Post on 07-Jan-2023
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On March 5, 1945, Lena Baker became the first and only
woman ever to be executed in Georgia’s electric chair.
Baker, a poor black woman from rural South Georgia, received
the death sentence for killing her white employer, who she
claimed, was attempting to hit her with an iron bar. She
also claimed that he had forced a sexual relationship with
her and often kept her locked up in his mill house for days
at a time. The case received scant attention in the media,
and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement had yet to
penetrate rural Georgia. After a four-hour trial, a jury of
twelve white men pronounced Baker guilty and the judge
sentenced her to the electric chair. No witnesses for the
defense were called and the trial never openly addressed the
issues of the forced relationship, domestic violence or
Baker’s plea of self-defense. Because she was poor, black
and rural, and had biased legal representation, Lena Baker
ended up paying the highest price for an act that would not
be a capital crime today.1
Baker was born in rural Randolph County, Georgia on
June 8, 1900 to Mack and Queen Baker.2 She grew up in a
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former slave cabin in a rural area of the county. As was
typical of that time, for blacks and poor whites alike,
Baker’s family lived off of wages from farm work. It was
most likely a meager existence, as a 1909 courthouse record
indicates that Baker’s father was only paid for twelve weeks
of work that year.3 When Baker was sixteen, she moved with
her mother to a house on Morgan Street in Cuthbert,
Randolph’s county seat.4
It was a few years after this move into town that
Baker had her first brush with the law. In 1920, she and a
neighbor, Lizzie Thomas, were convicted of “running a lewd
house.”5 Baker and Thomas were sentenced to ten months of
hard labor on a state farm. Baker apparently served out her
sentence with no incident, then returned to live with her
mother at their house on Morgan Street. Her life continued 1 Associated Press, “Church Buys Marker to Note Executed Woman’s Burial Spot,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 10 Jan. 1999: F9.2 Georgia, Department of Public Health, Certificate of Death: Lena Baker, 6 March1945.3 Lela Bond Phillips, The Lena Baker Story (Atlanta: Wings Publishers, 1998)2-3.4 Phillips, 4-5.5 Bill Torpy, ”40’s Era Trial Stirs Questions on Race, Justice [online],” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 22 June 2003 [cited 23 June 2003] Available from World Wide Web: (http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/0603/22lena.html)
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much in the same vein as other poor, rural blacks at the
time, constantly living with the specter of Jim Crow.
Though blacks made up a majority of the population in
Randolph County, the Randolph County Historical Society
publications The History of Randolph Co. Vols. 1 & 2,
perhaps inadvertently, make it readily apparent that whites
controlled the money, the jobs, the government and the
courts.
Baker and her mother continued to live in the same
house on Morgan Street, but by 1944 Baker had three young
children to support. (The birth certificates of her three
children James Edward, Nelsie and Edna Lee list them as
illegitimate and of an unknown father.)6 Until 1942, their
main source of family income was taking in washing and
sporadic domestic employment. Then, in what probably seemed
like a stroke of luck, Baker was hired to nurse Ernest B.
Knight, a local gristmill owner7 and widower who had
suffered a broken leg. According to her trial testimony,
6 Phillips, 6.7 Georgia, Department of Public Health, Certificate of Death: E. B. Knight, 18 May1944.
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Baker “nursed him like [she] would a baby.” After Knight’s
leg healed, he and Baker continued to see much of one
another, and general consensus around Cuthbert held that
they had a sexual relationship. According to trial
testimony, the police had twice gone to Baker’s house to try
and catch the couple together. The sheriff, W. E. Taylor,
and his deputy, J. E. Irwin, refused to admit who had made
the complaint against the two. Assumedly, the couple’s
relationship was too public for the social mores of small
town Cuthbert. The Sheriff finally admitted that he had
received numerous complaints made by different people. The
deputy skirted the issue but admitted that reports had the
two “not living together, but something to that extent.”8
John Dollard, a Yale sociologist, studied the anonymous
“Southerntown” in 1935-36. He found that sexual relations
between white men and black women were quite common and
observed that, on the part of the black female,
“undoubtedly, there are many cases were sexual relations are
attended by idealization, tenderness, wish to be of service,8 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker, Randolph County GA Superior Court, May Adj. Term, 1944.
