"What I done, I did in self-defense, I would've been killed myself," Baker, a black woman and mother of three, said on March 5, 1945, in her final statement, according to records from the U.S. state. "Where I was, I could not overcome it."

Symbolically, Baker has finally overcome it. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles in Atlanta voted unanimously to pardon her. On August 30, the board will hand the pardon to her great-nephew, Roosevelt Curry, who sought the declaration.

Officials across the U.S. South are facing up to racial wrongs committed generations ago, in the days when discrimination against blacks as systematic and routine. Elderly white men are being convicted for the first time for racially driven killings that were committed during the 1960s in Mississippi and Alabama.

Two men responsible for the 1963 church booming in Birmingham that killed four black girls were convicted in separate trials in 2001 and 2002 in that Alabama city.

This year, a Mississippi jury convicted Edgar Killen, 80, in the slaying of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

Different Era
Take away race, and Baker's case was simply about a drunken argument that turned violent when a woman tried to end her relationship with an older, abusive man, who was her employer. Ernest Knight was 67 when he died. Baker was 44 when she was executed.

Yet race was central to the case. Given the time and the place, the outcome would have been different if she had been white, or if the man she had killed had been black, says James Ely Jr., a law professor and legal historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

"There was a pervasive notion that the criminal justice system operated largely as a means of a kind of social control," says Ely, 67. It was used "to prevent blacks from getting out of line."

He adds, "If a white woman were defending herself against a sexual assault, a jury would say, this is what we'd expect her to do."

Baker's trial, before an all-white, all-male jury, took less than a day, according to the court record. Her court-appointed unpaid attorney offered no witnesses other than Baker herself. Her testimony was unsworn, a practice that was allowed for criminal defendants in those days.

Grievous Error
Her lawyer offered no objections and minimal cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, according to the trial transcript.

Under modern law it would be impossible for Baker to be sentenced to die given the facts of the case, says the current district attorney for the circuit, Charles Ferguson.

Her lawyer would get at least a minimal fee, and an appeal to the state Supreme Court would be automatic. If it failed, another round of appeals in state and federal courts would follow. It would be almost impossible for her jury to have no blacks or women under current law.

"It was a grievous error to deny clemency in 1945," board Vice Chairman Garland Hunt said in a August 23rd press release. "This was a case that cried for mercy."

Baker lived in Cuthbert, a small town in southwest Georgia, and had worked picking cotton, washing clothes and cleaning houses when she took a job looking after Knight, who had broken his leg, according to the trial transcript.

A Drunken Argument
An apparent sexual relationship developed, accompanied by much alcohol, witnesses said. On an early morning in April 1944, after she had spent the night avoiding him, Knight pulled a gun on her and forced her into a gristmill he owned nearby, Baker told jurors. "He said, Lena, goddammit, you are going in my mill, and when he said that he throwed his pistol on me and made me go in there."

Later in the day he'd left her locked up so he could attend a church function and then returned with food, the trouble started again.

"I kept telling him I wanted to get out, and he said he would kill me before I got out of there," she told jurors. Knight pulled the gun out of his shirt.

"We got to tussling and I got the pistol away from him," she said. He turned to reach for a piece of iron used to latch the door, and she feared he would use it on her, she said. "I believed he would have killed me if I had not done what I did," Baker told the jury.

No Mercy
The jury found her guilty. The record indicates no jury recommendation of mercy, which would have been required for her to escape death.

Baker's lawyer filed a standard motion for a new trial and then dropped her case. She filed a petition for clemency with the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, which denied it.

"She had nobody but God," says Curry, the great-nephew, a retired construction supervisor from Attapulgus, Georgia, near the Florida border.

Baker was executed in Reidsville, in southeastern Georgia, 10 months after Knight's death.

"I have nothing against anyone," Baker said in her final statement. "I am ready to meet my God."