis "The Execution of Willie Francis" turns out to be about so much more. This book examines the sad state of race relations in the South during this period. At the same time King presents in clear and concise language the complex legal issues that surrounded this most unusual situation. Finally, readers catch a somewhat unflattering glimpse of how the U.S. Supreme Court handled this particular case. I must tell you that "The Execution of Willie Francis" had this reader mesmorized throughout. I simply could not put this one down. It is a story that you will never forget. Very highly recommended!

This is a well-written account of a crime committed in the forties by a young black man against a white man. It takes the reader into the unfair conditions of race in the forties. One feels a bit uncomfortable with the truth of it.

The death penalty is at the center. It's always been hard to know if the death penalty is fair or not. It's easy to see the reason on both sides. At any rate, this book offers a look into a story in history that most of us haven't known about and it's well worth the read.

Highly recommended.

-Susanna K. Hutcheson

Willie Francis was a sixteen-year-old black boy with a third grade education who was convicted of the murder of a white man in St. Martinsville, Louisiana in 1946. After being strapped into the electric chair--dubbed "Gruesome Gertie" by prisoners--a strange thing happened. Although cranked up to its full voltage, the switch thrown, and his body twitching horribly, Willie Francis did not die.

Many people believed that God had intervened to save Willie Francis's life and that therefore he should not be electrocuted a second time. A local white attorney named Bertrand DeBlanc believed that to put Francis in the electric chair a second time would constitute cruel and unusual punishment and place him in double jeopardy. So, against the wishes of most of the Cajun parish in which he lived, and at some considerable danger to his life and career, DeBlanc took the case and tried to save Francis's life.

Gilbert King makes it clear that it was highly unlikely that Willie Francis could have committed this crime, even if he had wanted to, and further that his appointed defense lawyers presented no defense at all to the charges. King shows how the "confession" was probably coerced from Willie Francis by Sheriff Gilbert Ozenne and his colleagues who had spent a considerable part of their lives terrifying and brutalizing black people and others who would stick up for them. As has been documented in innumerable books, people like Ozenne and his sidekick Gus "Killer" Walker believed that their job was to "keep the nigras down" by whatever means, and especially to deny them their civil rights, in particular the right to vote.

The larger horrific drama, of which the Willie Francis case is just one sorry example, played prominently throughout the South after the Civil War (and continues in more muted tones today), but was most obvious in places like St. Martinsville where people were mostly poor and uneducated. The savage brutality was first of all a way of effectively maintaining something close to slavery, and second a revenge upon the North for winning the war and attempting to deprive the South of its cheap source of labor. In another sense this sordid record of murder and something close to genocide or ethnic cleansing (before such terms were much used), stemmed from an attempt by beaten southern white males, in most particular the semi-educated and ignorant ones, to reestablish their deluded notion of manhood.

But this is also a chapter in the story of how gradually the South changed; how Afro-Americans with incredible patience and Sisyphean labors over many decades, while suffering enormous pain and loss of life, managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve something close to equality with whites. It is a story of great courage and determination.

Gilbert King's account is a vivid and compelling chapter in this uniquely American tale. The book is meticulously researched, amply documented with numerous endnotes, beautifully written, and powerfully engaged. In short, The Execution of Willie Francis is a outstanding work of journalism and a much welcome addition to an important literature. We have to face what we have done so that it might be a bit more difficult for others to do the same; and there, by increments, we might become more human.

King beautifully and skillfully transports the reader back to 1940s Louisiana. A wonderful read no matter one's feelings about the death penalty.

I wasn't sure what to think when I picked up this book, but I'm glad I did. The author quickly pulls you in, and before you realize it, you're deep into a small town mystery where the characters are as complex and haunting as the cursed town of St. Martinsville, Louisiana. At the heart of the story is Willie Francis, who is a Jesus-like figure who has accepted his death at the hands of the state, and who speaks so wisely for a child of his age. He doesn't seem capable of murder, but the author doesn't make that case. He simply presents the facts and allows readers to make up their own minds. I couldn't put this book down, and the ending was ultimately satisfying in a very strange way. Great, great story.

This is simply a great book. Gilbert King's gripping account of injustice, racial prejudice, and the brutality of capital punishment is at times poignant, at times harrowing, but always sure-footed in holding the reader's interest and propelling a tightly constructed narrative such as movies are made of. Indeed the cast of characters to be found here, from the tragic Francis--railroaded by the law--to his fearless Louisiana attorney, Betrand DeBlanc, who risks his standing in the Cajun community by working so zealously on Willie's behalf, make one think immediately in cinematic terms. A profound, powerful, magnificent book. Highly recommended.

Willie Francis, a young black man, was accused of murder. He survived his first trip to the electric chair, only to lose all efforts to avoid a second, successful execution. Willie always demonstrated his willingness to pay for his crime and the white attorney who fought for his life believed he committed the murder.

That was unique and historical enough to grab me in for a read but this is also an unvarnished look at the Louisiana south around 1940. In Gilbert's hands the story transcends the essential facts and elements. It includes racism, prejudice, poverty, murder and a search for justice.

Gilbert tells the story objectively and with restrained passion. He is fair to the emotions and humanity on all sides of this story and finds heroism and integrity as often as he uncovers mystery, deception, brutality and insensitivity. The result is both a tragic and heartwarming story.

It is also a valuable period piece because of the detail and objectivity with which Gilbert treats the local community and the south. The book has a nice pace and is extremely interesting. I really liked it.

I had never heard of the Willie Francis Story before, but after reading this book I will never forget it. Taking up a difficult, emotionally charged subject, Gilbert King adopts a tone that is at once dispassionate and relentless, exposing the injustice done to Willie Francis, a black teenager, convicted on thin and seemingly trumped up evidence of the murder of a white man in Louisiana in the forties. King pulls no punches describing the intense racism of that time and place, but always backs up his assertions with hard facts and telling details. When Willie miraculously survives his first, botched execution by electric chair, and yet is sent back to death row, the almost saintly figure of Bertrand DeBlanc, whom King brings vividly to life on the page, emerges to champion Willie's cause at the risk of his own reputation in the local community. The drama of DeBlanc's legal efforts and the poignancy of Willie's doomed situation make this a profound and memorable book.

A thoughtfully written and important milestone of horror surrounding capital punishment. Gilbert King is a brilliant writer, this work should be required reading in every high school.

This book is a fascinating glimpse into the moral and social culture of a small town in Louisiana in the late 1940s. Other reviewers have nicely outlined the narrative storyline--and it is both suspenseful and heartbreaking.

The thing that stood out most to me was that, in the battle involving racism and homophobia, it is homophobia that still dare not speak its name. At the end of the book we discover that there may have been an ambiguous sexual relationship between the murderer, Willie Francis, and the murdered, a closeted homosexual druggist named Andrew Thomas.

Francis alluded to a "secret between him and me" that he refused to elaborate on. Interviews with several people broadly hint that the secret may have been a homosexual relationship. But even Francis's strongest legal defender can't bring himself to articulate the homosexual undercurrent of the murder.

The racism of this time and place is accurately brought forth in the narrative, but the question of a homosexual relationship is avoided like the plague by everyone in the town interviewed for the book. The author tries to get to the bottom of the issue, but his interviews show that, in 1946, or even today when remembering 1946, no one would ever bring up the issue of homosexuality, even though it was clear that many of them remembered the unabashed racism of the time and were willing to recall the most blatant of racist comments.

This book reads like suspenseful fiction and is hard to put down. It also tells part of an ongoing story about racial justice and openness about the reality of homosexuality, even in tiny Southern communities. The open question is, have we evolved or improved much as a species in the past 60-some years?