August 25—Minutes before an executioner sent Lena Baker to her death 60 years ago, she explained again why she had shot a white man, a crime that resulted in her being the only woman ever to die in Georgia's electric chair.

“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.

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Twenty-six years ago while Atlanta was being marketed internationally as“the city to busy to hate,” the moniker coined by then Mayor, Maynard Jackson, a heinous and diabolical plot was unfolding under the surface.

Between 1979 and 1981, 24 bodies of murdered black males were discovered in Atlanta and 5 in surrounding DeKalb County. These deaths were bundled together and subsequently treated as the infamous Atlanta Missing & Murdered Children Case.

In 1982, Wayne Williams a self-proclaimed record promoter, freelance TV cameraman, and community radio station owner and operator was convicted in the murders of Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, and Nathaniel Cater, 27, and implicated in 22 of the other cases.

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