Qualla: Lynching of Sam Hose

Lynching of Sam Hose: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. W.E.B. Du Bois was walking down Mitchell Street in Atlanta on April 23, 1899, carrying a carefully composed letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution. He intended to present a reasoned, scholarly argument against racial violence. Then someone told him that Sam Hose had just been burned alive in Newnan -- and that the man's charred knuckles were on display in a grocery store window farther down the same street. Du Bois turned around. He never delivered that letter. Instead, the encounter shattered his belief that calm scholarship alone could fight injustice. "One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved," he later wrote. The lynching of Sam Hose did not just destroy one man. It transformed the trajectory of American civil rights.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Lynching of Sam Hose: A Dispute Over Wages

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Image based off of then recent photograph by now unknown photographer, Public domain. Sam Hose was born Samuel Thomas Wilkes around 1875. Described by those who knew him as friendly and intelligent, he was unusual among Black men in the nineteenth-century South in that he had learned to read and write. In the spring of 1899, Hose was working as a laborer for Alfre...

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Image: Image based off of then recent photograph by now unknown photographer | Public domain

Lynching of Sam Hose: Sunday Afternoon in Newnan

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. On April 23, 1899, Hose was captured in Marshallville and transported by train toward Coweta County. A mob seized him from the train at gunpoint in Newnan. What followed was a public spectacle of extraordinary cruelty witnessed by an estimated 2,000 people on a Sunday afternoon. ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Lynching of Sam Hose: The Scholar Who Turned Around

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. No single event more profoundly redirected American intellectual life than what Du Bois witnessed that day on Mitchell Street. At the time, Du Bois was a professor at Atlanta University, committed to the idea that rigorous sociological research could combat racism through reason....

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Lynching of Sam Hose: Reckoning in Coweta County

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. For more than a century, the story of Sam Hose remained Newnan's unspoken history. In 1999, the Georgia Historical Society erected a historical marker at the site -- the first marker in Georgia, and one of the first in the country, to document a lynching. More recently, the recon...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain