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[Identification of item], Campaign to Free Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University
The Campaign to Free Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram Collection was acquired by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library as a purchase in 2009.
Processed by Danielle Moore, November 2010
Encoded by Danielle Moore, November 2010
Accession 2009-0250 is described in this finding aid.
Descriptive sources and standards used to create this inventory:
This finding aid is NCEAD compliant.
The collection includes three publications related to the campaign to free Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram, an African American sharecropper and widowed mother of twelve in southwest Georgia, along with two of her sons, Wallace and Sammie Lee Ingram, who were serving life sentences for the 1947 death of their white sharecropper neighbor, John Ethron Stratford. The handling of the case aroused concern about racial injustice in the southern judicial system which led to the formation of a national campaign for clemency. Through the efforts of the African American community, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the communist-influenced Civil Rights Congress (CRC), the Ingrams' original death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 1948 and eventual release in 1959.
The three items in the collection were published in 1954, when publicity for the case was largely coordinated by the Women's Committee for Equal Justice, an off-shoot of the CRC headed by the civil rights activist, Mary Church Terrell. The broadside issued by the Women's Committee for Equal Justice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, includes a quote from Mrs. Ingram; a reprint of
Also included in the collection is a four page newsletter issued by the New York headquarters of the Women's Committee for Equal Justice designed to raise support for the May 9th and 10th
The earliest item in the collection is a four page newsletter published in February 1954 by the Pennsylvania Civil Rights Congress,
For a full history of the case, see the article written by Charles H. Martin,
These are searchable subject entries for this collection. Performing a search on these subjects in the Duke University Libraries online catalog will bring up other related research materials.