Case Study: Sam Hose

1. Wells makes her case by showing both sides of the events that lead to and happened during the lynching’s. “Truth is mighty and will prevail” (1) is the motto of their cause to stop the lynching. Because Wells gives the claims made during the times it gives the readers a sense of what’s actually happening and why, but when she finally includes the detectives findings it is shown that the actions taken by whites were taken hastily and without justice. The true will prevail is their motto because now that they have this information published, the hope is that the people who performed and participated in the lynching’s will be punished accordingly for their actions.
2. Sam Hose; or originally known as Samuel Wilkes, was lynched on April 23rd at 2:30pm in Newman, GA. Wilkes was burned alive on the stake in front of nearly 2,000

“E. D. Sharkey…was one of the most persistent advocates of the burning” (15). Le Vin made it a point to decried the claims made by Sharkey and then showed that those claims didn’t match the actual accounts of that day. Knowing they didn’t match Sharkey still told the story and pushed for the lynching of Wilkes.
7. The accounts given by the detective match fairly well to the accounts given in the newspaper. However the major difference noticed was the shooting of the nine black men. In the newspaper counts of the night, the mob single handedly checked the black men to ensure they were all dead when in the end they only missed one, where as in the detective’s findings this particular event didn’t happen. The mob shot off three round and hastily left the scene and the participants were never discovered.
8. The gruesome and horrifying details of the lynching’s are meant to affect the reader by making them feel as if they are really there watching it happen. This is to make the reader see how horrible these events truly were. By making the reader feel this way, it was hoped that they would reevaluate how things are being handled in