Page "Sam Hose" Paragraph 3

A mob removed him from the train at gunpoint in Newnan, Georgia.

Former Governor William Yates Atkinson and Judge Alvan Freeman pleaded with the crowd to release Wilkes / Hose to the custody of the authorities.

Ignoring their pleas, the crowd marched northward toward the Cranford home.

The lynch mob grew, reaching an estimated 2000 individuals.

Once news of the capture reached Atlanta, large crowds boarded trains to Newnan.

Mistakenly believing that these trains were loaded with troops, the mob stopped just north of Newnan.

Newspapers reported that Wilkes '/ Hose's ears, fingers and genitals were severed.

The skin from his face was removed and his body was doused with kerosene.

He was tied to a tree and burned alive.

Some members of the mob cut off pieces of his dead body as souvenirs.

According to Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, the noted civil rights leader and scholar W. E. B.

Du Bois, who lived in Atlanta at the time, was on his way to a scheduled meeting with Atlanta Constitution editor Joel Chandler Harris to discuss the lynching, when he was informed that Hose's knuckles were for sale in a grocery store on the road on which he was walking.

He sadly turned around and did not meet with Harris after learning this.