Rosa Lee Ingram

                                      Rosa Lee Ingram

    When Rosa Lee Ingram and her two sons received the death penalty in 1948 for murdering a white landowner in rural Georgia, civil rights activists from across the nation rushed to her defense.  The Ingram case represented an example of the emerging Cold War politics of racial protest and helped trigger local challenges to Jim Crow in the southwest corner of Georgia.

Rosa Lee Ingram, was an African American sharecropper and widowed mother of 12 children, was the center of one of the most-explosive capital punishment cases in history near the small town of Ellaville Ga.In 1948 in a one-day trial, Ingram and two of her teenage boys were sentenced to die by the electric chair, after an altercation with a White landowner in the state of Georgia.

On November 4, 1947, Rosa Ingram farmed adjoining lots with white sharecropper John Ed Stratford. Ingram bred Stratford’s livestock.  Stratford confronted Ingram, accusing her of allowing her livestock to roam freely on his land. When Ingram reminded Stratford that both the livestock and the land were owned by their landlord, he struck her with a gun.  Several of Mrs. Ingram’s sons came to her defense. Mrs. Ingram, along with her sons Charles (age 17), Wallace (age 16), Sammie Lee (age 14), and James (age 12) were arrested. James was eventually released. . John Stratford was armed with a shotgun and pocket knife when he went to have his word with Ingram. When Ingram’s boys overheard their mother yelling then rushed over to her armed with farm instruments. Later, the 64-year-old man was found dead by way of blows to the head according to the investigation.

In several accounts and most notably in author Janus Adams‘ “Sister Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African-American Women’s History,” it was said that Stratford struck Ingram in the head with the butt of his rifle after threatening to shoot her mules that allegedly invaded his cornfield. Other historical accounts state that according to later testimony, though, Stratford threatened Ingram with sexual assault before striking her.

The sentencing of Ingram and her two sons to die in the electric chair was handed down by an all-white jury on February 7, 1948. When their executions were scheduled for February 27, 1948, less than three weeks later, the country erupted in protests against the trial, which had been conducted in haste and secrecy, and the sentences.

The Ingram case received national press attention during the post-World War II era when the southern justice system and Jim Crow itself were under new scrutiny.  Members of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rushed down to appeal the verdict, providing support to local white lawyer appointed to the case, S. Hawkins Dykes.  The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a left-based organization, also became involved in raising funds for the Ingrams and publicizing their cause but also generating tensions with the NAACP which harkened back to the political splits seen in the Scottsboro cases of the 1930s.  When the Ingrams appealed in 1948, Georgia courts reduced the death sentences to life imprisonment but refused to take further action.  The NAACP and the CRC’s formal protests thus increasingly stalled due to both strategy conflicts and the continuing power of the southern legal system.

A second wave of protests ensued after the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the Ingrams’ life sentences.  Despite continued protests from Civil Rights organizations on the basis of the extenuating circumstances (e.g. that Mr. Stratford had sexually assaulted Ingram and her children were responding in self-defense), in 1952, the Georgia pardon and parole board refused to free Ingram and her two sons.  When Sojourners for Truth and Justice came to visit Georgia governor Herman Talmadge in January 1953 to plead for the Ingrams’ release, they were turned away by the governor’s wife, who told them the governor was out hunting.  In 1955, the Ingrams were again denied parole. The State Board gave no reason for denying parole.

At this point, female activists emerged as a critical political voice on behalf of Rosa Lee Ingram and her sons, often working across traditional alliances of race and class.  For example, the CRC supported the creation of the National Committee to Free the Ingram Family which was headed by Mary Church Terrell, long a leader of the black women’s club movement. This group petitioned the United Nations to address the Ingram case as both a matter of human rights and women’s rights.  Other groups such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice linked the Ingram case to the failures of the southern legal system, calling upon President Harry Truman to take action.

The Ingrams were defended by the Civil Rights Congress, as well as Sojourners for Truth and Justice. As historian Erik S. McDuffie notes, the case galvanized black left feminists, highlighting the specific forms of oppression experienced by poor black women, as well as foregrounding the history of white men’s sexual violence against black women. According to McDuffie, “Ingram’s case represented in glaring terms the interlocking systems of oppression suffered by African American women: the painful memories of and the continued day-to-day sexual violence committed against black women’s bodies by white men, the lack of protection for and the disrespect of black motherhood, the economic exploitation of black working-class women, and the disfranchisement of black women in the Jim Crow South.” Black progressive women were the leaders of the global campaign to free the Ingrams.

 The Ingrams were finally released on parole in 1959 after having been judged to be “model prisoners.”  The activism surrounding the case revealed real tensions over leadership and left-based politics but it also demonstrated women’s efforts to highlight gendered critiques of Jim Crow.

Wallace Ingram (from left) stands with Rosa Lee Ingram, Samuel Ingram and Clayton R. Yates.

  Information sorces:
   BlackPast.org , Wikipedia the free encyclopedia , newsone.com , The  American Journal of Legal History ,