In 1934 Horace Mann Bond, an African American, was in the early years of a distinguished career as an historian and university president when the lynching of a young black man, Jerome Wilson, impinged on his life, shaking him to the core. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education had taken him to a small community near Franklinton, in Washington Parish, Louisiana, where the lynching took place. Bond knew the victim's family, and he wrote an account of the lynching that traced the history of the Wilson family from the days of slavery.