A Lesson Before Dying
Historical Context

Preface

Introduction

Historical Context

About the Author

Other Works/Adaptations

Discussion Questions

Additional Resources

Credits

Teacher's Guide

The Life and Times of Ernest J. Gaines

1930s
Ernest J. Gaines is born in Louisiana, 1933.
Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, creator of populist “Share Our Wealth” program, is assassinated in Baton Rouge, 1935.
Joe Louis becomes champion, both in pro boxing and in the hearts of African-Americans, 1937.

1940s
America enters World War II, 1941; all-African-American Tuskegee Airmen help win the air war, 1942–5; armistice signed, 1945.
Jackie Robinson integrates pro baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers, 1947.
Gaines moves to Vallejo, California, in 1948, the year A Lesson Before Dying is set.

1950s
Thurgood Marshall successfully argues against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, 1954.
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man, 1955.

1960s
Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech, 1963.
A six-month return to Louisiana invigorates Gaines' career, 1963.
Congress passes Civil Rights Act, 1964.
President Lyndon Johnson names Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, 1967.

1970s
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman wins the California Book Award, 1972, the same year Gaines receives a Guggenheim grant.
Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first woman and first African-American to run for president, receives 152 delegates, but loses the Democratic nomination, 1972.

1980s
Gaines takes a professorship at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, is later made Writer-in-Residence, 1981.
Jesse Jackson wins five Democratic presidential primaries in 1984 and 11 in 1988.
Gaines publishes A Gathering of Old Men, 1983.

1990s
After 28 years in prison, Nelson Mandela is released in 1990; his policies of reconciliation help to heal the wounds of apartheid in South Africa.
Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1993, the same year Gaines publishes A Lesson Before Dying. Oprah Winfrey selects Gaines' novel for her book club, 1997.

2000s
Romulus Linney's play A Lesson Before Dying premieres at New York's Signature Theatre, 2000.
Gaines retires from teaching, 2005.
Hurricane Katrina devastates Southern Louisiana, 2005.
Supreme Court rules against voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, 2007.

The Pre-Civil Rights South

Between the atrocities of the Jim Crow South and advances of the civil rights era, the 1940s Louisiana of Ernest Gaines' youth forms a crucial bridge. Gaines had used that era before in three other books, and he has written that A Lesson Before Dying didn't begin to crystallize in his mind until he made a relatively late decision to set it then. In his essay “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” Gaines says, “If I put my story in the forties, there was so much material I could use…I knew the food people ate, knew the kind of clothes they wore, knew the kind of songs they sang in the fields and in the church.”

During the Jim Crow era, local officials had instituted curfews for blacks and posted “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs in parks, schools, hotels, water fountains, restrooms, and public transportation. Laws against miscegenation or “race-mixing” deemed all marriages between white and black not only void, but illegal. Compounding the injustice of Jim Crow laws was the inconsistency of their application. Backtalk would rate a laugh in one town, a lynching just over the county line.

It's little wonder that those few African Americans who succeeded on a national level became a source of enormous pride to those still under racism's lash. The scholar-critic Henry Louis Gates has written of hearing the shouts go up all over his West Virginia hometown whenever a black face appeared on television: “Colored on Channel 2!” “Sammy Davis Jr.'s on Channel 5!” For Gaines' slightly older generation, the same thing happened whenever the names of the barrier-breaking ballplayer Jackie Robinson, or heavyweight champ Joe Louis—both mentioned in A Lesson Before Dying—or pioneering civil-rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall came up.

As chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Marshall argued and won th 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which struck down school segregation. Thirteen years later, Marshall crossed the courtroom rail to become America's first black justice on the Supreme Court, where several of his influential opinions became, and still are, the law of the land. But he laid the groundwork for that triumph in political and legal struggles—such as the Garner v. Louisiana case, which invalidated convictions for a lunch-counter sit-in—during the pre-civil rights era that Ernest J. Gaines chronicles so well.