Finally pardoned

Lena Baker, a Georgia-born African American woman, has been pardoned for a crime for which she was convicted - and executed -- 61 years ago. Baker received the pardon last Tuesday. She had been convicted for the 1945 murder of a White man.

As a child, Baker picked cotton with her family for a White farmer. In 1944 she made a living picking cotton, cleaning the homes of Whites and doing their laundry. When Baker was hired by A.C. Knight to take care of his injured 66-year old father, Ernest Knight, it meant extra income for her family, which consisted of her mother and her three children. Ernest Knight, a local gristmill owner and heavy drinker, often carried a pistol strapped to his shoulder. Coerced into a sexual relationship with the old man, Baxter was helpless to resist the abuse. When she tried to avoid him, Knight would lock her in his gristmill for several days at a time and, as a newspaper later reported, keep her there as his "slave woman."

At Baker's trial, another one of Knight's sons, E.C. Knight, testified that when he told Baker to stay away from his father and he heard that they had been seen together, "I 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 any more."

His testimony did not cause a stir at the court proceedings.

Baker had also been warned by the county sheriff to stay away from Knight or she would be thrown in jail. No one seems to have thought of telling Knight to leave Baker alone. With the warning from the sheriff and the near death beating from his son, she tried her best to avoid Knight.

One Saturday evening, he went to her home and in spite of the fact that she told him her children were asleep, he forced her at gunpoint to go to the gristmill. On the way, she escaped and tried to avoid him by staying away from her home that night, sleeping in the woods near a convict camp. Returning home the next morning, Knight cornered her, took her to the gristmill and locked her in while he went to a religious celebration with his son. When he returned that night, she asked that he allow her to go home because she had been away from her children all day. He refused and drew his gun, threatening to kill her if she did not accede to his demands.

There was a struggle for the gun, it went off and Knight was killed. Baker was arrested and charged with his murder, in spite of her insistence that it was self defence and evidence that Knight had repeatedly abused her.

A jury of 12 White men heard testimony. It took less than five hours to convict her of murder and for the judge to sentence her to death. Her lawyer immediately asked for a new trial, citing that "the verdict was contrary to the evidence and without evidence to support it ... and the verdict was contrary to law and the principles of justice and equity". He then resigned. Without legal representation, there was no appeal and Baker was executed. Her last words were: "What I done, I did in self defence, or I would have been killed myself ... I am ready to meet my God."

Baker is the only woman that the state of Georgia has ever put to death in the electric chair.

After her conviction, all the members of Baker's family, except her mother, fled their homes "for fear of retribution". As a result, there was no proper funeral. African Americans in the community of Cuthbert, where this incident took place, were afraid to mourn her properly.

The White residents did not want her body buried in the town where she had lived all her life and the Black people were too afraid to say anything. However, the local undertaker braved White anger and returned Baker's body from Reidsville, where she was executed, to her birthplace for burial in the cemetery of the Mount Vernon Baptist Church where she had sang in the choir most of her life. Her death certificate lists the cause of her death as "Legal electrocution."

More than 50 years after Baker was killed by the state of Georgia, some members of the Mount Vernon Baptist Church, joined by what remained of the Baker family, began to gather at Baker's grave for prayers and songs. In 1998, the congregation of the church raised $250 for a slab and marker for her grave.

On the 58th anniversary of her death, her relatives, who were now scattered from New Jersey to Florida, met to place a wreath on her grave. Her 61-year-old great nephew, Roosevelt Curry, spoke at the occasion.

"We are trying to give her the funeral that she never had, the moment that her family was cheated out of. There are a lot of things we want to do; she still was a human being. She was a mother. She was somebody's daughter and also she was a child of God. I wish I could get a million women up in there because this is a woman's fight. This is a woman's fight because the lady's rights were violated."

That same year Curry requested a pardon from The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. At first, the only response from the Board was that it usually does not grant pardons "of this kind." But, the family persisted. They petitioned the Georgia Department of Pardon and Paroles to clear Baker's name even though Heather Hedrick, director of public information for the department, reportedly said: "I think they're probably looking to wipe the record clean and we cannot do that; that can only be done by the courts."

Two years later, with the support of many people and organizations, including John Cole Vodicka, the activist founder of The Prison and Jail Project, an inmate advocacy group project, the board decided mercy was in order in Baker's case. Curry said he cried when the board told him of its decision. "Now we can all cry tears of joy, it's late but it's on time. This case was passed to me. I'm hoping I can pass this onto my family."

Georgia's pardon and parole board chose not to clear Baker of the murder conviction. Instead, it ruled a "grievous error" occurred when she was denied clemency in 1945 and read a proclamation to that effect in Atlanta last Tuesday, August 30, 61 years after Baker's "Legal electrocution".

Lela Bond Phillips, a professor at Andrew College in Cuthbert and the author of the book, "The Lena Baker Story", summed up Baker's reality: "The world Lena Baker was born into was a world where women had few rights and where Black women had virtually none. Their lives were arranged according to the dictates of men, White men in particular."

At the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa, the African Canadian Legal Clinic posited that "over policing and criminalization… have had a devastating impact on the family, particularly since there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Black women who have been thrust into the criminal justice system. It has been very difficult for African Canadian families to reverse direct and systemic racism because existing human rights enforcement mechanisms are woefully inadequate."

Other studies have found the "over-representation of visible minorities more evident among women than men. In 1992/93, one third of adult female admissions to Ontario prisons belonged to visible minority groups compared with one quarter of males."

"Black women are admitted to provincial custody at a rate almost seven times that of White women. At Vanier Centre for Women, admissions of Black women increased 630 per cent over the six years between 1986/87 and 1992/93. The comparable figure for Caucasian women was 59 per cent. These women are typically young (average age is about 30), lone parents, and poor. The average woman in prison has less than a grade nine education and was unemployed at arrest. What little employment experience they have is usually in unskilled and minimum wage jobs."

The same people who control the school system control the prison system and the whole social system ever since slavery, says the group Dead Prez on their 2000 album, "Let's Go Free".

tiakoma@aol.com.