The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South

By Eli Faber and Carol Berkin

The tragic story of the killing of 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century

At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century.

How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's contemporaries—men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state—Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice.

The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived—the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty.

As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time.

A foreword is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643361956

Book preview

The Child in the Electric Chair

The Child in the Electric Chair

The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South

Eli Faber Foreword by Carol Berkin

© 2021 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-194-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-195-6 (ebook)

Front cover photograph

George Stinney Jr., 1944. Dept. of Corrections, Central Correctional Institution, Record of Prisoners Awaiting Execution. Inmate George Stinney, File #260. South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

In Honor of

Carol Ruth Berkin

Scholar, Teacher, Friend Extraordinaire

In Memory of

Gail Kotler

Brave, Compassionate, Wise

Daniel A. Sarot

He Never Gave Up

I give special thanks again, again, and again to my wife, Lani, for her undaunted love and support. Her help and constant friendship have made all the difference in my life and in the life of this project.

Justice: Justice shalt thou pursue.

Deuteronomy, 16:20

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Carol Berkin

Note on Sources

Ave Atque Vale

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Photo of George Stinney Jr., 1944

George Stinney certificate of execution

Alcolu lumber mill complex

Handwritten testimony in Stinney case

Murder indictments against George Stinney

Clarendon County Courthouse

Department of Corrections Records

Evidence from Stinney indictment file

George Stinney’s fingerprints

Acknowledgments

Lani Faber knew her husband’s wishes well. She made a list of all those who Eli would have wanted thanked in his acknowledgments. This list includes Robert Alderman, descendent of the Alderman family who founded Alcolu and whose friendship opened many of the doors of Alcolu’s residents to the author. It also includes Eli’s longtime friends, Barry Latzer and Avi Mendelowitz, who provided much-needed legal information and advice about criminal law procedures. Ben Krull and Peter Freedman read the book as it progressed, offering suggestions about organization and style, while Tom Litwick, Ken Moran, Louis Lainer, and Lydia Rosner listened with patience and encouragement as Eli thought through thorny issues of analysis and structure. Scott Chen kept Eli’s computer operating smoothly, ensuring that cyberdemons neither invaded nor carried manuscript pages off into cyberspace; the New York Public Library staff provided Eli with a home away from home during the long years of research and writing. Thanks also go to the anonymous peer reviewers whose careful reading of the draft manuscript provided critical editorial suggestions that guided both Eli’s editor and Carol Berkin in producing the final version of the book. Lani Faber is especially grateful to Dr. Alice Zervoudakis and her staff at Memorial Sloan Kettering, whose herculean efforts gave Eli the time he needed to finish eight chapters of the manuscript.

Carol Berkin joins Lani Faber in thanking Cecelia Hartsell for doing the arduous work of compiling an index and all the staff at the University of South Carolina Press whose admirable skill turned the manuscript into a printed book. Finally, we both thank Ehren Foley, editor extraordinaire, for his enthusiasm for the project and his steadfast belief in its importance. In Ehren, Eli would have surely found his kindred spirit.

Foreword

Eli Faber and I met in graduate school, during the tumultuous years of antiwar protest, the rise of the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the occupation of college campus buildings by angry students. The friendship that quickly emerged between us was a bit of a surprise to us both—I was a proud lefty, quick to form my political opinions, always ready to join a picket line or a march in Washington, emotionally committed to that vision of a perfected world that defined much of my generation; Eli was intellectually though not actively engaged with all the same issues of the day, but he was maddeningly willing to see the complexities and ambiguities of our nation’s political life. Yet, even in these early years, I recognized that Eli was that rare person, a man both honorable and sincere, a thoughtful man who did not wear his deep empathy for others on his sleeve or shout his intense commitment to justice from any rooftop. Luckily for me, our friendship lasted over fifty years.

