09/13/2026
Georgia put a Black mother in the electric chair for killing the man she said had trapped her and threatened her life. Sixty years later, the state admitted it had made a grievous error.
Lena Baker was 44 years old.
She was a mother of three who worked exhausting jobs—picking cotton, cleaning houses and doing laundry—to keep her family alive.
Then she took a job caring for Ernest B. Knight, a white gristmill owner recovering from a broken leg.
What happened afterward was not simply an employer-employee relationship.
According to Baker's testimony, Knight began locking her inside the mill, preventing her from leaving. On April 29, 1944, she tried to get away. Knight found her and brought her back.
Later that night, Baker said she told him she was leaving.
That's when the situation turned deadly.
Knight reportedly grabbed an iron bar used to secure the door.
Baker testified that she feared for her life and tried to escape. During the struggle, the two fought over a pistol.
The gun fired.
Knight was dead.
And Lena Baker did something that would later become crucial to her story:
She didn't run.
She went to a nearby home and reported that she had killed Knight.
She said she had done it in self-defense.
But this was Georgia in 1944.
Lena Baker was a Black woman.
Ernest Knight was white.
And the justice system that would decide her fate was anything but equal.
Her murder trial began on August 14, 1944.
It lasted less than a day.
An all-white jury found her guilty and sentenced her to death.
Governor Ellis Arnall temporarily delayed the ex*****on so the Board of Pardons and Paroles could review her case.
The board ultimately denied clemency.
Her ex*****on was scheduled for March 5, 1945.
And on that morning, Lena Baker was taken to Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.
She was strapped into the electric chair.
At 11:26 a.m., she was dead.
Lena Baker became the first and only woman executed by electrocution in Georgia.
Her final words remained consistent with the defense she had given from the beginning: she said she had acted in self-defense because she believed she would otherwise be killed.
Then came the silence.
For decades, Lena Baker's name faded from public memory.
But her family didn't forget.
Neither did the people who believed that the punishment had never matched the circumstances surrounding her case.
In 2005—60 years after her ex*****on—Lena Baker's family received something that should have come much sooner.
A pardon.
On August 30, 2005, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Baker a posthumous pardon.
But even that decision carried an important distinction.
The board did not declare her innocent.
Instead, it concluded that denying her clemency in 1945 had been a “grievous error” and that her case called for mercy.
Think about that.
Georgia had executed her.
Then, six decades later, Georgia acknowledged that she should have received mercy.
The pardon could not bring Lena back.
It could not return her to her three children.
It could not erase the fear she described or the hurried trial that ended her life.
It could only put the state's own acknowledgment on the historical record.
Lena Baker wasn't simply a name on an ex*****on list.
She was a mother.
She was a working woman.
She was a Black woman living under segregation.
And she was a woman who insisted until her final moments that she had fought to survive.
Georgia took her life in 1945.
Sixty years later, Georgia admitted that it had been a grievous error.
