On June 16, 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. became the youngest American executed in the 20th century after being convicted of a crime he hadn’t committed.
Two white girls, 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker, and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames, went missing after riding their bikes in Alcolu, South Carolina. The following day, George Stinney was arrested, and the horror began.
Stinney became a person of interest after joining the search party for the girls who were later found dead in a ditch. The girls had allegedly stopped by Stinney’s home and asked for help finding a flower. This made him the perfect scapegoat for racists.
But George Stinney was interrogated for hours by white officers who tried to bribe him with an ice cream cone in exchange for a confession. His trial lasted less than two hours without witnesses, evidence, or even a halfway decent lawyer. It took the jury 10 minutes to convict him, and then the judge sentenced him to death. The 95-pound child was strapped into an electric chair at Columbia’s state correctional facility. He had to sit on his own bible because the chair was too big for him.
Innocence and age do not matter to a carceral system that functions to uphold white supremacy. It will accuse and punish anyone it wants to, even Black children.