Framing Rosa Lee Ingram: A Cold War Era Murder Trial and Civil Rights Odyssey

By Dr. Evan Kutzler, Associate Professor of History, Western Michigan University

In 1948, all all-white jury in Georgia sentenced Rosa Lee Ingram and two teenage children to the electric chair for what became known nationally as a self-defense slaying. The protests that followed saved Rosa Lee, Sammie Lee, and Wallace Ingram’s lives but also propelled a rabid segregationist to seven terms in the U.S. Congress. At once local and national, distant and familiar, the Ingram case captured the imagination of activists around the country for years before receding from popular public memory.

Dr. Kutzler has published book-length projects and is presently completing a book about Rosa Lee Ingram, a widowed mother of twelve whose trial became an international symbol of southern and American injustice in the Cold War era.

“I am a Tennessean by birth, an academic by training, and a public historian by instinct,” so states Dr. Evan Kutzler’s website. He is currently an Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University who is also committed to the broad interdisciplinary field of professionals working outside the classroom and beyond the traditional mediums of academic scholarship. His public history projects have included national register nominations, websites, and digital tours, as well as newspaper, magazine, and book publications. A sample of projects include a photography book, Ossabaw Island: A Sense of Place with photographer Jill Stucky and an introduction by President Jimmy Carter (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2016), an edited cookbook, From Biscuits to Lane Cake: Emma Rylander Lane’s “Some Good Things to Eat” (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2023), and a National Park Service study on African American history at Andersonville National Historic Site.