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and desire for permanence.”9 Perhaps Baker welcomed the
relationship at first. Maybe she felt sorry for the helpless
man who she “nursed like a baby.” Whatever the circumstances
of the relationship, Baker soon found herself in a situation
that she could not control. Soon, according to Baker’s trial
testimony, the relationship turned violent. Baker tried to
refuse Knight’s attention. She testified that he often
locked her in his one-room mill house for days on end,
refusing to let her leave. He also pulled his pistol on her
more than once, and threatened to kill her if she ended the
relationship. Baker was locked into a cycle of domestic
violence and she had little chance of escaping. When
Knight’s attention was no longer welcome, she couldn’t just
“break up” with him. He felt that he had the right as a male
and a white man to do as he pleased with a “Negro” female.
On the other hand, complying with Knight was dangerous for
Baker, too. His son Eugene testified that, upon finding out
about the affair, he beat her severely and would have done
so again if she he had saw her near his father a second
time.10 Baker was caught between Knight’s personal whims
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and Southern society’s expectation that she “know her
place.” It is interesting to note that both times the police
investigated the alleged relationship they went to Baker’s
home, even though the relationship reportedly took place at
Knight’s mill. It is as if they did not want to disturb
Knight’s right to privacy in his domain. Baker, as an
African American, did not enjoy the same right to privacy
and thus her home was fair game.
Nights like Saturday, April 29, 1944 were all too
common in Baker’s life. According to her trial testimony,
Knight showed up the home she still shared with her mother
and three children, disturbing them all. He was drunk, and
demanded that she come with him to his mill house. Trying to
stall him, she said, she offered to buy them some liquor.
Witnesses at the trial acknowledge several times that both
Baker and Knight were heavy drinkers. He gave her fifty
cents to buy liquor and she left him standing on her porch.
Upon arriving in town she discovered that the only café that
9 John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937) 150.10 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker
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served blacks was closed. Still stalling for time, she sat
and waited on the porch of the café. She told the jury that
she hoped that Knight would forget her and go home. After
passing some time, she returned home only to find Knight
still waiting near her house. She slipped inside, but as
soon as she did, he knocked on the door again. When she
refused to come out, he said, “I’ll be damed (sic) if I am
going home until you go where I want you to,” and “I am not
going to let you rest tonight.” She finally acquiesced, and
went outside with him. But as they walked to his mill house,
she managed to dodge him again, this time by cutting across
a cemetery. Three times she had communicated that she did
not want to go with Knight to his mill house. She ended up
spending the night out doors, near a convict camp.
Assumedly, she did not want Knight to find her at home,
where her mother and children slept, for a third time.
The next morning, her path home took her by the mill
house. She assumed that Knight would either be sleeping
inside the mill house or back in his room at the local
boarding house, but he was sitting on the front porch. This
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time, he pulled a pistol on her and ordered her to go inside
the mill. When Knight finally had Baker in the mill house
he seemed to calm down; he told her “You are safe and
everything in here.” She replied, “No, I am in the wrong
place.” It was now Sunday, and Knight told Baker that he
was expecting his son, Albert C. Knight, to come and take
him to a church singing. Baker was told that she was to
stay in the mill house until he returned. So, she stayed
locked in the small building on a hot South Georgia summer
day until Knight returned that evening, bearing some food
and more liquor. She told him she wanted to go home and he
replied that he would kill her before she left. This time
though, perhaps fed up after spending a hot day locked up in
the mill, she told him, “You will have to do it.”
