Lena Baker

Lena Baker (June 8, 1900 – March 5, 1945) was an African American woman in Cuthbert, Georgia, United States, who was convicted of capital murder of Ernest Knight, a white man who had sexually assaulted her. She was executed by the state of Georgia in 1945. Baker was the only woman in Georgia ever to be executed by electrocution. At the time of the trial, a local newspaper reported that Baker was held as a "slave woman" by Knight, and that she shot him in self-defense during a struggle. Baker's execution occurred during a decades-long period of state suppression of civil rights of black citizens in white-dominated Georgia. Since the turn of the century, the state had been actively disenfranchising black people and had imposed legal racial segregation and second-class status on them. In 2005, 60 years after her execution, the state of Georgia granted Baker a full and unconditional pardon. The board did not find Baker to be innocent, but said she could have been convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. A biography was published about Baker in 2001, and it was adapted for the feature film The Lena Baker Story (2008), chronicling the events of her life, trial, and execution.