Jimmy Wilson (robber)
African-American sentenced to death
James Edward Wilson (1904 – May 5, 1977) was an American farmhand who was convicted of a robbery of an elderly woman by an Alabama court in 1958 and sentenced to death. His case became a cause célèbre due to the small amount stolen ($1.95), the severity of the sentence, and the fact that Wilson, an African-American, was convicted by an all-white jury.
The case became a source of embarrassment for the United States at the height of the Cold War, as it suggested that American promotion of democratic principles overseas was hypocritical when it did not seem to uphold the same standards in its own states.
Biography
James E. Wilson was born in Alabama in 1904. He was illiterate.
Wilson was described as a "ne'er do well drifter", who was arrested eight times between 1929 and 1957. By the 1940 US Census, he was living with his wife in Marion, Perry County, Alabama. By 1957 he was a farmhand.
The case
Wilson was arrested on July 27, 1957, for stealing $1.95 ($23.11 in 2026) at night from a 74-year-old white widow, Estelle Barker, in Marion, Alabama. Barker also testified that Wilson had choked her and attempted to rape her.
“Jimmy Wilson (robber)” enters the record as african-American sentenced to death. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jimmy, Wilson and robber can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3179167. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1977, 1958 and 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jimmy Wilson (robber)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.