Baker’s testimony is not quite clear as to when Knight
pulled the pistol, but sometime during their argument, he
took the gun from his shirtfront. Even with the pistol
pointed at her, Baker said, “Whenever you let me out I’m
going to leave and never see you anymore.” He said, “I done
told you whenever you quit me or attempted to leave me what
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I will do.” Baker managed to wrestle the pistol from
Knight. When she did, he reached for the door latch. Baker
assumed that he was trying to reach the iron bar that he
used to lock the door. She told the jury that she thought
he would try to hit her with that iron bar. She testified,
“This is one time that I thought I had to do something. I
believe he would have killed me if I had not done what I
did.” Baker admitted that the gun then went off as a result
of their struggle, and T. E. Shaffer, the mortician
responsible for Knight’s body, testified that Knight had
been shot in the left ear, and that the bullet exited
Knight’s skull just above the right ear.11
In the trial transcript, various witnesses detail the
events of the rest of the evening. Randolph County Coroner
J. A. Cox reported that Baker and her son James showed up at
his home late that evening, while he was visiting with Tom
Overby, the police chief of the tiny, nearby town of
Benevolence, and Marvin Breedlove, a local mail carrier.12
She confessed to the murder and asked him for help. In the 11 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker12 Phillips, 69.
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trial, Cox reported that he had known Baker’s family for 35
years. Cox had employed the family and even let them stay
on his property. Baker felt like he was someone in
authority that she could trust to help her. At this point,
Cox did not arrest Baker but told her to go and tell the
Sheriff what she had done. He testified that she had been
drinking and he was not sure that she was telling the truth.
However he did report the crime to the Sheriff before
proceeding to the mill house, accompanied by Overby and
Breedlove. Meanwhile, the Sheriff went to Baker’s home and
arrested her. He waited for “a couple of days” before
questioning her, claiming that she was too drunk to be
questioned on the night of the crime, and that he “didn’t
care to talk to her.”13
The facts of the case were not well known around the
county, therefore the proceedings did not elicit as much
attention as many other small town murder cases. The only
mention of Knight’s death and Baker’s arrest up until the
time of the trial was in Knight’s tiny two and one half inch
13 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker
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obituary, located at the bottom of the front page of the
Cuthbert Liberal Enterprise next to an ad for war bonds.14
Perhaps town fathers considered it fortuitous that court did
not meet for three months. The public would have time to
lose interest in the murder and the deceased and his family
would be spared airing details of their private lives before
a courtroom full of interested spectators.
Whites in Randolph County also had reason to fear wider
repercussions from the case. In 1940, African Americans
made up 69% of Randolph County’s 16,609 citizens.15 There
was no gain in stirring up trouble between the races. With
the county’s population steadily declining,16 whites in the
predominantly agricultural county were losing their farm
workers. This out migration forced them to raise wages to
compete with industry jobs in cities. Laura Wexler, author
of Fire in a Canebrake, the story of a 1946 Georgia 14 “Knight,” Cuthbert Liberal Enterprise, J.B. Stanford, ed., 5 May 1944: 1. 15 University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data Browser [online], 1998, University of Virginia, [cited 15 June 2003] Available from the World Wide Web at: (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/) 16 University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, 20% ofRandolph County’s citizens moved away between 1930 and 1950. The population dropped from 17,174 in 1930 to 13,804 in 1950. The trend has continued and Randolph County’s estimated population in 2001 was 7,644.
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lynching, sums up the white liberal position in the 1940’s
south: “black people did not deserve equal rights, but they
did deserve a safe environment in which to work for white
people.”17 Others like Sheriff Taylor had worries of their
own - 1944 was an election year.18
If the shooting did not cause tension locally, then
what if the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) or the popular black newspaper the
Atlanta Daily World publicized the case? Racial tensions
were already running high in Georgia and the rest of the
United States. Black soldiers were returning from World War
II and demanding greater rights from the society they had
fought to protect. President Roosevelt had recently passed
the Fair Employment Practices Act (FEPA) declaring that the
defense industry, of course a major employer during World
War II, could not discriminate in hiring because of race.
