Throughout his adult life James Hembray Wilson kept a journal of his daily activities, and in these tiny booklets, small enough to fit comfortably into a shirt pocket whether traveling about the country or working behind a desk, Wilson preserved in abbreviated form many intimate details of his life. Sadly only one journal remains today, and it records his activities for but one-half of one year, from January 1st to June 30th of 1908, six months of names, places, and events during a busy time in his life when he traveled with the Billy Kersands Minstrels troupe for the last time before returning to Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College permanently. What better way might there be to get to know a man long gone than to read his own account of his life as it was happening? These daily jottings are not the romanticized and edited remembrances of distant and blurry memories, as one usually finds in most autobiographies, often inaccurate and sometimes intentionally changed; here we find a series of brief personal notations recording events of the day shortly after they occurred. Many connections are trivial but others are significant and hold some real fascination for us today.

In the fall of 1907 Wilson rejoined the Billy Kersands Minstrels in Chicago and began his final tour with this famous old company. Kersands was about sixty-five-years old when this tour started, a senior citizen of the minstrel business, and he had received some unexpected criticism just a few years earlier. In 1903 a negative and highly critical article portrayed this former superstar as a hasbeen and a wastrel: