THE CHILD IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR

A compact, jolting, account of the shameful execution of a 14-year-old Black boy in the Jim Crow South.

Beyond the riveting narrative, this book has a poignant backstory: Faber pursued it as both academic study and passion project, ultimately racing a cancer diagnosis to complete it. Before his death in 2020, he tasked colleague and friend Carol Berkin with shepherding it to publication. “I knew Eli had been right,” writes Berkin in the foreword. “I had in my keeping an important story that needed to be shared.” The story of George Junius Stinney Jr., convicted of murdering two young girls in a South Carolina mill town, is puzzling and tragic. “Bitter memories of this double murder and the execution that followed…endured for decades,” not least because a desultory investigation and arguably coerced confession leave open the question of culpability. Faber develops the story meticulously, with rewarding detours into the odd “company town” of Alcolu, where a sternly benevolent founding family dominated life, encouraging relatively benign treatment of Black citizens prior to the murder; and the horrific role of lynching as social control in the South. Recalling a memory from Stinney’s brother, the author writes that “until things unraveled after the murder of two White girls, overt tension between the races did not exist.” When the girls were found murdered, a state constable received a tip from an unnamed “colored man” that George Stinney was “the meanest” boy in the town. Although he’d been in sight of family members the whole day, Stinney’s guilt was quickly presumed. As people heard about his purported confession, “rumors of rape quickly destroyed the relative civility between the races that had long defined Alcolu.” A lynching was narrowly averted. Faber ably documents Stinney’s perfunctory trial and quick march toward execution, giving a rich sense of the daily, pervasive brutality of the Jim Crow South.

An unsettling yet important historical excavation and true-crime narrative.