The lynching of Will Brown was witnessed by one fourteen-year-old who would grow up to become a leading Hollywood actor, portraying quiet, “quintessentially American heroes.” His movie roles included Young Mr. Lincoln, as well as the juror who saves a Latino man from an all-white jury’s death sentence in Twelve Angry Men. Henry Fonda recalled that as a teenager he peered down at the handiwork of his neighbors that night from the second-floor window of his father’s printing shop. “My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes,” the adult Fonda said of this incident of his childhood.
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