Lena Baker
*On his date in 1945, Lena Baker, a Black mother of three, was electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.
She was convicted for the fatal shooting of E. B. Knight, a white-Georgia mill operator she was hired to care for after he broke his leg. She was 44 and the only woman ever executed in Georgia’s electric chair. For Baker, a Black maid in the segregated south in the 1940s, her story was a tough sell to a jury of 12 white men. Rumors that she was romantically involved with victim E. B. Knight did not help. Her murder trial lasted just a day without a single witness called by her court-appointed lawyer. She was convicted and sentenced to death.
John Cole Vodicka, director of an Americus-based inmate advocacy program known as the Prison and Jail Project, said Knight had kept Ms. Baker as his "virtual sex slave." She was his paramour, she was his mistress, and, among other things, his drinking partner. If you read the transcript and have any understanding of Black-white relations, Black women were often subjected to the sexual whims of their white masters, their white bosses, or some white man who had control over their lives or the lives of their families. "Here is one who resisted and paid the price.”
The undertaker who brought her body back to Cuthbert buried her in an unmarked grave for five decades until the Mount Vernon Baptist Church congregation raised $250 for a concrete slab and marker. The family is planning a memorial service on Mother’s Day, May 11, at Mount Vernon, where Baker sang in the choir. Her grave is behind the church. Relatives are also returning to Cuthbert to honor Baker and to clarify her name with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole.
Lena Baker, who had a sixth-grade education, publicly stated her innocence to the very end. “What I did, I did in self-defense," she said in her final statement. "I have nothing against anyone. I am ready to meet my God.”
in 2005 Lena Baker was pardoned by the Georgia State Legislature
Lela Bond Phillips
English Dept.
Andrew College,
Cuthbert, Georgia.
The Lena Baker Story,
Wings Press