When, a decade ago, Eli told me he was working on a book about South Carolina’s 1944 execution of a young African American boy, I had misgivings. Historian and subject seemed a bad fit: Eli’s roots were in Queens, New York, and he had lived a life untouched by violence or by the deep racial hatred that I, who grew up in Alabama in the 1940s and 50s, knew all too well. Could he make the necessary connection to the residents of small-town South Carolina, Black or White, he planned to interview? Would he understand the culture of the rural South? I needn’t have feared. The people he interviewed in Alcolu and Stinney’s aging siblings saw in Eli what I had seen so many years before: his sincere interest in understanding events and the people who were caught up in them. Eli knew how to listen—and thus they talked.

Eli worked on this book patiently. He scoured South Carolina archives and newspapers for accounts of the murder of the two young girls and the trial and execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. He interviewed eyewitnesses and poured over the interviews collected by another scholar years ago. Eli contacted Stinney family members, who were at first reluctant to share their memories with him but soon warmed to the project. He carefully and deeply read the literature on Jim Crow, lynching, and life in the mill towns of the South. Throughout these years, he labored to understand the motives and the actions of the men and women involved in Stinney’s brief life and capture the cultural and social context in which the tragedy played out. As he at last began to write The Child in the Electric Chair, Eli confessed to me that the most difficult part of this project was coming to terms with the fact that he would never truly know the guilt or innocence of this fourteen-year-old boy who was convicted of murder. Yet he never doubted that Stinney’s story must be told.

In the Fall of 2019, Eli called me with the terrible news: He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that February. Through all the chemo treatments, the doctor visits, and a bout with the COVID-19 virus, Eli continued to work on the book. He was not afraid of what lay ahead for him; he was only fearful that he would not have time to finish telling George Junius Stinney Jr.’s story.

In January 2020, when he knew he was losing his battle with cancer, he called me with a request: Would I use his notes to write the final chapter, edit the manuscript, find a publisher, and see the book through to publication? I agreed. By the end of April, Eli was gone.

I kept my promise. I kept it not merely as an act of friendship—which it was—but also because, as I read the manuscript, I knew Eli had been right. I had in my keeping an important story that needed to be shared. In the current era of rising racism and the challenge to it by Black Lives Matter activists, our nation must finally reckon its past if it hopes to justly shape its future. I believe George Junius Stinney Jr.’s story can help us grapple with this task. Eli Faber wrote this book because he believed it too.

Note on Sources

Writing about the life of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the times in which he lived has been a project requiring many years of gestation, not least because of the scarcity of original sources that historians regularly rely upon. No written accounts or memoirs by individuals who participated in the case or who were otherwise present at the time are known to exist, save for the recollections of an individual who was sixteen years old in 1944, the year of the dual murders of two young girls in the village of Alcolu, South Carolina, and the execution of fourteen-year-old George Stinney, which ensued only eighty-three days later. Contemporary newspaper accounts are few in number; investigative reporting by journalists is entirely nonexistent, in contrast to the mountain of coverage that a death sentence imposed upon a fourteen-year-old would actually happen, were such an event at all possible in today’s world. Above all, there is no transcript of Stinney’s trial because there was no appeal of the case to higher courts.

Interviews with individuals present in 1944 in Alcolu, South Carolina, have therefore been a source of inestimable importance in the effort to reconstruct what occurred and why. Paramount among these have been the interviews with Robert Lewis Alderman, a fourth-generation member of the family that established Alcolu, who has devoted much of his time and energy to preserving the history of the beloved village where he spent his early years. By opening many doors for interviews with other residents of Alcolu, both past and present, Alderman in effect functioned as the village elder who made the interviewing process feasible. I am indebted to him for his confidence in my efforts to comprehend the life and times of George Junius Stinney Jr. as well as to the gracious and welcoming receptions I received from the parties I was recommended to interview, and to the individuals whom I found on my own who were willing to speak with me. In many cases, they opened their homes to me for my interviews with them.

Interviews with three of George Stinney’s immediate family members were crucial for comprehending much and for adding many poignant details: his brother, Charles Stinney, the youngest member of the family; Katherine Stinney Robinson, the oldest of his two sisters; and her daughter, Norma Jean Robinson. All who read about and contemplate George Stinney’s life and times should be deeply grateful to them for their willingness to share their painful recollections of the catastrophe that engulfed their family in March 1944, which affected their lives forever after.

