Hose, Sam

Source:

 African American National Biography

Hose, Sam

(c. 1877–23 Apr. 1899),

laborer and lynching victim, was born Samuel Wilkes near Macon, Georgia. The names of his parents, who were probably farmers or sharecroppers, have not been recorded, but it is known that his father died when Samuel was a child. Samuel, his mother, his sister, and his brother then moved a few miles south to Marshall, in present-day Crisp County in Georgia, where they earned a reputation for honesty and hard work. Samuel learned to read and write and was considered in the town to be an intelligent young man, but there were few opportunities in Marshall for African Americans other than to work as a laborer picking peanuts or cotton.

Sometime before 1896, when Samuel was nineteen years old, his sister married and his mother became seriously ill, leaving Sam to be the sole breadwinner in the family, since his brother was severely mentally handicapped. Wilkes worked for around two years as a laborer on the Jones family farm near Marshallville, Georgia, but he fled to Atlanta following an incident in 1896 or 1897 in which he was accused of assaulting a fellow employee, an older African American woman. It may have been around this time that Sam Wilkes adopted the surname Hose, which is in some accounts rendered as “Holt.”

In late 1897 Hose began working as a laborer for Alfred and Mattie Cranford on their farm in Palmetto, Coweta County, Georgia, just southwest of Atlanta. Little is known about Hose's life there until the afternoon of 12 April 1899, when he appears to have killed Alfred Cranford with an axe. Hose promptly fled to his mother's home on the Jones farm seventy-five miles away, but he was captured by the Jones brothers thirteen days later, on Sunday, 23 April, following the most extensive manhunt in Georgia history. Although his captors had hoped to receive the $1,600 in rewards offered by Georgia Governor Allen Candler and the Atlanta Journal Constitution among others, a mob took Hose from the Joneses and brought him to Newnan, the county seat of Coweta County.

As had been predicted—indeed, urged—by the Journal Constitution, Sam Hose was then tortured and mutilated before a crowd of more than two thousand spectators (some reports claim four thousand), many of whom had arrived on specially arranged trains from Atlanta. The crowd included many of the community's most respected and respectable citizens, most of whom had probably attended church that morning. What followed can hardly be characterized as Christian, though in his autobiography W. E. B. Du Bois pointedly described the scene as a crucifixion. The leaders of the mob chained Hose to a pine tree, cut off his ears, fingers (which were severed one by one and shown to the crowd), and genitals, poured kerosene on his body, and set him ablaze. The torture lasted almost half an hour before Hose died. “Such suffering has seldom been witnessed,” one newspaper reported (quoted in Litwack, 281). The spectators then dismembered what remained of the victim's body for souvenirs; when there were no body parts left they contented themselves with pieces of the pine tree and chains. Some of these were kept as mementoes, others were sold. A piece of bone went for twenty-five cents, a slice of liver (cooked) went for a dime. Some reports allege that a piece of Hose's heart was delivered to the avowedly pro-lynching Governor Candler.

There are two widely divergent accounts of what happened on 12 April 1899 in the Cranfords' farmyard to provoke such a seemingly extraordinary response. The version given by the Cranford family and relatives appeared in most Georgia newspapers at the time and was reported in highly salacious detail. One such account contended that Hose “crept into [the Cranfords'] happy little home” while they were at supper and “with an ax knocked out the brains of the father, snatched the child from its mother, [and] threw it across the room” (cited in Dray, 4). Hose then allegedly raped Mrs. Cranford.

Detective Louis P. Le Vin of Chicago, however, hired by Ida B. Wells Barnett to investigate Hose's lynching, concluded that Hose had killed Alfred Cranford in self-defense. According to witnesses, Hose admitted that he had quarreled with his employer a week earlier when Cranford denied his request for extra money to pay for a visit to his ailing mother. In Hose's account Cranford, who was known to have a volatile temper, borrowed a revolver the following day and threatened to kill Hose if he caused any more problems. Hose claimed to have been chopping wood in the farmyard on the afternoon of 12 April when Cranford again confronted him about their earlier quarrel and drew his gun to shoot. Hose admitted that he then attacked Cranford with his axbefore escaping into the woods, but stated that he did not know if he had killed his employer. Hose also insisted—and continued to insist throughout his ordeal and torture—that he did not rape or in any way assault Mrs. Cranford, who had remained in the farmhouse throughout the confrontation. Detective Le Vin concluded that Hose probably was innocent of the charge of rape. He noted that Mrs. Cranford had made no mention of any such assault when she ran to the home of her father-in-law to tell him of the attack on her husband. Family relatives and the press, Le Vin believed, were responsible for spreading the rumor that Hose was guilty of rape.