Roosevelt had only agreed to pass the act after being
pressured by black leaders like A. Phillip Randolph of the
March on Washington Movement and Walter White of the NAACP. 17 Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake (New York: Scribner, 2003) 53.18 Phillips, 27.
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White southerners, upon seeing this, believed that blacks
were gaining a dangerous amount of power with lawmakers.19
Blacks were also pressing for the right to vote, an
eventuality that many southerners equated with the return of
the carpetbaggers, and the Supreme Court appeared to be on
their side. The highest court had recently ruled that
blacks could not be denied the right to vote in a Primary
Election. This ruling seriously threatened the southern
practice of declaring that Democratic Primary elections were
whites-only affairs. Before the White Primary was
abolished, blacks were allowed to vote only in the general
election, and as the Solid South always elected Democrats,
black votes for Republican candidates were essentially
meaningless. 20
Baker stayed in jail, probably unaware of the
innumerable racial tensions swirling around her, until
August 14, 1944, the date of her trial. W. Leon Ferguson, an
19 Jennifer L. Fraire, “The Fair Employment Practices Committee of Atlanta: Southern White Reaction To Antidiscrimination Legislation During World War II,” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 16 (1995): 175-177.20 Wexler, 25-26. The case was Smith v. Allwright, 322 U.S. 718 (1944).
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Emory educated lawyer from nearby Terrell County was
appointed by the court to be her attorney.21 Two local
attorneys and well-known figures around Cuthbert, John
Franklin Terry and Joe M. Ray prosecuted the case. Terry
had been assigned by the county Solicitor General (precursor
to the modern District Attorney) to fill in for him that
week. Ray was involved because the Knight family had hired
him to assist with the prosecution – a practice that is now
illegal.22 Ray’s entry in The History of Randolph County
Georgia Volume II states that he was known primarily as a
defense attorney, and that murder cases were his specialty.
The entry brags that Ray “never lost a client to ‘the
chair.’”23 Terry and Ray may have viewed this as one of
their easier cases. The jury that they needed to convince
of Baker’s guilt was made up of twelve white men, E. B.
Knight’s peers. Most were prominent citizens of the county,
and most knew some or all of the principals in the case, as
well as one another.24 Judge William C. “Two-Gun” Worrill
presided over the trial. He had acquired his nickname
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because of his intimidating habit of trying cases with two
pistols on the bench in front of him.25
Since Baker had confessed to the crime, the question at
the trial was, did she shoot Knight in self-defense? The
prosecutors Terry and Ray made a strong case. Their
witnesses included the Coroner J. A. Cox, whom Baker had
turned to for help, Sheriff Taylor and Deputy Irwin who were
in charge of the case, the local funeral director, Tom
Overby, and Knight’s two sons, Albert and Eugene. Ferguson
introduced Baker herself as the sole witness for the
defense, even though several people in Cuthbert could have
testified about her turbulent relationship with Knight, if
not about the night of the shooting itself.
Surely one of the most discomfiting issues in the trial
was the presence of the interracial relationship between
Baker and Knight. Baker’s only hope relied on her attorney
proving that Knight had mistreated her and given her cause
21 Phillips, 65.22 Phillips, 62.23 Randolph County Historical Society, Randolph County Georgia Volume II (Cuthbert, GA: Randolph County Historical Society, 1997) 334.24 Phillips, 56-60.25 Phillips, 8.
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to defend herself. Unfortunately, the details behind the
crime proved too salacious for the mores of the small
southern town. Perhaps the Cuthbert citizens involved in
Baker’s trial wanted to spare Knight’s family the
embarrassment of making the relationship public knowledge.
Or perhaps they too recognized the three classes of homicide
professed by a Savannah policeman in Edward Ayer’s Vengeance
and Justice, “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder.
If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide.
If a nigger kills another nigger, that’s one less nigger.”26
In other words, if Knight had attacked Baker, she must have
deserved it. If she had gone ahead and let him hit and
possibly kill her with that iron bar, then they, the
prominent citizens of Cuthbert, would not be in the this
unfortunate position.
