Sam Hose (born Samuel Thomas Wilkes; c. 1875 – April 23, 1899) was an African American man who was tortured and murdered by a white lynch mob in Coweta County, Georgia, after being accused of rape.

[1] Hose was described by those who knew him as friendly and intelligent and, unusual for a black man in the 19th century South, he learned how to read and write.

[2] Having to look after his aging mother and an intellectually disabled brother, he abandoned his plans for higher education and worked as a manual laborer.

[2] Newspaper accounts in 1899 said that Wilkes left Marshallville and used the alias Sam Hose because he had been accused of assaulting an elderly black woman.

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

Mistakenly believing that these trains were loaded with troops, the mob stopped just north of Newnan, deciding they could wait no longer.

[8] Another woman, future United States Senator Rebecca Felton, wrote a letter protesting against Mell's letter, saying that any "true-hearted husband or father" would have done the same to the "beast" Hose, arguing that Hose needed to be killed in the same way that a mad dog needed to be put down, except "the dog is more worthy of sympathy.

"[8] 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.

Until then, Du Bois believed that lynching was an aberrant phenomenon and that he could use reason and a sense of fairness to appeal to the majority of the white community.

[4] A group of prominent citizens in Chicago, led by journalist and activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, hired detective Louis P. Le Vin to investigate the Hose lynching.

Le Vin's entire report was published in Chapter IV of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's article, Lynch Law in Georgia.

Le Vin stated that his conclusions were gathered from interviews with "persons he met in Griffin, Newman [sic], Atlanta and the vicinity."

Le Vin concluded his report with the statement, "I made my way home thoroughly convinced that a Negro's life is a very cheap thing in Georgia."

[12]Historian Leon Litwack states, in Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, that during an investigation by a white detective, separate from the investigation organized by Wells-Barnett, Cranford's wife Mattie revealed that Hose had never entered the house, and had acted in self-defense against her husband.

[14] In response, Skinner replied to Rusk that in Newnan, it was accepted that Hose was a murderer and rapist, and it was disrespectful to the Cranford family to present the story any other way.

If we start paying respect to murderers and rapists, then we need to do the same for the late Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacey".

[16] One letter writer took a contrary position to the majority, saying the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee should be "commended" for its work, and concluded: "To ignore the past or sweep it under the rug is what keeps people from getting together in harmony and amity...The bottom line is that addressing an old wrong is the right thing to do".

[16] Rusk in a letter to the editor of the Newnan Times-Herald argued for a public discussion rather than a memorial service for Hose, writing: "One of the more unfortunate aspects of lynching in Georgia and elsewhere is that many of those killed were innocent of any crime.

Number two—little lasting good will be achieved if any effort to revisit this horrific event in Newnan is cooked up primarily by 'outsiders'...Do wounds like Hose's killing really heal by leaving them alone?

[17] The historian Edwin Arnold from Coweta County noted that even today, there is no marker at the place where Hose was killed to commemorate the event.