Please join us for the next installment of the UCSC History Department's Works in Progress lecture series:
From Mary Booth to Virginia Christian: Juvenile Injustice in the New South
Dr. Catherine Jones
Thursday, November 30
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Humanities 1, Room 520
Light Refreshments will be served. No RSVP necessary.
Mary Booth was fourteen years old when a Virginia court sentenced her to death for murdering Clara Gray, the wife of her employer, and Travis Jones, a farm manager, in 1882. Thirty years later, Virginia Christian, also a young African American woman employed in domestic service, was convicted of murdering her white employer, Ida Belote. Appeals from family members, jurors, and community leaders convinced the governor to commute Booth’s sentence to life in prison. Similar pleas on behalf of Christian, however, failed. Despite having recently passed a new juvenile justice law and in defiance of protests by national civil rights organizations, Virginia electrocuted seventeen-year-old Christian on August 16, 1912.
