In the spring of 1948, amid appeal hearings that would determine whether Rosa Lee Ingram, Charles, Ingram, and Sammie Lee Ingram died in the electric chair, the
Pittsburgh Courier published a biography of the sharecropper’s life. The title of the first installment, “He Tried to Go with Me: The Life Story of Mrs. Rosa Lee Ingram,” included a three-frame illustration of John Stratford, a white sharecropper, attacking Rosa Lee Ingram, and her sons coming to her defense and killing the white man. Focused around one version of what happened on that rural field road, this became a shorthand biography for Rosa Lee Ingram for activists and, later, historians. Yet the biographical details were sparse and sometimes contradictory. Rosa Lee Ingram even rejected key pieces of the biography twelve years later on her release from prison. The fight between John Stratford and herself, she later claimed, had been about who controlled her sons’ labor in the fields that day.
Using local land and court records, the U.S. Census, and genealogical records, this paper examines Rosa Lee Ingram in the years before the fight on the field road that brought her name and family into the vortex of the long civil rights movement. Unlike the Pittsburgh Courier, which salvaged a biography of static poverty and persecution in hopes of saving three lives, this salvage biography of incomplete and imperfect sources finds a more complicated family history in which Rosa Lee Ingram and her extended family had, at the time of her birth, a notable level of respect and middling economic status in the local community. It was amid the changing rural South of the 1930s and 40s, including unmooring of families and communities amid the Great Migration, that Rosa Lee Ingram’s life became more precarious than her grandparents.
