Rosa Lee Ingram

Black History Month – February 3, 1948

Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper and widowed mother of four boys, was the center of one of the most sensational capital punishment cases in history. On this day in 1948 in a one-day trial, Ingram and two of her teenage boys were sentenced to die by electric chair, after an altercation with a white landowner in the state of Georgia. On November 4, 1947, John Ed Stratford confronted Mrs. 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. As Rosa Lee Ingram fought Stratford off, her teen aged sons rushed to help her, 17-year old Wallace Ingram and 14-year old Sammie Lee Ingram came to her defense after hearing her screams. The teens arrived with farm tools to fight Stratford off their mother. Stratford was killed due to several blows to the head, and local authorities then charged the Ingram family with murder. Rosa Lee and her sons were sentenced to death by electric chair, while another son, Charles was acquitted in a separate trial due to lack of evidence. The sentencing of Ingram and her two sons to die in the electric chair was handed down by an all-white jury. Their executions were scheduled for February 27, 1948, less than three weeks later.

During the trial there were accounts suggesting that Stratford was enraged because Ingram had repeatedly objected to his sexual harassment of her. The trial lasted just one day and was held January 26, 1948 in Ellaville, Georgia. The judge presiding over the case was Judge W M Harper. The attorney representing Mrs. Ingram, S Hawkins Dyke, had been appointed to her the morning of the trial. The case of the Ingram family received national press coverage during the post-World War II era, when the southern justice system and Jim Crow were under 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 her lawyer. When the Ingrams appealed in 1948, Georgia courts reduced the death sentences to life imprisonment. In 1952 and 1955 the family was denied parole. The State Board gave no reason for denying parole. There were many female activists that emerged and kept the fight for Rosa Lee Ingram and her children going, while highlighting the history of white men’s sexual violence against black women. Due to their fight, the family was released on parole in 1959 for being “model prisoners.” Rosa Lee Ingram died in 1980. There is no current information on the whereabouts of her two sons, 17 year old Wallace Ingram and 14-year old Sammie Lee Ingram. The men would be 87 years and 84 years respectively.

Reprint from Hill1News