Lena Baker was a 44-year-old mother of three who supported her children by cleaning homes and washing clothes in Randolph County, Georgia, when she was sent to the electric chair on March 5, 1945, for killing the white gristmill owner who employed her. She remains the first and only woman ever executed in Georgia's electric chair, according to multiple accounts of her case. Sixty years later, the state that put her to death would call its own decision a grievous error.
A Killing at the Gristmill
Baker was born near Cuthbert, Georgia, in 1900, and by 1944 she was working for Ernest B. Knight, a 67-year-old white gristmill owner who had hired her to care for him while he recovered from an injury, according to the seed reporting from OurBlackGirls. That account states Knight had locked Baker inside his mill for extended periods, an allegation attributed to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and that Knight's own son later admitted he had previously beaten Baker after finding her with his father. On April 29, 1944, Knight forced Baker from her home, and the next day he took her back to the gristmill, the outlet reports.
Baker wanted to leave the mill that day, but she and Knight struggled over his pistol after he raised an iron bar used to secure the mill door, per the same account. The pistol discharged, killing Knight. Separately, earlycountynews.com describes the same struggle, reporting that “Baker managed to get hold of Knight's pistol, which went off, hitting him in the head, instantly killing him.” Baker went that night to the home of J.A. Cox, the town coroner, and told him she had shot Knight, the outlet reports.
Trial Before an All-White Jury
Baker was charged with capital murder and went on trial in Randolph County on August 14, 1944. According to earlycountynews.com, “Lena Baker was charged with capital murder and stood trial August 14, 1944. The all-white male jury convicted her by the end of the afternoon.” The trial lasted only several hours, and the twelve-man jury was made up entirely of white men who rejected her account that she had acted to save her own life. As the Tifton Gazette put it, “The jury of 12 white men didn't buy her self-defense argument.”
Baker insisted throughout that she had no other choice. “What I done, I done in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself,” she said, according to AFRO News. The jury convicted her of murder and did not recommend mercy, which meant the sentence was death. Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall granted her a 60-day reprieve, but the state's board of pardons and paroles denied her clemency in January 1945, and she was transferred to Georgia State Prison in Reidsville that February.
Executed, Then Pardoned Six Decades Later
Georgia executed Baker by electrocution on March 5, 1945, according to WALB, which reported plainly, “On March 5, 1945, Lena Baker was executed.” Not every account agrees on the timeline: the Albany Herald has reported that “In February of 1945, Lena Baker was executed in Georgia's electric chair,” a discrepancy that remains unresolved across the record. She was buried near Mt. Vernon Missionary Baptist Church in Randolph County, and her grave initially lacked a formal marker; church members placed a simple one decades later, before family members and supporters gathered at the cemetery in January 2011 to dedicate a new headstone.
Her great-nephew, Roosevelt Curry, pursued a pardon for Baker with support from the Prison and Jail Project, and on August 30, 2005, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted her a full and unconditional posthumous pardon — 60 years after her execution, per the Albany Herald. The board acknowledged that denying Baker clemency in 1945 had been a grievous error. “A grievous error, as this case called out for mercy,” the board said, according to the Tifton Gazette.
Not a Finding of Innocence
The pardon stopped short of declaring Baker innocent. The board instead concluded that the circumstances could have supported a voluntary manslaughter charge rather than murder, a distinction that, as earlycountynews.com noted, meant “The Parole Board suggested a verdict of manslaughter would have been more appropriate” — an outcome that would not have led to her execution. Baker's case is now cited as an illustration of how Jim Crow-era Georgia's segregated criminal justice system excluded Black citizens from meaningful participation, with a Black woman's self-defense claim against a white man rejected by an all-white jury.
The case has resurfaced in cultural retrospectives in the years since. Baker's story became the basis for the 2011 docudrama The Lena Baker Story, and it was later folded into the theatrical production American Captives: Lena Baker & Sandra Bland, which paired her case with Bland's, according to TDF, to examine, in the production's framing, “how little has changed in the relationship between Black women and the United States justice system in 60 years.”
A Rare but Recurring History
Baker's execution remains an outlier in American capital punishment history, though not a singular one. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there were 576 documented executions of women in the United States as of December 31, 2022, dating back to the first in 1632 — about 3.6 percent of the 16,047 confirmed executions carried out in the country and its colonies since 1608. Eighteen death-sentenced women have been executed in the U.S. since 1976, the organization reports.
