Lena Baker — The Woman Georgia Executed for Surviving In the Jim Crow South of the 1940s, Lena Baker was a poor Black mother of three, doing everything she could to keep her children fed in a world where poverty and prejudice worked hand in hand. She scrubbed floors, washed clothes, and took whatever work she could find. When she was hired to care for a white mill owner named Ernest Knight, she thought it was another job ,hard maybe, but honest. She didn’t know she was walking into captivity. Kn