Saunders - 2

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

Saunders - 3

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)

Saunders - 4

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.

Saunders - 5

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.

Saunders - 6

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

Saunders - 7

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

Saunders - 8

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

Saunders - 9

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

Saunders - 10

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.

Saunders - 11

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

Saunders - 12

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.

Saunders - 13

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.

Saunders - 14

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).

Saunders - 15

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

Saunders - 16

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.

Saunders - 17

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.

Saunders - 18

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

Saunders - 19

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

Saunders - 20

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

Saunders - 21

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

Saunders - 22

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.

Saunders - 23

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.

Saunders - 24

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.

Saunders - 25

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.

Saunders - 26

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)

Saunders - 27

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.

Saunders - 28

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.