In January 2014, Katherine Stinney Robinson and Charles Stinney, together with their sister, Amie Ruffner, provided extensive additional information about what they witnessed and heard almost seventy years before on March 24–25, 1944, when they testified under oath before a special court that convened in Sumter, South Carolina, to determine whether their brother had received a fair and impartial trial. This unusual proceeding is described here in the epilogue, but the testimony of the three siblings is woven earlier into the account of what transpired on those two fateful days in their family’s life.

Many of these living sources pale in comparison to the significance of a set of seven interviews conducted in 1983, thirty-nine years after George Stinney’s execution, by David I. Bruck, an eminent criminal lawyer widely known for his work representing indigent clients who have been sentenced to death. In several instances, Bruck has pleaded their cases before the US Supreme Court. In 1985, Bruck published an article in the opinions section of the Washington Post in which he argued against provisions in twenty-six states that allowed juveniles under the age of eighteen to be sentenced to death. The shocking example of George Stinney provided Bruck with powerful ammunition. While preparing his essay, he was able to interview key participants and observers who were present in Alcolu in 1944, whose recollections go far in addressing the absence of in-depth newspaper reports and, especially, the absence of a transcript of the trial. The seven were the older sister of one of the two murder victims; the state constable who arrested Stinney; the son of the county’s sheriff, who, at the age of seventeen, witnessed the execution; a member of the enraged crowd clamoring to lynch him; the member of a well-known family in the village, who attempted to see Stinney in the jail in which he was held after his arrest, posing a distinct threat to his life; one of Stinney’s court-appointed defense attorneys; and, perhaps most important of all, the foreman of the jury that found him guilty after only ten minutes of deliberation. The transcripts of these invaluable interviews are part of the David I. Bruck Collection in the South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina. So far as is known, they have escaped the attention of the many interested parties who have been drawn to the case of George Stinney in the aftermath of his tragic end, as well as to the violent deaths of the two young girls who were murdered in Alcolu on March 24, 1944.

Several of the individuals whom Bruck interviewed in 1983 had no hesitation in freely using the N word. As ugly as it is, as unacceptable as it is in decent society, the entire word has been spelled out when citing their statements in order to preserve the authenticity of their voices, as well as the sentiments that lay behind their utterances. The same policy has been applied when citing original sources in other locations, notably in chapter 4 (Postponing a Lynching). The goal throughout has been to adhere with fidelity to what has been a part of our history that ought not to be softened.

Chapter 1

June 16, 1944

Don’t really remember that much…. I remember wanted to get out of there. I wanted to get out of there bad.

Lt. James E. Gamble recalling the execution of George Stinney Jr.

June 16, 1944. Friday—the day of the week for executions in the State of South Carolina.

In France, American forces maintained their momentum ten days after the landings on D-Day, pushing forward against the German army and toward the port of Cherbourg. Across the south of England, rockets carrying bombs, hailed by Germany as its secret weapon, rained down from the skies for the first time; they were so new that the press called them robot bombers. On the other side of the world in the Pacific, the Marines gained a half mile in savage fighting on the island of Saipan, while B-29 Superfortress bombers attacked the Japanese mainland for the first time, hitting Japan’s steel-manufacturing center. And in Washington, DC, southern senators assailed the Fair Employment Practices Committee, while the House rejected proposals affecting funding for several Cabinet departments.¹

In Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, Governor Olin DeWitt Johnston continued to hone his plans for winning his race for the US Senate. The campaign, in which the contenders debated each other in successive appearances across the state, had commenced two days before. Johnston’s decision to run would seal the fate of the fourteen-year-old African American youth, who on the morning of the sixteenth, awaited execution on death row a few miles away in the state penitentiary. South Carolina juries had twice before condemned fourteen-year-old boys to death, but in neither case was that sentence carried out. This time, it would be. George Junius Stinney Jr. would thus become the youngest person executed during the twentieth century in the United States of America.²

