Rosa Lee Ingram was a widowed African American mother of twelve children and a hardworking sharecropper who lived in the deep South during one of the harshest times for Black women in America. In the 1940s, her name became known across the country after she and two of her sons were sentenced to death for defending themselves against a white man. What followed was a story of pain, bravery, and the struggle for justice.
Rosa Lee Ingram was born on July 23, 1902, in Georgia. She lived in the deep South during a time when Black women were doubly oppressed, by race and by gender. As a widowed mother, she struggled to provide for her twelve children through the backbreaking labor of sharecropping. She farmed land near Ellaville, Georgia, next to a white sharecropper named John Ed Stratford. Their lives intersected daily through the backbreaking work of farming, but Rosa Lee’s position as a Black woman under Jim Crow law left her vulnerable to Stratford’s unwanted advances.
Reports from the Pittsburgh Courier later revealed that Stratford had been trying to force himself on Rosa Lee for some time. She refused him every time, and this bruised his ego. Like many white men of that era, Stratford believed that a Black woman’s body was his to use. Rosa Lee’s refusal was, in his eyes, an act of rebellion that challenged not just his desire, but his sense of racial power.
On November 4, 1947, a confrontation between Rosa Lee Ingram and John Ed Stratford turned deadly. Stratford accused Ingram of allowing her livestock to stray onto his land. When she reminded him that both the land and the animals belonged to their landlord, he got angry. What began as a dispute over livestock quickly escalated into violence when Stratford struck Rosa Lee across the head with the butt of his gun.
Hearing their mother’s cries, several of Ingram’s sons rushed to her defense. In the struggle that followed, Stratford was killed after being struck on the head.
Rosa Lee and four of her sons, Charles (17), Wallace (16), Sammie Lee (14), and James (12), were arrested. The youngest, James, was later released, and Charles was tried separately and acquitted due to lack of evidence. The remaining three, Rosa Lee, Wallace, and Sammie Lee, were left to face an all-white, all-male jury in Ellaville, Georgia.
Their trial lasted only one day, on January 26, 1948. Rosa Lee’s court-appointed lawyer, S. Hawkins Dykes, was given the case that same morning. There was no time to prepare or call witnesses. Within a few hours, the jury found them guilty of murder. Judge W. M. Harper sentenced Rosa Lee and her two sons to die in the electric chair. The speed and secrecy of the trial outraged many across the nation. None of the defendants had proper legal representation, and the court ignored the evidence suggesting that Ingram and her sons acted in self-defense.
Nearly a hundred years earlier, another Black girl named Celia had faced the same cruel fate. Celia was an enslaved teenager in Missouri who was bought by a white man named Robert Newsom in 1850. From the moment she arrived, Newsom raped her repeatedly. For years, she endured his assaults in silence until, in 1855, when he came to her cabin one night to attack her again, she fought back.
Celia struck him with a stick and killed him. Desperate and terrified, she burned his body in her fireplace. When her crime was discovered, she was arrested and tried for murder. Her lawyer argued that she had the right to defend herself, just like any woman would. But the court refused to recognize her humanity. Because she was enslaved, they said she had no legal right to resist her master’s sexual demands. Celia was executed by hanging that same year.
The parallels between Celia and Rosa Lee are painful. Both women were attacked by white men who saw them as powerless. Both fought back. And both were condemned not because they had killed, but because they had dared to defend themselves.
As word spread about the sentence given to Rosa and her two sons, the country erupted in protest. Civil rights groups, churches, and women’s organizations protested the verdict. Black-owned newspapers uncovered and reported the truth about Stratford’s persistent sexual harassment, revealing details that the white press had tried to hide.
The Civil Rights Congress and the NAACP also launched national campaigns demanding justice for the Ingram family. Protests erupted in major cities, and thousands signed petitions calling for their release. Black women’s groups took the lead, arguing that the case was not only about racism but also about the sexual abuse and exploitation of Black women in the South.
Under pressure from the public, Judge Harper commuted the Ingrams’ death sentences to life imprisonment in April 1948, admitting that the evidence was circumstantial.
Still, the struggle was far from over. For more than a decade, civil rights activists fought tirelessly for the family’s release. Groups such as Sojourners for Truth and Justice, led by Black women, saw in Rosa Lee’s case a powerful symbol of the many ways Black women suffered under racism, poverty, and sexual violence.
After years of petitions, rallies, and relentless public pressure, their efforts finally succeeded. In August 1959, twelve years after the conviction, Rosa Lee and her sons were granted parole. Rosa Lee was 57 years old, her son Wallace was 28, and Sammie Lee was 26. She walked out of prison older and worn from years of struggle, while her sons emerged as adults, having spent their entire youth behind bars for defending their mother.
Rosa Lee’s case became a symbol for many Black women who were fighting to be heard. Historian Erik S. McDuffie described her story as a clear example of how poor Black women suffered under multiple forms of oppression. They were sexually targeted by white men, economically exploited, and denied basic respect as mothers and as human beings.
After her release, Rosa Lee lived quietly in Atlanta, Georgia, until her death in 1980. Although she never gained the peace she deserved, her story remained a powerful reminder of what it meant to stand up in a time when doing so could cost a Black woman her life.
Rosa was spared the electric chair, but many others were not as fortunate. Below are two women who paid the ultimate price for standing up to their oppressors:
Sources:
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/rosa-lee-ingram-case
https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ra/article/pubid/RA-7-1/print/
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1948/v12n11/ingram.html
