The youngest person to be executed by electric chair was George Stinney Jr. George was a Black fourteen year old boy when he died in the electric chair in South Carolina in 1944.  Seventy years after his execution, George Stinney Jr. was exonerated for the crimes it took all of ten minutes to convict him of.

Thirty-two years before the George Stinney case, in the summer of 1912, a young Black girl, just days after her 17th birthday was led to the electric chair in Richmond Virginia. As with many of these cases, the issues of race, class, and education all played an integral role. It is Virginia’s story that inspired this The Chair.