George Stinney Was Executed By South Carolina At Age 14

This story has haunted me ever since I saw it mentioned on the front page of The West Side Spirit (June 10-16, 2021, "Eli's Final Chapter"). In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney, an African-American, was put to death by the State of South Carolina, writes Ben Krull, "accused of murdering two white girls, ages seven and 11." After what Krull calls a "slipshod one-day trial," Stinney was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair "based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence." The death sentence was carried out within three months, which did not give Stinney a chance for a retrial.

This case is the subject of a book by the late Eli Faber called The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South. Faber was a retired professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The book was published on June 25, 2021 by the University of South Carolina Press.

This is the first time I ever heard of a person so young going to the electric chair. It should come as no surprise that in a Southern state like South Carolina, the life of a black person, adult or child, had no value.

The Child in the Electric Chair deserves to be read. It also deserves to be adapted into a major motion picture, showing the cruelty, injustice, and bloodthirstiness of the Jim Crow South. This book should give advocates of the death penalty an opportunity to reconsider its use and to acknowledge the barbarism of the death penalty.