Virginia Governor Grants Pardon to Black Men Executed in 1951

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam last week announced he would grant posthumous pardons to a group of Black men who were executed in 1951 after being convicted by all-White juries of raping a White woman.

Northam issued “simple pardons” for the so-called Martinsville Seven. The pardons do not absolve them of guilt but instead recognize the injustice created by racial inequity.

Northam said the pardons represent an effort to right a wrong, which was the same reasoning he has used to grant more than 600 pardons since January 2018. He was responding to a petition from families of the Martinsville Seven.

The highly publicized case prompted protests at the White House when the men were executed.

They were arrested in January 1949 upon a complaint from a 32-year-old White woman who said she was attacked while walking past a group of Black men drinking by railroad tracks in Martinsville.

After one of them tackled her, she said she was raped repeatedly over two hours by men who threatened to kill her if she screamed. She testified at trial that they dragged her into nearby woods when she briefly escaped.

All of them signed confessions after they were arrested, although their accounts of the incident differed. Several were illiterate and unable to read their own confessions.

They all pleaded not guilty to having sex by force but were found guilty by all-White juries. They were executed by electric chair in February 1951.

The petition for pardon to Northam from their families said, “The Martinsville Seven were not given adequate due process. They were sentenced to death for a crime that a white person would not have been executed for . . . and they were killed, by the Commonwealth, ‘simply for being black.’ ”

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