Unfortunate position, embarrassment, tragedy – however
the case was viewed at the time, the lawyers and the judge
assured that it would be over quickly. The capital murder
trial lasted only four hours and the transcript weighs in at26 Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance & Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) 231.
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only ten pages. The prosecution began by attempting to
establish that the pistol found in Baker’s home had indeed
been the murder weapon. Upon cross-examination by Ferguson
though, the funeral director could not say with certainty
that the gunshot wound in Knight’s temple had come from a
pistol.27 Since Baker had already confessed to the murder,
this whole line of questioning must have appeared as
irrelevant to the spectators in the courthouse that morning
as it does today. Perhaps Ferguson was trying to give the
appearance that he was going to defend his client to the
best of his capability.
Ferguson did try to establish the details of Knight and
Baker’s relationship, but he encountered staunch opposition.
It was only after Sheriff W. E. Taylor was called to the
stand for a second time that he admitted that numerous
people had been complaining about the two living together.
Coroner Cox, who professed that he often visited and traded
with Knight at the mill house, claimed that he never saw
Baker and Knight together. Knight’s two sons came the
27 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker
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closest to admitting to their father’s relationship with
Baker. Albert C. Knight, the son who had originally hired
Baker to nurse his father, claimed that he moved his father
to Tallahassee for a time to get him away from Baker.
According to Albert Knight, Baker followed them and when he
found out about her presence he “gave her twelve hours for
me not to see her in Tallahassee or Leon County again.” He
never states that the elder Knight objected to Baker’s
presence, and in fact, it was five or six months before
Albert discovered her living in Tallahassee.28
Albert’s brother Eugene C. Knight also testified at the
trial. He lived closer to Cuthbert, in nearby Cairo,
Georgia and had been aware, as he said, of Baker drinking
and going in and out of his father’s residence on Webster
Street. Eugene Knight testified that he warned Baker once
“this has got to stop... I don’t want to hurt you or have no
any trouble with you, and you had better stay away from my
Daddy.” When, two days later, Knight found Baker at the
residence again, he reported to the unflinching jury that “I
28 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker
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took her and beat her until I just did leave life in her. I
told her to stay away from my Daddy and not go around him
anymore.” Ferguson did not cross-examine Knight about the
beating. In the 1940’s violence against blacks, including
lynching, whitecapping, or beatings, was still fairly
common.29
With all the male witnesses either denying or remaining
silent on the relationship issue, Prosecutors Terry and Ray
were left with the relatively easy task of disproving the
self-defense claim. They asked each witness in turn whether
they had seen an iron bar at the scene of the crime. The
witnesses had, of course, seen nothing of the sort. The
Sheriff even went so far as the state that the door was
barred with a wooden latch.30 Even if there had been no
bar, Knight still could have threatened Baker. Even with
the pistol out of his hands, Knight always carried a cane.
But the witnesses testified that they had not found a single
sign of struggle in the mill house. Never mind that Sheriff
29 William F. Holmes, “Part Five: 1890-1940,” A History of Georgia, Kenneth G.Coleman ed., (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1977) 286.30 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker
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Taylor found Baker’s glasses in a can of dirty water
underneath a belt and pulley system. Ferguson could have
seized on the fact that the glasses, an expensive necessity
at the time, had been so casually flung around the room. Or
he could have seized on the fact that the witnesses
themselves described the mill house, which Knight used for
storage as well as his assignations with Baker, as crowded
and messy. The mess could easily cover signs of Knight and
Baker’s struggle over the pistol.31
With one offhand sentence, Coroner Cox, the first
person Baker had turned to in her time of trouble, presented
a motive that would let the jury off the hook. He
testified, “I believe she said Mr. Knight owed her for doing
his washing the week before.”32 This explanation made
sense in the jury’s frame of reference. And even if they
did not quite believe that Baker shot Knight over a laundry
bill (what could she possibly hope to gain from that?), at
least that provided an explanation for a black woman’s
presence in a white man’s house on a Sunday evening. That 31 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker32 State of Georgia v. Lena Baker
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also explained why the police had once caught Knight and
Baker together at her home - she was just doing his washing.
