The color was an accident. When Alabama needed an electric chair in 1927, the state turned to an unlikely craftsman: Ed Mason, a British inmate at Kilby State Prison near Montgomery, serving 60 years for theft and grand larceny. Mason was a master carpenter by trade, and he built the chair with the precision of a man who understood wood. When it came time to paint it, someone grabbed what was available -- highway-line paint from the adjacent State Highway Department lab. The chair came out bright yellow, and the inmates gave it a name that stuck: Yellow Mama. Mason was rewarded with a 30-day pass for his work. He used it to disappear, turning up later in a New York state penitentiary. The chair he left behind would be used to execute people in Alabama for the next 75 years.
Until 1923, the business of execution in Alabama belonged to the counties. Each one maintained its own gallows and carried out hangings in private. It was a decentralized system that produced inconsistent results and, occasionally, public spectacles that state officials found embarrassing. In 1923, the Alabama legislature centralized the process, mandating that all executions be performed by electrocution at a single state facility. A special room was designated at Kilby Prison in Montgomery. The state needed a chair, and Ed Mason -- inmate, carpenter, and soon-to-be fugitive -- got the assignment. The first person to sit in Yellow Mama was Horace DeVaughn, executed on April 8, 1927, for murder. A new era of state-administered death had begun in Alabama, and it would be painted yellow.
Yellow Mama's history is marked by failures that became national news. In 1983, John Louis Evans -- the first person executed in Alabama after the Supreme Court's Furman v. Georgia ruling temporarily halted capital punishment -- received an initial jolt of electricity that lasted 30 seconds. His body seized so violently that the electrode strapped to his left leg snapped off. Smoke and flames erupted from beneath the hood covering his head. Two physicians entered the chamber and found Evans still alive. Over his lawyer's protests, a third jolt was administered. The execution took 24 minutes. Evans's body was left charred and smoldering. Six years later, in 1989, the state executed Horace Dunkins, a man with an IQ of 69 convicted of murder. The first electrical jolt only knocked Dunkins unconscious. Warden Charlie Jones later explained that the jacks connecting electricity to the chair had been reversed, delivering insufficient voltage. It took 19 minutes for Dunkins to die.
The names on Yellow Mama's ledger trace a cross-section of Alabama's darkest chapters. Rhonda Belle Martin, a serial killer who poisoned members of her own family, was executed in 1957. Jeremiah Reeves, just 22 years old, was put to death in 1958 for a rape conviction that drew civil rights protests and widespread doubt about his guilt. Henry Francis Hays died in the chair in 1997 for his role in the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile -- a case that became a landmark in the prosecution of racially motivated violence. Each execution carried its own weight of circumstance, controversy, and irreversibility. Yellow Mama did not distinguish between the guilty and the questionable; it simply performed the function for which Ed Mason had built it.
The last person executed in Yellow Mama was Lynda Lyon Block, put to death on May 10, 2002, for murder. Less than two months later, on July 1, Alabama revised its death penalty law to allow inmates a choice between lethal injection and electrocution. The yellow chair was carried upstairs and placed in an attic above the execution chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. It remains there, available if a condemned prisoner ever requests death by electrocution. In 2015, state representative Lynn Greer sponsored legislation to bring Yellow Mama back into active service if lethal injection drugs could not be obtained. The bill passed the Alabama House but died in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The chair sits in storage -- not decommissioned, not destroyed, just waiting in an attic in a small Alabama town, its yellow paint fading in the dark.
Yellow Mama is housed at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, at approximately 31.13N, 87.45W. The facility sits in the flat pine-and-farmland terrain of Escambia County in southwestern Alabama. Nearest airports include Atmore Municipal Airport (K0R1) immediately nearby and Pensacola International Airport (KPNS) approximately 50 miles to the south. From altitude, the Holman prison complex is visible as a cleared compound with institutional buildings surrounded by forest and agricultural land. The town of Atmore provides a reference landmark to the north.