Rope and Silence

On Sunday, April 30, 1882, a mob of two thousand men, women, and children hanged a Black man named Frank Fisher from a tree in the woods south of Galion, Ohio. They were unmasked. They did it in the afternoon. No coroner came. No one was ever charged.

This novel follows the nineteen-chapter structure of the nonfiction source, The Untold Story of the Mob Lynching of Frank Fisher, by Mike Robinette. Every institution, law, vote count, named person, date, resolution, and documented action is factual. The invented elements are the novel's contribution: the inner lives of real people in real rooms, the texture of ordinary days before extraordinary violence, the voices of characters whose words were not recorded but whose presence is established by the record.

Frank Fisher was never tried in a court of law. He protested his innocence to the end. Under the foundational principle that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, he must be remembered as a legally innocent man - a Black American killed in an era of racial prejudice, public hysteria, and the complete collapse of justice.

One truth requires no further research: Frank Fisher was murdered by a Galion mob on Sunday, April 30, 1882.