to office.  So far as I legitimately can, I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope—­the door of opportunity—­is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color.  Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”  These memorable words, coming in a day of compromise and expediency in high places, greatly cheered the heart of the race.  Just the year before, the importance of the incident of Booker T. Washington’s taking lunch with President Roosevelt was rather unnecessarily magnified by the South into all sorts of discussion of social equality.

On Tuesday, January 24, 1899, a fire in the center of the town of Palmetto, Ga., destroyed a hotel, two stores, and a storehouse, on which property there was little insurance.  The next Saturday there was another fire and this destroyed a considerable part of the town.  For some weeks there was no clue as to the origin of these fires; but about the middle of March something overheard by a white citizen led to the implicating of nine Negroes.  These men were arrested and confined for the night of March 15 in a warehouse to await trial the next morning, a dummy guard of six men being placed before the door.  About midnight a mob came, pushed open the door, and fired two volleys at the Negroes, killing four immediately and fatally wounding four more.  The circumstances of this atrocious crime oppressed the Negro people of the state as few things had done since the Civil War.  That it did no good was evident, for in its underlying psychology it was closely associated with a double crime that was now to be committed.  In April, Sam Hose, a Negro who had brooded on the happenings at Palmetto, not many miles from the scene killed a farmer, Alfred Cranford, who had been a leader of the mob, and outraged his wife.  For two weeks he was hunted like an animal, the white people of the state meanwhile being almost unnerved and the Negroes sickened by the pursuit.  At last, however, he was found, and on Sunday, April 23, at Newnan, Ga., he was burned, his execution being accompanied by unspeakable mutilation; and on the same day Lige Strickland, a Negro preacher whom Hose had accused of complicity in his crime, was hanged near Palmetto.  The nation stood aghast, for the recent events in Georgia had shaken the very foundations of American civilization.  Said the Charleston News and Courier:  “The chains which bound the citizen, Sam Hose, to the stake at Newnan mean more for us and for his race than the chains or bonds of slavery, which they supplanted.  The flames that lit the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential, among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole race whom the tortured wretch represented.”