The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth by Kristin Henning

Author:Kristin Henning [Henning, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Public Policy, Social Policy, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, sociology, General, Penology
ISBN: 9781524748906
Google: m1lFEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-15T23:47:00.768915+00:00

10

The Dehumanization of Black Youth: When the Children Aren’t Children Anymore

george and willie must die: killing black innocence

On March 23, 1944, police officers came to find fourteen-year-old George Stinney at his home in Alcolu, South Carolina. The police were convinced he had brutally murdered two young girls by beating them over the head with a metal spike and dumping them in a muddy ditch.1 George and his seven-year-old sister, Aime, were said to be the last ones to have seen the girls alive. George and Aime were Black. The murdered girls were White. The girls were last seen riding their bicycles looking for flowers. George was barely five feet tall and did not yet weigh a hundred pounds.

Alcolu was a small, racially segregated sawmill town. Whites and Blacks lived on opposite sides of the railroad tracks and attended separate schools and churches. George lived with his parents and four siblings. The Stinneys lived in housing provided by George Sr.’s employer at the sawmill. George’s parents weren’t home when the police came, but his seventeen-year-old brother, Johnny, was. The police took them both away in handcuffs. The police eventually released Johnny, but they held on to George.

Police questioned George alone in a small room without his parents and without an attorney. The officers claimed he confessed to killing eleven-year-old Betty June Binnicker and eight-year-old Mary Emma Thames. Consistent with the pervasive stereotypes about Black boys in the 1940s, the police, the politicians, and the public were convinced that George killed Mary Emma to have sex with Betty June.2 Police later claimed he admitted as much in a confession. None of this was supported by the medical evidence or the officer’s initial recounting of the confession. There was no written record of any admission, and there was no evidence that the girls had been sexually assaulted.

Prosecutors charged George with two counts of first-degree murder. The court appointed Charles Plowden, a tax commissioner campaigning for election to local political office, to represent George. The trial lasted two and a half hours on April 24, 1944, with six witnesses and no transcript of the proceedings. The courtroom was packed with more than 1,000 people, but Blacks were not allowed inside. George’s attorney did not cross-examine the prosecutor’s witnesses and did not call any witnesses on George’s behalf. The all-White jury decided George was guilty in ten minutes.

George was executed at 7:30 p.m. on June 16—less than three months after he was accused. George was the youngest person in America to be put to death by the electric chair. News accounts at the time reported that the straps on the chair were too big for George’s tiny body and that he had to sit on books to reach the headpiece.3 When the switch was flipped, the convulsions knocked down the mask and exposed George’s tears. He was pronounced dead within four minutes of the initial shock.

According to George’s former cellmate, Wilford Hunter, George denied the charges until his execution and couldn’t understand why they would kill him for something he didn’t do.

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