Born in Germany, Marion Palfi worked as a freelance photographer and portraitist in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis in 1936, eventually marrying an American soldier and emigrating to the United States. Settling in New York, she befriended Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps and soon began to photograph for numerous Black publications and causes. In the late 1940s, she documented the virulent effects of racism and poverty in the United States and published a devastating study on racial violence in Georgia that includes this portrait of the widow of Caleb Hill, the victim of the first reported lynching of 1949.