It was a long ride back from the prison morgue at Reidsville to the tiny western Georgia town of Cuthbert. As aside from the humming of the tires of the undertaker's car, there was nothing to break the monotony of red-dirt field after red-dirt field sliding by under an endlessly gray March sky.

The undertaker could imagine that, under different circumstances, Lena Baker might have found cause to sing as she made her way between the exhausted cotton fields. She might have broken into one of those old Negro spirituals she had learned when she was a member of the choir at the Mount Vernon Baptist Church. She might have sung "Goin' Home." Even after the whiskey had taken its toll on everything else in her life, Lena had always been able to sing.

Lena Baker, prison photo

The undertaker glanced in the rear-view mirror and studied the plain pine box in the back of his station wagon, the state-issued casket that Lena's body had been poured into a few hours earlier after the doctor had pronounced her dead and the executioner had unstrapped her from the chair. There had been no singing at the prison. Perhaps there was a murmured prayer for the souls of the warden, the judge and the executioner; and perhaps one for Lena. She had even delivered her own eulogy, such as it was, as she calmly walked into the execution chamber, sat straight-backed in the chair and without a hint of fear in her voice, said simply "I have nothing against anyone. I'm ready to meet my God."

There would be nothing to add to that back in Cuthbert. Even if there were a good word to be offered, there would be no one kind enough or brave enough to offer it. The upstanding white people of Cuthbert didn't even want Lena Baker's remains returned to the town where she had grown up and cut cotton and where she had lived for almost all of her 44 years. Most of the black folks were afraid to say anything at all about Lena. After all, she had killed a white man. Even her own family, all but her mother, had scattered for fear of retribution after her conviction. It took courage on the part of the undertaker to defy the town's white fathers to drive to Reidsville and claim Lena's body.

Never mind that the man she had killed, Ernest B. Knight, had stalked her and held her as a virtual sex slave. Never mind that he had often threatened her life with a pistol, the same pistol that had finally been used to kill him. Never mind that Lena had claimed that she killed the man in self-defense. It didn't even matter that most of the good white people detested Knight, viewing him as brutal, abusive and even a little dangerous. All that mattered in Cuthbert was that a black woman had killed a white man. And in Georgia in 1944, there was only one way to deal with a woman like Lena Baker. "Legal Electrocution," is the way it was described on the bottom of Lena's death certificate. Legal electrocution and then burial in a plain pine box in an unmarked grave, a sinking patch of weeds at the overgrown edge of the cemetery at the Mount Vernon Baptist Church.

It would take nearly six decades before anyone would clear away the weeds over Lena Baker's grave, six decades before anyone would root out the dusty old case files and study them. Six decades before anyone would publicly raise the question of whether Lena Baker had been given justice.

More than 50 years after Lena Baker was killed by the state of Georgia, the members of the Mount Vernon Baptist Church, joined by the remnants of the Baker family, and even a few of the white folks from around Cuthbert, Ga., would still gather at Lena Baker's grave. They'd say a few prayers, and they'd sing a few songs -- the songs Lena sang in the choir.

Relatives of Lena Baker at grave