source: 4WardEverUK Writers

published: 26 May 2023

Image Credit: SOMMAI at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

From all of our hundreds of Remembrance Calendar entries, we particularly feature certain cases that were of notable historical significance.

George Stinney Jr

In June 1944 14-year-old George Stinney Jr became the youngest American executed in the 20th century. In the court case which sealed his fate, it took 10 minutes to convict him by an all-male, all-white jury.

George was subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney present, and no African-Americans were allowed in the Courthouse. The entire trial, including the jury’s deliberations, lasted less than 3 hours. It took 70 years after his execution to exonerate him. George was sentenced to the electric chair.

George was arrested in March of 1944 for the murder of two young white girls.It all started when the two girls, in the racially segregated mill town, set out on a springtime hunt for maypops. They were 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and her friend, 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames. They strolled past the busy lumber mill and there they spotted two black children ahead; George and his little sister Amie.

It was reported that Betty June and Mary Emma paused near them asking where to find maypops. George and Amie didn’t know. The girls walked on. George and his sister were considered to be the last people to ever see the girls alive.

The two girls were found on March 23, 1944 laid next to each other, badly beaten by a railroad in a watery ditch on the ‘black side’ of the town. There were no signs of a struggle when Dr. Asbury Cecil Bozard examined the bodies, but it was clear they’d met cruel and violent ends.

Mary Emma had a jagged, two-inch long cut above her right eyebrow and a hole boring straight through her forehead into her skull. Betty June suffered at least seven blows to the head, so punishing, the doctor noted, the back of her skull was “nothing but a mass of crushed bones.”

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Other News:

See 4WardEverUK archives here >

Inside the execution of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr

28 February 2023

George Stinney Jr: Black 14-year-old boy exonerated 70 years after he was executed

18 December 2014

An Undying Mystery: George Stinney

(date unknown)

YouTube Videos:

• Execution in South Carolina: 14-Year-Old George Stinney Convicted in 1944
• 14 year old George Stinney Executed - True Stories (caution: distressing footage)