The Child in the Electric Chair

An unusual number of white women packed the gallery during the 1944 trial of George Stinney Jr., a fourteen-year-old Black boy charged with murdering two white girls in Clarendon County, South Carolina. The reason? Their purses concealed guns their husbands planned to use to kill Stinney if the boy was acquitted. But after the daylong trial, the jury took ten minutes to find Stinney guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. With no funds for an appeal, Stinney died in the state's electric chair eighty-three days after he was charged with the crime—one of the youngest juveniles executed in the twentieth century. The late historian Eli Faber tells Stinney's story in The Child in the Electric Chair, a microhistory of the death penalty in the mid-twentieth-century South that is at once harrowing and erudite. In many ways, the case exemplified the Jim Crow injustice visited upon Black boys and men accused of terrible crimes against white people: legal proceedings conducted in an atmosphere of potential violence, a publicly appointed defense counsel offering little defense of their client, and an all-white jury. But Stinney's age made the situation different. Pleas for mercy flooded Gov. Olin Johnston's office. “Beseech you spare young George Stinney child execution is only for [Adolf] Hitler,” one woman wrote (p. 107). She was one of a dozen letter writers who compared his execution to Nazi actions

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