Lena Baker, a black maid who was executed in Georgia’s electric chair 60 years ago has been pardoned by the state and will have a proclamation presented to her descendants on August 30, according to Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles spokeswoman Scheree Lipscomb.

In 1945, Lena Baker was sentenced to die after a one-day trial. An all-white, all-male jury found her guilty of killing a white man she claimed held her in slavery and threatened her life.

Baker’s story was dramatised for Jamaican audiences earlier this year in the production entitled Who Will Sing For Lena? The one-woman production featured Makeda Solomon in the role of Lena, with direction by Fae Ellington.

The Board, Lipscomb said, did not find Baker innocent of the crime. Members instead found the decision to deny her clemency in 1945 “was a grievous error, as this case called out for mercy,” Lipscomb said.

During her trial, Baker testified that E B Knight, a man she had been hired to care for, held her against her will in a grist mill and she attempted to escape. She said she grabbed Knight’s gun and shot him when he raised a metal bar to hit her.

After Baker’s execution in 1945, her body was buried in an unmarked grave behind a small church where she had been a choir member. In the late 1990s, the congregation marked the grave with a cement slab.

State records indicate that 20 women have been executed in Georgia, 19 by hanging and Baker by electrocution. One woman sits on Georgia’s death row today.

“I believe she’s somewhere around God’s throne and can look down and smile,” said Baker’s grandnephew, Roosevelt Curry, who spearheaded the family’s campaign to clear her name.

John Cole Vodicka, director of the Georgia-based Prison & Jail Project, a prison-advocacy group that assisted Baker’s descendants with the pardon request, told the Associated Press he was pleased with the decision.

“Although in some ways it’s 60 years too late, it’s gratifying to see that this blatant instance of injustice has finally been recognised for what it was – a legal lynching,” Vodicka said.