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

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.

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

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

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 writt

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.