Sam Hose: A Lynching in Newnan, Georgia

On April 23, 1899, 21 year-old Sam Hose (Wilkes) was brutally lynched outside of Newnan, Georgia, just southwest of Atlanta in Coweta County. Hose had left his home in Macon, Georgia in 1898 to seek work to help support his ill mother and mentally retarded brother.

Sam Hose came to Newnan after a brief stint in Atlanta, and had been there in the service of Alfred Cranford for about a year at the time of his death. Alfred and Mattie Cranford were descendants of two of the areas most established families. Alfred's family owned extensive land, and Mattie was considered one of the "Belles of Newnan" before her marriage. They were both in their mid-twenties.

Hose was accused of killing Crawford following a year of dispute over wages. Some accounts purport that there were back wages owed to Hose. Hose said that he threw an axe at Crawford in self defense after a gun was pulled on him. He admitted to hitting Crawford with the axe, but didn't know that he had killed him until several days later. Mrs. Crawford claimed that her husband's assailant had raped her, although she subsequently admitted to fabricating this claim.

In the Hose case, there was no police investigation made of the crime scene, no evidence gathered, and Mattie Crawford was never formally interviewed nor examined by a physician. Newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, fanned the flames of racial hatred in their coverage of the story. They echoed rumors of the rape of Mattie Crawford and painted a brutish picture of Sam Hose, claiming that he took advantage of Mattie as her husband lie dying and her child had been thrown to the floor. These specious stories were used as validation by the vigilante gangs who were already roaming west Georgia seeking to defend the "honor" of the Crawford family and white southern womanhood.

In addition to echoing unsubstantiated rumors, the papers also hinted that Sam Hose would be mutilated and burned if caught. They advertised a $500 reward for Hose's capture. Special excursion trains eventually brought about 2,000 spectators from Atlanta to the Newnan area to witness his torture and killing.

Before he died, Sam Hose's fingers, hands, and genitals were cut off. Parts of his face were skinned. Sam was chained to a small tree, his clothing doused in oil and his body surrounded by kerosene-covered logs. In his agony, as his flesh was consumed in flames, Sam moved enough to disturb the pyre - and the fire had to be rekindled. "When he finally died, the crowd cut out his heart and liver from his body, sharing the pieces among themselves, selling fragments of bone and tissue to those unable to attend." Shortly after the lynching, one of the participants reportedly left for the state capitol, hoping to deliver a slice of Sam's heart to the governor of Georgia. None of Sam Hose's executioners wore a disguise, and none were punished.

Sam Hose's extra-legal killing garnered national and international attention. Ida B. Wells strengthened her anti-lynching campaign by highlighting the details of Sam Hose's torture and killing in her pamphlet entitled "Lynch Law in Georgia." She commented that, "Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, he should not resist." Black troops fighting insurgents in the Philippines read leaflets published by Filipinos that told the Americans about the Sam Hose lynching, asking them how they could be willing to die for such a country.

This lynching, like many incidents of violence perpetrated by the white power structure on African-Americans, troubled the possibility of interracial cooperation in the future. W.E.B. DuBois, widely regarded as one of the most significant African-American cultural and political stewards of the twentieth-century, was a professor at Atlanta University at the time of Sam Hose's death. The story goes that DuBois was on his way to Joel Chandler Harris' office at the Atlanta Constitution to deliver a careful and reasoned protest letter regarding Sam's lynching, as well as a proposal for interracial cooperation. As he walked he happened upon a storefront that was displaying Sam Hose's knuckles in a jar, and he returned to campus, too disheartened to continue. Another local African-American leader who was deeply effected by the lynching of Sam Hose was Lucius Holsey. Holsey, bishop of the Colored Methodist Church in Atlanta, was a proponent of paternalistic interracial cooperation, and promoted collaboration between black and white Southern Methodists. After hearing about the Sam Hose lynching, Holsey renounced paternalism in favor of separatism, advocating for the creation of a black state in the west.

The account above was compiled from the following sources and more information on the Sam Hose case may be available through these books and websites:
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen, Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis and Leon F. Litwack
Death at the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, by Philip Dray
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, by Leon Litwack
http://www.ourgeorgiahistory.com/chronpop/933
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?path=/Religion/HistoricalFigures&id=h-903

September, 1906: A Race Riot in Atlanta

In late September, 1906, the city of Atlanta erupted into four days of deadly rioting fueled by mounting racial hatred. It is estimated that at least twelve people (mostly African-Americans) died during this time in the city, while many other black people were injured and lost property. The riot is emblematic of the limitations of Reconstruction period reforms and social and economic advances for African-Americans in the face of white Southern racism.

Locally, African-American leaders were divided regarding strategies for black attainment in American society. Booker T. Washington had given his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech in Piedmont Park in 1895, which advocated social segregation and economic cooperation among the races and black education focusing on vocation rather than the classical arts and sciences. W.E.B. DuBois, then a professor at Atlanta University, released The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 in opposition to Douglas' viewpoint. While Douglas believed that the economic success of African-Americans would eventually be rewarded with social acceptance, DuBois argued that civil rights for blacks would only be achieved through agitation and protest.

