Washington Parish

In 1934 Horace Mann Bond was in the early years of a distinguished career as a historian, educationist, and university president. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education took him to Washington Parish, a corner of southeastern Louisiana bordered by Mississippi on two sides. Under the auspices of the Rosenwald Fund, he and his wife, Julia Washington Bond, lived in a small farming community and studied the operation of the local black schools. Today they would be called participant-observers in 1934 they were dubbed explorers. This experience, Horace recorded, proved one of the most valuable of our entire lives. ... 

Portrait of Washington Parish and Star Creek Diary are not works of academic scholarship in the vein of such sociological classics of the era as Charles S. Johnson s Shadow of the Plantation (1934), John Dollard s Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), Hortense Powdermaker s After Freedom (1940), or Allison Davis s Deep South (1941). They are, however, superb social observations written by a black intellectual at the height of his powers. Horace Mann Bond was also a fine writer. Portrait of Washington Parish and Star Creek Diary have immediacy and literary freshness. ... 

In scattered pockets of the rural South, however, including Washington Parish, black farmers still cling to the soil with stubborn tenacity. Star Creek Diary helps us to to understand why. 

This shocking event ended Bond s rural idyll. He and Julia left Washington Parish for the safety of New Orleans. But Bond could forget neither the lynching nor the fate of the Wilson family. John Wilson, a man of bedrock honesty and sturdy independence, now stood to lose everything. His wife suffered a nervous breakdown. Two of his... 

Frazier and Bond both believed that black landholding had promoted family stability. They were correct. Black farmers who owned their land tended to have larger families, and the family heads, invariably fathers, exerted more parental authority by virtue of their ability to employ their children and endow them with land. Indeed, in examining the landowning families of Washington Parish enumerated in the U.S. Census between 1870 and 1910, the similarity between the black families and the white families is remarkable. If the census had not classified people according to race, it would be all but impossible to tell black and white families apart. 

Even as the incidence of lynching declined, moreover, it remained axiomatic that any black person who killed a law enforcement officer would pay with his life, regardless of any extenuating circumstances. There is an unwritten law in Louisiana, wrote black attorney A. P. Tureaud, that any man who kills a policeman. .. either goes to the electric chair or the police will kill him. It is unlikely that a second trial for Jerome Wilson would have produced either a different verdict or a different sentence successful appeals in such cases usually only delayed executions. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that Jerome Wilson might escape with his life was intolerable to nameless whites in Washington Parish. ... 

It is impossible to estimate what proportion of the southern black population personally knew a victim of lynching, but it must have been substantial. In Washington Parish, with its large, complex kinship network of Wilsons, Bickhams, and Magees, Jerome Wilson had hundreds,... 

Portrait of Washington Parish incorporates a report written for the Rosenwald Fund and various drafts of Bond s unpublished manuscript, The First Lynching of 1935. They have been edited to form a coherent whole. Star Creek Diary is published here as it was written save for minor editing. Forty Acres and a Mule has been edited more substantially, especially in the two middle chapters. The genealogical charts are Bond s own, as amplified and amended by the editor. Horace Mann Bond was responsible for writing the texts in this collection. Julia Bond made a substantial contribution to her husband s research and is hence listed as a co-author of the volume. All endnotes are the editor s. 

In i860 Washington Parish numbered in its population only one thousand slaves and two thousand white persons. The slave owners and their slaves formed a black belt down the center of the Parish,... 

There is little obvious structural change in the composition of society in Washington Parish of today as compared to what it was befo... 

Sullivan is dead, the woods are gone for almost a thousand miles around, and the mills at Bogalusa are half emptied by the depression and by labor saving devices. The shrewd Yankees who have succeeded the florid Irishman in the seat of Empire still rule the barony, but they are more interested in cutting operation costs than in the preservation of the aura of autocracy over every aspect of their feudal estate. Washington Parish never had time to become what Sullivan wanted it to be,... 

Ophelia Magee Scarborough, Temple Wilson s sister, who sheltered the Wilson family in Baton Rouge after they fled Washington Parish. 

Not surprisingly, the Bonds had serious qualms about going back to Washington Parish. Despite assurances as to their safety from white friends there, a visit to Franklinton on February 8 settled the question they decided not to return to Star Creek. The following accounts of their brief trip explain why. ... 

We drove to the Ford agency to see Mr. Greenlaw, the Ford dealer. He was not in but would be back at one o clock. He was attending a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce. His son-in-law was there and returned a flashlight of ours that had been there for some time. (We had lost it some time in October.) Then we drove over to the Washington Parish Training School. I got out at Mrs. Barker s. (She is the wife of the principal.)... 

After leaving Julia with Mrs. Barker, Horace stopped by Washington Parish Training School. 

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