On This Day in History: June 16

The criminal execution of George Stinney

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He wasn’t executed. He was murdered. It was state-sanctioned murder.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 16, 1944—

In March of 1944, in the small town of Alcolu, South Carolina, two young white girls were found brutally murdered. Their names were Betty June Binniker, age eleven, and Mary Emma Thames, age seven. Alcolu was a working-class mill town, with racial segregation marked by a set of railroad tracks. There was little interaction between Black and white.

The girls had been riding their bicycles, seeking flowers to pick. As they passed by the Stinney house, they asked fourteen-year-old George and his little sister Aimé where they could find maypops. The girls were later found dead in a ditch from blunt-force trauma to their heads. Aimé said George was with her at the time of the murders, but police were looking for someone to pin them on.

The police showed up to the Stinney house while the parents weren’t home. Sister Aimé hid in the chicken coop as both George and his older brother Johnnie were hauled away in handcuffs.

Johnnie was later released, but George was questioned alone in a small room, without his parents or an attorney. Police claimed he confessed to the murders, but no evidence of a confession exists. He was kept prisoner for weeks without being permitted to see his parents. On April 24 there was a two-hour trial. George’s court-appointed attorney had political ambitions and did not question the police, who proclaimed that George had confessed. Neither did he call George’s sister as an alibi. After ten minutes of deliberation by an all-white jury, George Stinney was found guilty. George’s piece-of-shit attorney didn’t even bother to appeal.

On June 16, 1944, George Stinney was murdered by the state of South Carolina. The weapon used was the electric chair. He was only five feet tall and under a hundred pounds; the straps on the chair were too large for his small body, and prison officials used the Bible he was carrying as a booster seat. During electrocution, his bodily convulsions caused the mask to fall from his face, revealing a burned scalp and tears streaming from his eyes. Two additional jolts and eight minutes later, his teeth smoking, and one eye boiled away, he was finally pronounced dead. He wasn’t just murdered; he was tortured to death.

Seventy years later a circuit court judge proclaimed that George Stinney had not received a fair trial and vacated his conviction.

Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.