Talk:Sam Hose
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SEE:newnan.com/samhose and "The Sam Hose Story:Lynching a Trajedy With No Winners"[3/18/o7] at http://times-herald.com for a more historically accurate account and a letter from the family of ALFRED and MATTIE CRANFORD.
"Newnan was given undeserved and undesired nation-wide publicity when a mob brought Sam Hose, caught at Griffin, Ga., after one of the most fiendish and horrifying crimes at Palmetto in the annals of the State, to one of her suburbs and burned him."
With that terse assessment, Lily Reynolds and Mary Gibson Jones dealt with one of the most notorious lynchings in history in their 1928 history, "Coweta County Chronicles." The Sam Hose lynching is little known to most Cowetans today. There are no markers to tell where any of the events connected with it occurred, and many longtime residents have never heard of the events that unfolded in 1899.
Outside Newnan, the case has much broader exposure. Dr. Edwin Arnold, a scholar who teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., has written a manuscript about the Hose case that is being considered by a publisher. Arnold, who grew up at Hogansville, had never heard of Hose until he was doing some research on literature about lynchings a few years ago.
When he told his daughter, a history major, about what he had found, she looked at him and said, "Everybody knows about Sam Hose."
The article on Newnan in Wikipedia, a popular Internet information source, features 10 sentences on the town's history. One reads: "Newnan was where the infamous lynching, mutilation, burning and dismemberment of Sam Hose took place in 1899."
The Hose case is back in the news in Newnan after members of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee — in conjunction with local residents who have not yet revealed their identity — announced plans to hold a memorial observance on April 23, 2007 — the 108th anniversary of the lynching. The plans were followed by letters and Sound Off comments in The Times-Herald, almost all negative.
Arnold talked about what made the Hose case different from others — and about how the circumstances and events are viewed differently locally from most published accounts.
"There certainly were a lot of other lynchings going on at that time," Arnold said. Several black men were lynched in Georgia in the months leading up to the events in Newnan.
"What made the Sam Hose case different was the spectacle nature of it and the degree of torture," Arnold reflected.
The murder of Alfred Cranford and the subsequent lynching of Sam Hose comprise a tragedy in which there are no winners. Cranford, 26, was dead — his head split by an axe. His wife, Mattie, not quite 25, was left a widow, the humiliation of her rape spread on the pages of the newspaper of her hometown and publications around the world. There was even a detailed speech about the attack on the floor of the U.S. Congress.
She left her home, moved to Newnan where she led a quiet, somber existence — taking in sewing to support her family. Until her death in 1922, after a two-week bout with pneumonia, she spent most of her time at home and never changed her account of what happened on April 12, 1899.
Her youngest son, Clifford Alfred "Tan" Cranford, was blind in his left eye as a result of the injuries he received that day. The nickname came about because other children tried to call him "Poor Thing" because of his injuries.
Hose, 21, died in horrific pain. Several of the people who helped kill him had emotional difficulties afterward. A Coweta retiree recalled that a relative who took part "regretted it all his life."
William Yates Atkinson, the popular former governor who sought to dissuade the mob, died a few months later while undergoing surgery for an appendectomy.
The site where the lynching occurred, located across U.S. 29 from the entrance to Sprayberry's Barbecue, was vacant for years, and some local residents were astounded when a home was built on the tract — although at some distance from the site of Hose's death. "Ripples," a columnist for the Herald and Advertiser, a predecessor of The Times-Herald, proclaimed the spot haunted with "the wail of the hobgoblin and the rattle of chains," less than two weeks after Hose died.
In April 1899, Alfred and Mattie Cranford and their children lived on a farm in northern Coweta County. Northgate High School is located on the land today.
Sam Hose — who was also known as Sam Holt — was from Marshallville in middle Georgia. His real name was Tom Wilkes, and newspaper accounts in 1899 stated he had been accused of assaulting an elderly black woman there and had fled Macon County and taken on a new identity.
He came to work at the Cranford farm. Some sources indicate Alfred Cranford was dissatisfied with the quality of Hose's work. Others allege a disagreement over pay between Cranford and Hose.
Newspaper accounts from 1899 indicate the Cranfords were sitting down to a meal at their home when Hose killed Alfred Cranford, raped his wife and threw their infant son, Clifford Alfred Cranford, to the floor.
Hose left the area and fled to Marshallville where his mother lived on a farm owned by one of two brothers, J. L. and J. B. Jones. The brothers found Hose and accompanied him on a train headed to Atlanta where a reward awaited. A total of $1,600 was offered — $500 from the Atlanta Constitution, $500 from Gov. Allen Candler, $250 from Coweta County, $250 from the city of Palmetto and $100 from Jacob Haas of Atlanta.
At Griffin, Hose and the Jones brothers were removed from the train at gunpoint, according to "At the Hands of Persons Unknown" by Philip Dray. A locomotive, coal car and coach were assembled to take Hose from Griffin to Newnan. A mob in Newnan took Hose from the railroad depot on Broad Street through town. Atkinson and Judge Alvan Freeman unsuccessfully pleaded with the crowd to allow Hose to be taken to jail.