These competing interpretations of Cranford's death were never adjudicated in court by a judge and jury of Samuel Hose's peers. The lynch mob did bring Hose to the Cranford home so that Mrs. Cranford could identify him as her assailant, but she was too ill to do so. Mrs. Cranford's mother, however, identified Hose as the perpetrator, which was sufficient proof for the mob—even though she had not witnessed the crime. For those who lynched Sam Hose the law and matters of due process simply did not matter. A Newnan newspaper declared shortly before Hose's capture that in the Cranford case “the provocation is so unbearably aggravating” that “people cannot be expected to wait with patience on the laggard processes of the courts” (quoted in Dray, 5).

This demand for instant “justice” was hardly new-in-American history, but lynch law took on a new-and-radically different character in the post-Reconstruction South. In earlier times lynching had had no specific racial character, but from the 1880s to the 1920s it became something that white people in the South, and especially in the Deep South, did to African Americans. Between 1882 and 1930, 90 percent of the estimated 2,800 Southern lynch victims was black; 94 percent of those black victims were lynched by whites. Like segregation and voter disfranchisement during the same time period, lynching functioned to keep black people in their place. “The real purpose” of the Hose lynching, wrote Ida B. Wells Barnett, “is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce” (Lynch Law in Georgia, 1899, 1).

Wells Barnett's investigation of the Hose affair also revealed that it was not an isolated incident but was in fact only one of twelve lynchings and attempted lynchings in the vicinity of Palmetto, Georgia, in a six-week period beginning in mid-March 1899. The first nine victims had been arrested in February of that year for their alleged roles in a series of arsons in Coweta County. The nine men, who had no previous convictions and were probably innocent, languished in jail for nearly a month, chained together, until a masked mob of more than a hundred heavily armed men broke into the jail to lynch them. The mob fired a volley of shots into the cells, killing five of the prisoners instantly and wounding two of the others. A New York Times report suggested that Alfred Cranford may have been one of the leaders of the masked mob. Relations between the races were thus already volatile by the time of Cranford's killing. Hose's death did not, however, appease the white citizens of Coweta County. In the week that followed, mobs forced hundreds of African Americans off their land, burned down a black church, and burned and tortured at least two other black men—Elijah “Lige” Strickland, a well-known local preacher, who was accused of conspiring with Hose, and Albert Sewell, who allegedly threatened revenge for Hose's murder.

The Sam Hose lynching was widely publicized. In addition to the lurid—and generally approving—coverage of the affair in the white-owned Georgia press, northern newspapers such as the New York Times provided extensive and more critical coverage, while African American newspapers like the Richmond Planet recorded the compelling evidence of Hose's innocence that emerged following Detective Le Vin's investigation. Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church spoke for many religious leaders in condemning the Hose lynching and in advocating “manly resistance on the part of Afro-Americans themselves” to prevent further atrocities (“Race War Predicted,” New York Times, 27 Apr. 1899, 2). The Hose lynching also left a deep impression on Robert Charles, who decided thereafter to arm himself and who later provoked a bloody race riot in New Orleans in 1900.

The most dramatic effect of the Sam Hose lynching, however, was on W. E. B. Du Bois, then teaching at nearby Atlanta University. Du Bois was engaged in a social-scientific investigation of race relations in America, and he still believed that southern whites would ultimately accept full equality for the Negro. Not fully aware of the details of the Hose lynching, Du Bois set off to discuss the affair with Joel Chandler Harris, an editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution who had popularized for a white audience the Uncle Remus stories. En route to Harris's office, Du Bois saw Sam Hose's knuckles hanging on display in a butcher's window. “Something died in me that day,” Du Bois later wrote in his autobiography (Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, 1940, 67). The barbarity of the Sam Hose lynching convinced Du Bois that rational arguments and precise social-scientific data were inadequate tools in the black struggle for equality. The lynching of Sam Hose was thus one of the more significant factors in Du Bois's founding of a national civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which in the 1920s helped to reduce dramatically the number of lynchings in the South.

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