Eighty-one years after the execution of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr., a group of Clarendon County residents and visitors gathered Monday at a memorial site in Alcolu to remember the youngest person executed in the United States during the 20th century and the legacy of injustice that still reverberates today.
Led by local historian George Frierson, the small ceremony included local leaders, family friends, and well-wishers from neighboring Sumter who brought balloons and a photo of Stinney. The memorial site, located on private land owned by Jerome and Elaine Dupree, features a stone marker originally placed on June 14, 2014, and later engraved with a portrait of Stinney and the date of the vacated conviction. On Monday, the area was freshly outlined with white gravel, a finishing touch added by Clarendon County School District Board Chairman John Bonaparte, while Mrs. Dupree, the memorial’s longtime caretaker, ensured everything else was in pristine condition.
“We gather here not just to grieve what happened, but to remember George Stinney and his rightful place in the history of Clarendon County,” Frierson said. “He deserves to be acknowledged.”
On June 16, 1944, George Stinney Jr., a Black teenager from Alcolu, was executed by electric chair in Columbia after being convicted of murdering two white girls, 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames. His arrest, trial, and execution unfolded over just 83 days. He was tried by an all-white jury in a proceeding that lasted about two hours with the jury deliberating for only ten minutes before finding him guilty. No physical evidence tied him to the crime, no defense witnesses were called, and his court-appointed attorney failed to mount a defense. His confession, now widely believed to have been coerced, was obtained without a parent, guardian, or lawyer present.
Weighing less than 100 pounds, Stinney was so small that the straps didn’t fit him properly. A stack of books, including a Bible, was placed on the chair beneath him so the electrodes could reach his head.
His case became a rallying point for civil rights activists, legal scholars, and community historians like Frierson, who spent more than a decade working with Stinney’s surviving family members to clear his name. Their efforts led to a two-day hearing in December of 2014, culminating in a historic ruling by Circuit Court Judge Carmen T. Mullen.
In an order filed Dec. 17, 2014, Mullen wrote that “fundamental, Constitutional violations of due process exist in the 1944 prosecution of George Stinney, Jr.” and vacated the conviction.
The ruling, made public that day, was reported by The Manning Times in an article by the late Robert Joseph Baker, who covered the case extensively. At the time, attorney Matt Burgess, who worked with lead counsel Steve McKenzie and Ray Chandler, told The Manning Times, “There won’t be a new trial. This is different from a pardon. A pardon doesn’t clear someone’s name. This clears his name completely.”
Stinney’s cousin Irene Lawson-Hill, speaking at the placement of the original memorial stone, told The Manning Times in 2014, “We have come here today to finally place a memorial and let the world know that he was wrongly convicted and unjustly executed. It is a stain on the judicial record of South Carolina, and it must be removed.”
When the conviction was vacated later that year, the marker was updated. On July 11, 2015, Frierson and others rededicated the stone and called on then-Gov. Nikki Haley and other state officials to issue a formal apology to the Stinney family.
“Judge Mullen made it clear: This was wrong,” Frierson said at the time. “So, if it was wrong, I want somebody to express remorse, so we are asking the state to do that.”
As of the 81st anniversary, no formal state apology has been issued.
Today, the site stands not just as a memorial to a boy lost to injustice, but as a symbol of ongoing remembrance, reflection, and a call to action. The gathered crowd spoke little, but their presence conveyed what words could not.