In less than one half hour the jury came back with a
verdict of guilty. At the time it was the judge’s
prerogative to pronounce sentence. Symbolically, his
sentence ended that day’s court session, as it would end
Baker’s prospects for a future. “It is ordered and adjudged
by this court that the Warden of the penitentiary of the
State of Georgia shall execute the said Lena Baker, by
electrocution.” The sentence provided instructions for the
prisoner’s removal to the Georgia State Prison in
Reidsville, and set Friday, October 13th, 1944 as the date
of the execution.33
As final as the death sentence seems, the mishandling
of Baker’s case did not end there. Ferguson appealed to the
Judge Worrill for a new trial. The petition stated that the
jury’s verdict had been “contrary to the evidence and
without evidence to support it.” Ferguson then resigned from
Baker’s case, stating that he had done his duty as a court
33 Phillips 78.
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appointed attorney. This left Baker jailed, with no source
of income and no legal advice. Still, Baker did write to
Governor Ellis Arnall. Arnall was known as the closest thing
to a progressive governor that Georgia had elected since the
Civil War.34 As a prison reformer, he had abolished the
Governor’s Pardon, because he felt that his predecessor,
Eugene Talmadge, had abused it. He could not pardon Baker,
but he did respond on October 9, four days before the
scheduled execution, granting her a sixty-day reprieve. She
remained in the Cuthbert county jail over Christmas, to
await a new hearing on January 6, 1945. But the reprieve
proved to be just that because Judge Worrill had dismissed
her appeal citing that she had failed to procure new
counsel. Worrill apparently did not take into consideration
that Baker was without an attorney because her attorney had
resigned her case, and that while sitting penniless in jail
she had slender chances of obtaining another. The State
Board of Pardons and Paroles reviewed her case, but they
also denied clemency. After the hearing on January 18, 1945 34 Numan V. Bartley, “1940 to the Present,” A History of Georgia, Kenneth G. Coleman ed., (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1977) 389.
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the Cuthbert Times reported that “the three member board
unanimously decided that the woman was not deprived of any
constitutional rights, and there were no extenuating
circumstances.” The new execution date was set for March 5,
1945. 35
Sheriff Taylor himself drove Baker to the Georgia State
Prison in Reidsville on February 23. She presented somewhat
of a problem to prison staff because they had never housed a
female death row inmate before. The decided to house her in
a single cell near the execution chamber. Author Lela Bond
Phillips, author of The Lena Baker Story, has visited the
cell where Baker stayed and states that the condemned woman
would have seen the death chamber anytime she was allowed to
leave her cell.36
The scheduled date of execution came with no further
hope of a reprieve for Baker. No one in her family attended
the execution or even came to visit her in prison. Phillips
speculates that, aside from the economic constraints posed
by travelling across the state, the family feared 35 Phillips, 81-83.36 Phillips, 96.
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repercussions from the white community in Cuthbert if they
visited their relative.37 Even today Baker’s only living
daughter refuses to visit the town where her mother lived
out most of her life.38 One of Baker’s former employers, H.
O. Pritchett, was able to attend the event. He reportedly
spoke with her and gave her messages from her family just
before the execution. She allowed Pritchett to witness her
execution, 39 but denied that privilege to Eugene Knight, who
had also driven to Reidsville that day.40
Baker died protesting her innocence. Her last words
included, “What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would
have been killed myself […]. God has forgiven me, I have
nothing against anyone […]. I am ready to meet my God.”
With those words, Baker was strapped into the morbidly
nicknamed “Old Sparky” and the execution was performed.
Baker’s death was front-page news in Cuthbert. The March
8th, 1945 Cuthbert Times ran a story entitled “Baker Burns.”