The major political issue of the day was the also to social status of African-Americans. Atlanta Constitution editor Clark Howell and former Atlanta Journal editor Hoke Smith were vying for the Democratic nomination in the gubernatorial race. Populist party leader Tom Watson, who had made unsuccessful bids for the vice-presidency in 1896 and the presidency in 1904, threw his support to Smith in the contest, on the condition that Smith would make "disenfranchisement of the Negro" central to his platform. Watson had originally advocated for the political cooperation of poor blacks and poor whites against corporate domination, but when he realized that this position was too contentious to guarantee political success in the south, his became vocally and vehemently racist.

As two journalist-politicians competed for the nomination that would ensure a sojourn in the governor's mansion, Atlanta's major newspapers ran vague and often uncorroborated stories of black violence against whites. Multiple newspaper extras published on Saturday, September 22, the day of the riot, included such stories; these were quickly circulated in the downtown area, no doubt contributing to the growing mob's hostility. By the time the saloons let out, a crowd of approximately 10,000 had assembled in downtown Atlanta. It soon disbursed to various quadrants of the city, wreaking death and havoc on black Atlanta.

Detailed accounts of the riot reveal both the blindness of the rioters' racial hatred and the inability and unwillingness of local and federal authorities to protect Atlanta's black citizens from harm. Black porters were attacked on train cars. A trolley headed for Grant Park was stopped, its white passengers removed, and its black passengers beaten mercilessly. Walter White, a future leader in Atlanta's NAACP, recalled witnessing a lame black man being run down by a mob and beaten to death during the riot. Governor Terrell called in the state militia on the second day of the riot to quiet the mobs and prevent further violence, but former slave E.W. Evans, who worked in Atlanta during the riot, recalled that some soldiers actually contributed to terrorizing and killing African-Americans. While the military prohibited further arms sales on the third day of the riot, police officers were confiscating arms from black people, but not from white people.

In nearby communities, mob violence against blacks and corrupt policing also raged during the riot. A white mob lynched Zeb Long on Sunday, September 23 in East Point. He had been arrested earlier in the day for acting suspicious and carrying firearms. On Tuesday, September 25, 245 men in the community of Brownsville - just south of Atlanta - were rounded up as suspects in the death of one Officer Heard. Sixty of these men were eventually charged with Heard's murder.

In the aftermath of the Atlanta Race Riot, patterns of residential segregation were reinforced, and would affect the ways in which Atlantans lived and interacted for decades to come. The third quarter of the 19th Century, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, brought Atlanta's prosperity increased, and it was deemed "the City Too Busy to Hate," harkening to the assimilationist interracial economic cooperation that Frederick Douglas had proposed in 1895. What was left unsaid, and largely forgotten, was the history of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, it political, social, and psychological impact, and the collective silence and denial about this period in local history, which continues to perpetuate a cycle of unconsciousness, separateness, hatred, and violence across the racial divide in the city. The institutions and individuals who are responsible for the deaths, destruction of property, and violations of human rights that occurred during the riot have never been brought to justice or asked to make reparations.

In 2006, Atlanta will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its hosting of the Olympic games, and it will also remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. Atlanta has become a diverse, international city, and the need of its citizens to acknowledge injustice and engage difference has only increased. STAR is collaborating with representatives from a variety of local organizations, including the Atlanta mayor's office, universities, museums, corporations, and grassroots activist groups to plan a series of events in commemoration of the riot. One component will be an exhibit about the riot mounted at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. The aim of the commemoration is to educate Atlantans about the history of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, and its social, economic, and political affects, which still touch its citizens today. It will be an opportunities for truth, justice, honest conversation, and community building.

This account was compiled using the following sources, and more information on the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot may be available here:
Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906, by Mark Bauerline.
http://www.bookmarkmedia.com/Atlanta1906/site/index.html
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/104

To get more information on the 1906 Race Riot, please visit: http://www.1906atlantaraceriot.org

Leo Frank was a Jewish factory owner who was falsely accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13 year-old girl who worked in his pencil factory. The Georgia State Supreme Court found Frank guilty in 1915, and although the governor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, on August 17, 1915, he was taken from the Milledgeville State Farm Prison and hung from a tree outside the town of Marietta. According to Steve Oney's recent book And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, some members of the lynch mob were from prominent Atlanta families. The events around the lynching led to both the 20th Century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, with its first group dubbed "The Knights of Mary Phagan," and the creation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

In 1946, two African-American couples –Mae Murray and George Dorsey and Dorothy and Roger Malcolm – were waylaid while driving, shot hundreds of times, and lynched by a firing squad of 12-15 unmasked white men in broad daylight at the Moore's Ford Bridge, sixty miles east of Atlanta. No one has ever been prosecuted for these crimes, and it is believed that some of the perpetrators are alive and still reside in local communities with impunity.