CARROLLTON, Ga. — On the afternoon of Jan. 30, 1950, Clarence Henderson sat in the witness box in a cavernous courtroom in Carrollton and pleaded for his life.
“The night of this killing, the night it occurred, I was at home in my bed asleep,” the 27-year-old Henderson said. “I am innocent.”
His pleadings held no sway. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated less than two hours before finding the Black sharecropper guilty of the Oct. 31, 1948, murder of Carl “Buddy” Stevens, Jr., a white man. Despite an entirely circumstantial case with no eyewitnesses, the verdict came with no recommendation of mercy, and the judge sentenced Henderson to die in Georgia’s electric chair.