Hose was taken to the home of the P.M. McLeroys, the parents of Mattie Cranford. Mrs. McLeroy asked Hose why he had killed Alfred Cranford. According to the Herald and Advertiser, Hose said that "Lige" Strickland had promised him $20 if he would kill the farmer.
Although some accounts indicate as many as 2,000 people attended the lynching, the actual number probably was much smaller. The Herald and Advertiser estimated the crowd at 500. Trains was chartered to bring some 1,500 Atlantans to the lynching, but Hose was dead before the trains arrived.
Some scholars suggest the mob, hearing of the trains, feared they would contain soldiers who might stop them before they killed the farmhand.
The first plan apparently was to take Hose to the Cranford farm and lynch him. The mob stopped, however, at Forksville, then a rural area outside the city. Hose was chained to a tree and tortured for "almost a half hour," according to Dray.
His ears, fingers and genitals were severed. He was then doused with kerosene and set afire. Dray records Hose's last words as "Sweet Jesus."
W.E.B. DuBois, a professor at Atlanta University, later recounted learning Hose's knuckles were being displayed in the window of an Atlanta grocery store. Decades later an elderly white Cowetan showed a toe that probably was Hose's to a young boy.
The writer of the news column from Handy in the Herald and Advertiser in 1899 wrote of surprise "that anyone would want a part of Holt's carcass or his clothes for a souvenir," adding, "We want to forget him and his crimes as soon as we can."
Although there were reports that a Newnan photographer of the day snapped and sold pictures of Hose's remains, none has ever surfaced.
On April 24, Elijah Strickland, a black minister who lived on the farm of W.W. Thomas in northern Coweta County, was hanged from a tree. The Herald and Advertiser reported Thomas sought to save Strickland, who three times maintained his innocence before he was hanged.
Strickland's ears and a finger were also cut off before he was hanged.
The incidents were reported in newspapers across the country and overseas. The Hose killing, particularly, was deemed newsworthy.
Ida Wells-Barnett, a black journalist working in Chicago, used the Hose case as part of her ongoing anti-lynching campaign. "It became kind of a rallying cry," Arnold stated.
She and a group of Chicago citizens paid a white detective, Louis P. LeVin, to come to Georgia to investigate. LeVin's report stated he was unable to talk to Mattie Cranford. The report, in fact, does not name a single person to whom LeVin spoke, although he states he received information Hose told others. In at least one published account of LeVin's report, he repeatedly refers to the town as "Newman," raising the question of whether he ever came to Coweta County at all.
LeVin speculated that Hose went to Alfred Cranford seeking money and that Cranford came at Hose with a gun. LeVin further suggested that Hose threw the axe at Cranford and ran away — never realizing he had inflicted a fatal blow.
On June 6, 1899, the Salt Lake Broad Ax, an African-American newspaper published in Utah, printed LeVin's speculation but attributed it to Mattie Cranford. That version of the story has come down through the years. In Arnold's research, he finds people who wrote that Mrs. Cranford changed her story invariably base their statements on the false Salt Lake City article "or a reference to that article."
Arnold noted, "That became the narrative over a period of time." A disconnect between what Cowetans believed and what was written elsewhere took place.
Local historians familiar with the Cranford-Hose events express no doubt that Hose killed Alfred Cranford, raped Mattie Cranford and permanently injured Tan Cranford.
"In Newnan, the story is very much the one that came out right after the murder," Arnold said. "With just a few exceptions," Arnold said, other writings depict Hose as innocent of any crime — or at least of anything other than killing his employer, perhaps with cause.
Dray is one of the few to concede the possibility that Hose — while undeserving of lynching — may have been guilty of the charges leveled against him. Dray stated "a strong argument for the possibility of some kind of sexual assault is the fact that the Cranfords and McLeroys were prominent Coweta families and would not have wished to stigmatize Mattie unnecessarily."
Arnold said both narratives need to be examined by historians. To ignore what has been believed for more than a century in Coweta County "is not doing justice to the local community," he said.
He said Mattie Cranford was "terribly exploited by different groups" — both those advocating on her behalf and those who sought to absolve Hose of any wrong.
The mainstream press of 1899 referred to Hose as "the black beast" and "the monster." Those who advocated his cause often cast Mattie Cranford as "a very cunning figure," Arnold said. "To turn Sam Hose into a martyr, you have to turn the Cranfords into liars."
"No one alive knows what happened at the Cranford home on April 12, 1899," John Herbert Cranford, great-grandson of Alfred and Mattie, wrote in a statement prepared recently for The Times-Herald. He wrote the family has "indirectly suffered from the unlawful actions of the mob" because there was no trial and, therefore, no presentation of evidence or legal conclusion regarding Hose's status.
The Sam Hose case continues unresolved both legally and historically. "Nobody knows what happened that night," Arnold said. "Nobody can know."
Sam Hose information on Times-Herald Web site
The Times-Herald's Web site has several items relating to the Cranford-Sam Hose case. At
readers will find:
- a three-page statement by John Herbert Cranford on the issues relating to his great-grandfather's murder and the subsequent events, including the lynching of Sam Hose.
- a letter from Rich Rusk of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee outlining his reasons why the lynching should be recalled.
- a series of newspaper articles published in The Herald and Advertiser in 1899.
