How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Louisiana began using the electric chair in 1941. The original electric chair was known by the men at Angola as “Gruesome Gertie.” At first, the chair was not based at a single location but traveled to the parish where the condemned person was imprisoned. In 1957, however, Gruesome Gertie retired from its traveling and found a home on the Red Hat cell block at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The chair has the infamous distinction as the site of the country’s first-known botched execution by electrocution. Willie Francis, a seventeen-year-old Black boy from Saint Martinville, Louisiana, was placed in the electric chair on May 3, 1946. He was charged with murdering a pharmacist named Andrew Thomas in 1944, but in the decades following his death, serious questions were raised about Willie’s culpability. Months after Thomas was killed, the Saint Martinville police had failed to apprehend anyone for the murder. Saint Martinville’s sheriff called the chief of police in Port Arthur, Texas, and told him to arrest “any man” from Saint Martinville found in Port Arthur, in a last-ditch effort to resolve the case. Willie, visiting one of his sisters in Port Arthur at the time, had been arrested, mistakenly, on a separate drug charge. The charge was dropped, but the police began questioning Willie about Thomas’s murder in Saint Martinville instead. Soon police had a signed confession from Willie. The boy had no counsel present. Given his age and the circumstances of his arrest, it is...