A Lesson Before Dying is set in the fictional city of Bayonne, Louisiana in the late 1940s. It tells the story of two African American men struggling to attain their manhood in a deeply prejudiced society. Jefferson, a young man with little formal education, is an innocent bystander at a deadly shootout between a white store owner and two black robbers. He is later convicted of murder and sentenced to death. During the trial, Jefferson’s defense lawyer calls him a “hog,” claiming he is less than human and therefore should not be killed. Jefferson’s distraught godmother Miss Emma asks Grant Wiggins, the local school teacher, to “make Jefferson a man” before he dies. Over the course of the novel, Grant must find the courage within himself to face many diverse situations: a hateful white society; an indigent black community with high expectations; a pained young man slated for execution; and his own reluctant feelings to shoulder the many burdens of the black community.
Grant faces many different types of opposition during the novel. Though Miss Emma, Jefferson’s Godmother, has worked for Henry Pichot, the plantation owner, for years, he is reluctant to help Grant make Jefferson a man. At one point, Miss Emma gets down on her knees and begs for help from Mr. Pichot. Grant is often asked to visit Mr. Pichot’s house to meet with him, and then is forced to wait in the kitchen for hours until Mr. Pichot is ready to see him. During his many trips to the jail to visit Jefferson, Grant is scrutinized and ridiculed by the white sheriff. The plantation school is horribly under-funded, yet when the white superintendent of schools, Dr. Joseph Morgan, visits, he only examines the children’s teeth as though they were cattle, and instructs Grant to place “more emphasis on hygiene.” (p. 57) When Grant suggests that the children have never seen a toothbrush before, the superintendent replied, “Get (the kids) off their lazy butts, they can make enough for a dozen toothbrushes in an evening.” (p. 58) Not only does Grant face oppression from white characters in the novel, but also must face the struggles within the black community. Grant grapples with his own ability to even make an impact on his students. Grants’ former teacher, Matthew Antoine, had told him that teaching was useless, “You’ll see that it’ll take more than five and a half months to wipe away-peel-scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years.” (p. 64) He constantly grapples with his internal motivation for staying at the quarter and not leaving for an easier life. Though Grant is educated, he is, unlike the majority of the other characters in the book, not Christian. As such Grant constantly wrestles with the local black minister, who wants to save Jefferson’s soul before he dies. Both men are looked up to in their community, but both have sharply contrasting views about what is best for people.

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