Missing Mamma: The Lena Baker Story

The Pursuit of Justice

Roosevelt Curry glances down at the simple concrete marker over Lena Baker's grave. It doesn't tell much of a story. The inscription simply lists her name, her date of birth June 8, 1900 -- and the date of her death, May 5, 1945. It's not much of a memorial. "We want to put up a better stone so it will always be taken care of so nobody has to watch over it," says Curry. "A better one. A marble one."

But a tombstone isn't a real memorial. It's just a piece of rock, Curry knows. To truly honor the memory of his great-aunt, he says, "I wish I could get a million women up here."

To Curry, the legacy that his great-aunt left behind is one of struggle. The sordid tale of her life in the desperate red-dirt fields and back alleys of Cuthbert, Ga., is a story of a woman fighting for her life. "This is a woman's fight. This is a woman's fight because the lady's rights were violated," he says.

The Lena Baker Story

According to court records, interviews with family members and those who have studied the case, Lena Baker's struggle began the moment she was born into a poor family of black sharecroppers in Cuthbert. "Those were desperate times," says Lela Bond Phillips, a professor at Andrew College in Cuthbert and the author of the book "The Lena Baker Story." The world Lena Baker was born into was a world where women had few rights and where black women had virtually none. Their lives were arranged according to the dictates of men, white men in particular.

As a child, Lena Baker worked with her family chopping cotton for a well-to-do white farmer named Cox. Though the Cox family treated them well, the job didn't pay enough to keep the family fed and clothed, and the occasional work Lena and her mother, Queenie Baker, did as domestics and taking in laundry from other white folks didn't help much.

By the time she was a young woman, Lena Baker had discovered that she had one thing she could trade on, her good looks. In the mid 1920s, according to court documents that Prof. Phillips unearthed, Lena and a friend, another woman from Cuthbert, began entertaining gentlemen callers in exchange for money. Though the tiny brothel they operated scandalized the black community, little would likely have been said about it, except that it was rumored that the partners counted among their clients some of the area's white men. While prostitution-- even as a response to crushing poverty -- was illegal, the white authorities in Cuthbert would likely have ignored the operation if the clientele had been exclusively black, Phillips said.

But because there were rumors of "race mixing" -- an unforgivable crime in rural Georgia in the early 20^th century -- the Randolph County Sheriff felt compelled to act. Baker and her partner were arrested, convicted and spent several horrifying months locked up in the county's dungeon-like workhouse.

When Lena Baker was released from the workhouse, she was, to a great extent, ostracized even by her own community. "I think the black community was embarrassed by her," Phillips says. Though she continued to sing in the church choir on Sundays, the rest of her life was marked by loneliness, isolation, and a growing dependence on the only other solace she could find, alcohol.

Night after night, it is said, Lena Baker would make her way to a back alley near Dawson Street. Baker would find a "colored café," as she would later call it, to suck down store-bought whiskey when she could afford, or homemade sour mash when she couldn't. By the time she was in her forties, she was the mother of three children and, her family now admits, a full-blown alcoholic.

Perhaps, says John Cole Vodicka, the activist founder of The Prison and Jail Project, an inmate advocacy group, Project, it was Lena Baker's vulnerability that led her to the bottle. And maybe it was the liquor that made her even more vulnerable, Vodicka suggests. In any event, Baker soon came under the sway of a gun-toting, whiskey-swilling white man named Ernest B. Knight. She often predicted he would be the death of her.