Biography
Rosa Lee Ingram was the Black Georgia sharecropper widow at the center of one of the defining civil-rights cases of 1948. In November 1947, near Ellaville, Georgia, a white neighbor named John Stratford confronted Rosa Lee Ingram — a Black widow and sharecropper — over stray livestock and, according to testimony, sexually threatened her; as she fought him off, her sons came to her defense with farm tools and Stratford was killed. In February 1948 an all-white jury convicted Rosa Lee Ingram and two of her sons of murder and sentenced all three to death. The case became the Civil Rights Congress's first major national defense campaign on behalf of African Americans, with a National Committee to Free the Ingram Family led by the veteran clubwoman Mary Church Terrell. The death sentences were reduced to life imprisonment on appeal in 1948, and after years of campaigning the Ingrams were paroled in 1959.
