Lena Baker: ‘I am ready to meet my God’

On Aug. 14, 1944, Baker was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Cuthbert. They rejected Baker’s story that she feared for her life and killed Knight — whom she testified had regularly beaten and raped her — in self-defense.

Only six months later, after she was denied clemency, Baker was executed at the state prison in Reidsville, making her the first of only two Georgia women to ever be executed by the state, and the only one to die in the electric chair.

Next Wednesday, March 5, will mark the 80th anniversary of Baker’s execution.

“What happened to Lena Baker was typical for that time in our history,” said Rhonda Cook, a retired reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and one of Georgia’s foremost authorities on state executions. “Testimony that might benefit a Black defendant was discounted and juries of all white men didn’t need much time to decide on a verdict.”

Baker was born on June 8, 1900, just outside of Cuthbert. Her mother, Queen Harris, was the daughter of slaves. Baker could read and write but dropped out of school in the sixth grade. She eventually had three children and settled with her mother in a shack in Cuthbert.

To make money, she washed clothes, picked cotton and worked as a maid. When that was not enough, she and a friend opened a “lewd house,” and entertained Black and white men. In 1920 she spent several months in jail after being convicted of prostitution.

Baker thought she caught a break when she entered Knight’s orbit in the early 1940s after being hired by his son to take care of his 65-year-old father, who had broken his leg.

“The job of taking care of Ernest Knight seemed like a windfall,” author Lela Bond Phillips wrote in her 2001 book, “The Lena Baker Story,” which was turned into a movie in 2008 starring Tichina Arnold. “Maybe, she told her mother, her luck was about to change.”

Although the details are a mixture of fact and folklore, Baker and the elder Knight started a sexual relationship that stirred the community.

Janice Liddell, a playwright and retired English professor at Clark Atlanta University who has written a one-woman play about Baker, said the relationship was hardly consensual. Knight often plied Baker with alcohol and forced her to stay with him. He occasionally gave her a few dollars.

“She was poor and Black, so she took the money. But she never wanted to be with this man,” Liddell said. “She had so many problems and so few solutions that she was almost forced.”

At one point, Knight’s son beat Baker within an inch of her life and warned her to stay away from his father. Baker testified that after the beating, she was afraid to see Knight.

But Knight came to Baker’s home on April 29, 1944, and demanded she come to his millhouse, where they often drank and stayed together.

She testified she “was afraid to go to the mill,” but asked Knight if he had any liquor. He only had “home-brew.” She preferred whiskey, so he gave her 50 cents to get some. She was to meet him later.

At the mill, they drank the whiskey, but Baker pleaded with Knight to let her go home to her children.

“Do what I tell you to do or I’ll kill you,” Baker claimed Knight said in her testimony.

On Sunday morning, April 30, 1944, Knight went to church and locked Baker in the millhouse. When he returned with dinner and a half-pint of whiskey, Baker again tried to leave. Knight pulled his pistol.

“We got to tussling and I got the pistol away from him,” Baker said.

Baker said when Knight went for the door and reached for an iron bar, she shot him through the head behind his left ear.

“I believe he would have killed me if I had not done what I did,” she said.

In court, witnesses testified no iron bar was found, which left jurors to assume Knight had run for the door out of fear after the 5-foot-4, 135-pound Baker gained control of his gun. Her court-appointed attorney called no witnesses, other than presenting her unsworn, disjointed statement to the court.

It took the jury just six hours to hear the case and convict and sentence Baker to death.

Cook said if this case had happened today, she doubts Baker would have even been charged with murder.

Credit: kdjohnson@ajc.com

Credit: kdjohnson@ajc.com

“The record showed that (Baker) had been a victim of repeated sexual assault and when she shot Ernest Knight she was defending herself. But at that time, she didn’t have a chance with the jury,” said Cook, who has witnessed 28 executions, including the 2015 lethal injection of Kelly Gissendaner, the only other Georgia women to die in the hands of the state. Gissendaner and her boyfriend were convicted of orchestrating the 1997 murder of her husband.

Between 1924 and 1980, an electric chair known as “Old Sparky” put 418 people to death in Georgia. Of the 441 people executed in the state by electric chair through 2001, when the method of death was ruled unconstitutional and replaced by lethal injections, 83% of them were Black.

Just one photo of Baker — her mug shot — is known to exist. It was taken on Feb. 23, 1945, when she arrived at the Reidsville State Prison, which housed “Old Sparky.”

A scarf, tied beneath Baker’s chin, covers her head, which is slightly cocked to the left. She looks blankly at the camera, but the glare from a light obscures her eyes. A number, 11279, is affixed to her.

Credit: COPY

Credit: COPY

Baker appeared calm as she delivered her last words on March 5, 1945.

“What I done, I did in self-defense or I would have been killed myself. Where I was I could not overcome it. God has forgiven me. I have nothing against anyone,” she said. “I am ready to go. … I am ready to meet my God.”

It took six minutes for her to die.

She was buried in an unmarked grave without a church service behind Mount Vernon Missionary Baptist Church in Cuthbert, where she once sang in the choir. Her story vanished.

“It happened so fast and nobody was raising a fuss or saying this is not right,” said John Cole Vodicka, an Athens-based social justice activist. “They put her in jail, prosecuted her, killed her and she was forgotten about.”

Credit: WikiCommons

Credit: WikiCommons

In 1998, members of the Mount Vernon Missionary Baptist Church placed a simple headstone for her grave.

In 2005, after reading articles about Baker, Liddell debuted her play, “Who Will Sing for Lena?” starring Carol Mitchell-Leon in the title role.

“It was just channeling her,” Liddell said. “I read the whole court case, and the end of it was so impactful. It told me that she wanted her voice heard.”

That same year, 60 years after her execution, the state of Georgia granted Baker a formal pardon stating that her execution was “a grievous error, as this case called out for mercy.”

“Her legacy will always be that she was a symbol of a racially unjust system,” said Vodicka, who worked with some of Baker’s descendants on the pardon. “She is one of those folks who we need to remember and know what happened to.”

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This year’s AJC Black History Month series, marking its 10th year, focuses on the role African Americans played in building Atlanta and the overwhelming influence that has had on American culture. These daily offerings appear throughout February in the paper and on AJC.com and AJC.com/news/atlanta-black-history.

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