37 Phillips, 95.38 Mia Taylor, “A Question of Justice,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 12 May 2003, A1.39 Phillips, 95-96.40 Phillips, 94.
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According to the story, Baker went to the chair calmly, but
after the switches were thrown, she remained in the chair
six minutes and had to be shocked several times before the
prison doctor pronounced her dead.41 Baker’s death was no
easier than her life had been.
Between 1924, when the electric chair replaced hanging
in Georgia, and 1972, when the Supreme Court temporarily
suspended the death penalty, Georgia executed 337 blacks and
only 78 whites.42 The first electric chair victim in
Georgia was a black male, and for two years whites continued
to be hanged while blacks tested out “Old Sparky.”43
Kathleen O’Shea, author of Women and the Death Penalty in
the United States: 1900-1998, compares the state mandated
executions of blacks in the early part of the twentieth
century to the practice of lynching. In her opinion, many
of the executions of blacks were just a continuation of the
460 lynchings reported in Georgia between 1880 and 1930.
41 “Baker Burns,” Cuthbert Times, John E. Minter, Jr., ed., 8 Mar. 1945: 1.42 Kathleen O’Shea, Women and the Death Penalty in the United States, 1900-1998 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998) 138.43 Comp. M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smylka, “The Espy File [online],” 2003, Death Penalty Information Center, [cited 7 July 2003] Available from the world wide web: (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ESPYstate.pdf)
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Its true that many of the black executed in Georgia before
1972 were convicted of that old lynch mob standard – rape of
a white woman.44 Recent statistics compiled by Amnesty
International show that Georgia’s justice system is stacked
against blacks even today. In capital cases brought before
the Chattahoochee District of Georgia between 1973 and 1990,
85% of defendants were accused of murdering a white person.
Six percent of defendants were accused of a black-on-black
murder. Georgia never sought the death penalty for the
murder of a black by a white throughout the 27-year period,
even though 65% of murder victims in the district were
black.45
Why did Baker’s case not receive any national, or at
least statewide, attention? Though they did not cover the
trial, the Atlanta Constitution did mention Baker’s
execution in a thirty-five-word block on page eight.46
Neither the NAACP nor the Atlanta Daily World ever
44 O’Shea, 138.45 “The Death Penalty in Georgia: Racist, Arbitrary and Unfair,” June 1996, Amnesty International 8 June 2003 <http://www.web.amnesty.org/library/print/engamr510251996>.46 “Georgia ‘Chair’ Takes First Woman Victim,” The Atlanta Constitution 6 Mar.1945: 8.
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investigated the case. It is likely that Baker’s story
never came to their attention, but if it had, would she have
been a good candidate to advance the cause of civil rights?
She was a convicted prostitute, a heavy drinker and the
mother of three illegitimate children. If anything, Baker
confirmed many of the white’s perceptions of blacks, if the
views of the citizens of “Southerntown” can be considered
standard.47 Even Walter White, one of the most vehement
anti-lynching activists in the NAACP, concluded that only
innocent victims provoked public outcry. White investigated
a particularly brutal 1946 Georgia lynching where two black
men and their wives had been shot by a mob. In his Chicago
Defender column, he admitted that if the women had not been
included in the violence, the incident probably would have
passed by with little public outcry.48 Baker was by no
means an innocent, and since her execution was carried out
under the auspices of the law, she was not, by definition,
lynched.
47 Dollard, 137.48 Wexler, 112.
Saunders - 29
Lena Baker had the misfortune to live in a time in-
between. The regimented social structure of slave days,
where everyone knew their role, had gone, but a time when
blacks enjoyed (at least nominal) political and social
equality still fluttered ephemerally in the distant future.
There is no doubt that common prejudice of the 1940’s south
played a large role in Baker’s conviction and death
sentence. Baker likely would have lived to see
desegregation, the Voting Rights Act and the speeches of
Martin Luther King Jr. if justice had only been colorblind.