Baker, Lena, 1900-1945

LC control no.	n 2002093298
Descriptive conventions	rda
Personal name heading	Baker, Lena, 1900-1945 *Browse this term in* LC Authorities or the LC Catalog
Associated country	United States
Birth date	1900-06-08
Death date	1945-03-05
Place of birth	Cuthbert (Ga.)
Place of death	Cuthbert (Ga.)
Field of activity	Housekeeping
Affiliation	Mount Vernon Baptist Church (Cuthbert, Ga.)
Profession or occupation	Laundresses Household employees Prostitutes
Found in	Phillips, Lela Bond. The Lena Baker story, 2001: title page (Lena Baker) pge 89, etc. (born June 8, 1900; died March 5, 1945) New Georgia encyclopedia website, February 23, 2011: Lena Baker case (Lena Baker was the first and only woman to be executed in Georgia's electric chair. She was executed in 1945, after she was convicted of murdering a man who had imprisoned her; Lena Baker was born in 1900 in the small community of Cotton Hill) African American national biography, accessed December 11, 2014, via Oxford African American Studies Center database (Baker, Lena; laundress, domestic servant, brothel keeper, murderer; born 08 June 1900 in Cuthbert, Georgia, United States; worked as a laundress and occasional domestic for white families; regularly attended Cuthbert's Mount Vernon Baptist Church, where she sang in the choir; began to operate a small brothel in Cuthbert (1920s); arrested for prostitution and sentenced to several months in the workhouse; returned to Cuthbert to work as a domestic and to raise three children; isolated, she turned increasingly to alcohol; began working for Ernest B. Knight (1940s); had a violent, chaotic, and fueled by alcohol relationship; admitted to the county coroner that she killed Knight with a pistol in self-defense; on 14 August 1944 an all-white, all-male jury found her guilty of the capital murder of Ernest Knight; the trial lasted only a few hours; her attorney's appeals for clemency were swiftly dismissed; on 5 March 1945 she became the first woman to die in Georgia's electric chair; the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles apologized for the state's refusal to grant her clemency sixty years later (2005); died 05 March 1945 in Cuthbert, Georgia, United States)