Less than three months before, on March 24, a double murder had been committed in a small village in Clarendon County, approximately fifty miles southeast of Columbia. Two young White girls—one eleven years old, the other seven—had been found bludgeoned to death; and Stinney, an African American, had quickly been arrested on suspicion of having murdered them. Fury surged in the village in the hours after the arrest, and there was talk of taking care of the matter without time wasted on a trial, but the lynching had been averted. The case against Stinney proceeded according to what were then the prevailing norms of the legal system.³

Two local physicians conducted examinations of the corpses and submitted their findings to a coroner’s jury, which then ruled the two girls had indeed been murdered. Because the county’s criminal court was not scheduled to meet for another three months, a special term was convened in late April to try the accused for the murder of the older of the two girls. The court met on April 24, disposed first of seven lesser criminal cases, and then, in the climax of the special session, turned to the trial of the fourteen-year-old. A jury was empaneled and heard the prosecution’s case and then a plea for mercy from the two court appointed defense attorneys. The jury deliberated for less than ten minutes; the verdict they delivered was guilty. The presiding judge pronounced the sentence of death and directed that it be administered on June 16.

George Stinney was transported to the state’s penitentiary in Columbia and housed on Tier F, the prison’s most isolated and secure section. Tier F housed five other men, one of whom was scheduled for electrocution on the same morning as Stinney. In the weeks leading to the day of execution, Tier F’s inmates were said to spend much of their time reading the Bible and singing hymns. It was said that one of the five older prisoners gave the boy a Bible, which he reportedly read a great deal of the time.⁴

A photographer in the prison’s administration department took two pictures of every person who entered the institution to serve time there—or to be electrocuted. The two photographs of George Stinney underscore his youthfulness. He is dressed in black-and-white-striped prison clothing that hung loosely on his thin body. His childlike face belies his age of fourteen. In the profile view snapped by the photographer, Stinney’s right shoulder is so slight that it suggests the possibility that he had not yet reached puberty. He stood only five feet, one inch, tall and he weighed only ninety-five pounds. His slight size would figure gruesomely during his execution.⁵

George Stinney Jr., 1944. Dept. of Corrections, Central Correctional Institution, Record of Prisoners Awaiting Execution. Inmate George Stinney, File #260. South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

Following the state’s execution protocol, on the morning of June 7, the prison’s authorities removed Stinney and the second inmate scheduled for electrocution from Tier F and transferred them to the death house. This was a small brick building that contained two rooms: the execution chamber, a small space that held the electric chair, and an adjoining room with six cells secured by heavy bars. This had been the site of all executions since 1912, when South Carolina replaced hanging with the electric chair. Four days after the transfer, several of Stinney’s relatives visited him in his death-house cell. This may have been the only occasion since his arrest at the end of March that the boy saw members of his family. The prison’s White chaplain, as well as an African American chaplain, visited him and his condemned fellow inmate regularly. On at least one occasion, the White chaplain reported finding the two condemned men reading Bibles and singing hymns. Both of them assured him that, spiritually, they were ready to die. The chairman of the State Pardon and Parole Board also visited Stinney and later announced that he could find no reason to recommend to the governor that the boy’s sentence be commuted to life in prison. Pleas to spare his life had been arriving at the governor’s office from all over South Carolina as well as from other states, but the petitions, letters, and telegrams apparently had little, if any, effect upon the Pardon and Parole Board member. In the end, they did not dissuade the governor from carrying out the death sentence either.⁶

Three days before the death penalty was to be administered, the penitentiary’s captain of the guard, charged with supervising all preparations for the double execution, entered the death house and obtained what one newspaper characterized as a full confession from Stinney:

Which one did you kill first?…

The smaller girl….

Then I hit the big one.

What did you hit them with?

A piece of iron….⁷

On the day before his execution, two chaplains again visited the condemned child. That night, the governor of the state reportedly also visited. According to newspaper accounts, Stinney slept soundly on that final night. At some point on the morning of the execution, the two chaplains visited with him one last time, and later reported that he had been entirely calm. At 7:00 a.m., a half hour before the time set for his electrocution, the sheriff of Clarendon County entered the death house and conducted his own final interview:

George, you know that