The Exoneration of Lena Baker

Mugshot Series: The Exoneration of Lena Baker 30 x 40 Acrylic/Gold Leaf 2019

I don’t remember when I first read about Lena Baker but just like George Stinney, Jr., her mugshot and story stuck with me for a while. They both were rural southerners murdered by our system of justice in the 1940’s. George was killed in the state that I currently live, South Carolina, and Lena was killed in Georgia, where I was born. They both were exonerated many years after their death.

Lena Baker was born the same year as my maternal grandmother in 1900 to a sharecropper family. She was the was the mother of three children. She was working as a maid and caretaker in 1945 when she was convicted of killing a white man, who was also her employer in Cuthbert, Georgia. The local paper reported that Baker was held as a “slave woman” and that she shot him in self-defense during a struggle. She was the only woman to be executed by electrocution in the state. She was exonerated in 2005, sixty years after her death.

Her story is told in the book, The Lena Baker Story, by Dr. Lela Bond Phillips, which was adapted for a movie starring Tichina Arnold. If you can’t find the book or movie, just google her name for more information.

I attempted to honor Baker by allowing you to see her eyes. The eyes are the window to our soul. I’ve also honored her in the same manner as I did George Stinney, with a halo. This was my first time experimenting with gold leaf and acrylic paint.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”