Lena Baker

Lena Baker was born June 8, 1900, to a poor Black family of sharecroppers and raised near Cuthbert, Georgia. As a youth, she worked for a farmer named J.A. Cox, chopping cotton. Later, Baker and her parents moved into Cuthbert, where Baker worked as a maid to support herself and her three children.

On March 5th, 1945, Lena Baker, a maid, mother of three and former cotton-picker, was the first woman to be executed in the state of Georgia. She was wrongly convicted for killing her white employer, Ernest Knight, after he held her captive for days and threatened to kill her if she went back home to her family. Knight promised to kill Lena Baker with an iron bar. She took his gun in self defense and shot Knight. She immediately reported the incident to the authorities and told them exactly what happened and how she shot him in self defense. She was charged with Capital Murder at trial by an all-white male jury. Baker was the only woman executed by electrocution in Georgia. 60 years later in 2005, Baker was granted an unconditional pardon by the state of Georgia 

Lena Baker was an African American maid who was executed for murder by the State of Georgia in 1945 for killing her employer, Ernest Knight in 1944. Knight was an abusive drunk who forced Baker into sexual slavery, despite her being a mother of three. Baker was the first and only woman to be executed by electrocution in Georgia. In 2005, sixty years after her execution, the state of Georgia granted her a full and unconditional pardon in recognition of her original plea of self-defense