The Case of Rosa Lee Ingram
One of the many Mother's Day Cards sent to the White House by the National Committee to Free the Ingram Family
"The Ingram case represented in glaring terms the interlocking systems of oppression suffered by African American women: the painful memories of and the continued day-to-day sexual violence committed against black women’s bodies by white men, the lack of protection for and the disrespect of black motherhood, the economic exploitation of Black working-class women, and the disfranchisement of Black women in the Jim Crow South. Moreover, the case was a violation of human rights".
- Erik S. McDuffie | A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women’
On November 4, 1947, Rosa Lee Ingram; a widowed mother of twelve and a Black sharecropper from Ellaville, Georgia, was arrested for the death of John Ethron Stratford; a sixty four year old white sharecropper from the same location. Arrested along with Rosa Lee, were two of her sons, seventeen year old Charles Ingram, and sixteen year old Wallace Ingram.
Widow Rosa Lee Ingram and eight of children outside their home in Ellaville, Georgia
The Ingram's, who lived on the same property as Stratford, had endured years of threats and harassment from the white sharecropper that culminated in an argument over livestock. The sharecropper's widow, Irene Stratford testified that on the day of the incident her husband ‘entered the house, grabbed a rifle, and walked out, saying he was going to shoot some livestock’ [1]. Mrs Ingram’s livestock. A number of Mrs Ingram's hogs had crossed over to the Stratford property, and an enraged Stratford, armed with a .32 calibre rifle, sought to do something about it.
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[1] Charles H. Maqrtin, “Race, Gender, and Southern Justice: The Rosa Lee Ingram Case.” The American Journal of Legal History 29, no. 3 (1985): 251–68.