Lena Baker never had a chance. She was a poor and barely educated Black woman in southwest Georgia in the early 1940s, with few options. So when she wrestled a gun away from Ernest B. Knight ...

“It was sort of the best-kept secret in Cuthbert,” said Lela Phillips, author of the Lena Baker Story. In 1941, Baker worked for a white man by the name of Earnest Knight. The job turned into ...

slight, spunky Lena Baker assembles a chair from parts of ... She was found guilty of murdering her boss, Ernest Knight, for whom Baker worked as a maid. She said that she killed Knight in self ...