Yellow Mama is the euphemistic nickname given to Alabama's electric chair.
First installed at Kilby State Prison in Montgomery, Alabama, Yellow Mama acquired its yellow color when painted using highway-line paint from the adjacent State Highway Department lab. The chair was built by a British inmate in 1927 and was first used to execute Horace DeVauhan that same year. (Previous executions in Alabama had been by hanging.)
Yellow Mama is now stored in an attic above the newly reconstructed execution chamber at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. The last execution to occur using it was that of Lynda Lyon Block on May 10, 2002. On July 1st of that year, a revision to Alabama's death penalty went into effect allowing for an inmate to choose execution by either lethal injection or electrocution.
Read more about Yellow Mama: Background Information, Problems With The Yellow Mama, Controversy, Today, Cultural References
Famous quotes containing the words yellow and/or mama:
“The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“My Mama has made bread
and Grampaw has come
and everybody is drunk
and dancing in the kitchen”
—Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)