Justice for Lena Baker

Millions of people had not heard of Lena Baker until the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles posthumously pardoned her on Aug. 15. Baker, an African American maid, was and remains to this day the only woman to die in Georgia’s electric chair. The 19 other women executed in Georgia died by hanging.

Lena Baker

Baker was convicted of the first-degree murder of E.B. Knight by an all-white, all-male jury during a one-day trial. Not one witness was called by her white court-appointed attorney in her defense. A mother of three children, Baker was 44 years old when she was electrocuted on March 5, 1945.

Baker had been hired in 1944 to care for Knight, a white mill operator in Cuthbert, Ga., who broke his leg. Baker was sexually abused by Knight. She fatally shot him when he threatened her with a branding iron after she told him that she was quitting her job.

Black women being sexually exploited and raped by white men, especially in the South, was the norm not the exception, beginning with the days of slavery.

If there were real justice in Georgia back then, Baker would have been found innocent by reason of self-defense and set free. If there were real justice in Georgia today, the GBPP would have not only proclaimed Baker’s innocence, but abolished the racist, anti-poor death penalty once and for all to honor her memory.

—Monica Moorehead