April 23, 1899, at Palmetto, Ga., Sam Hose was burned alive in the presence of a throng, on Sunday afternoon.  He was charged with killing a man named Cranford, his employer, which he admitted he did because his employer was about to shoot him.  To the fact of killing the employer was added the absolutely false charge that Hose assaulted the wife.  Hose was arrested and no trial was given him.  According to the code of reasoning of the mob, none was needed.  A white man had been killed and a white woman was said to have been assaulted.  That was enough.  When Hose was found he had to die.

The Atlanta Constitution, in speaking of the murder of Cranford, said that the Negro who was suspected would be burned alive.  Not only this, but it offered $500 reward for his capture.  After he had been apprehended, it was publicly announced that he would be burned alive.  Excursion trains were run and bulletins were put up in the small towns.  The Governor of Georgia was in Atlanta while excursion trains were being made up to take visitors to the burning.  Many fair ladies drove out in their carriages on Sunday afternoon to witness the torture and burning of a human being.  Hose’s ears were cut off, then his toes and fingers, and passed round to the crowd.  His eyes were put out, his tongue torn out and flesh cut in strips by knives.  Finally they poured coal oil on him and burned him to death.  They dragged his half-consumed trunk out of the flames, cut it open, extracted his heart and liver, and sold slices for ten cents each for souvenirs, all of which was published most promptly in the daily papers of Georgia and boasted over by the people of that section.

Oct. 19, 1889, at Canton, Miss., Joseph Leflore was burned to death.  A house had been entered and its occupants murdered during the absence of the husband and father.  When the discovery was made, it was immediately supposed that the crime was the work of a Negro, and the motive that of assaulting white women.

Bloodhounds were procured and they made a round of the village and discovered only one colored man absent from his home.  This was taken to be proof sufficient that he was the perpetrator of the deed.  When he returned home he was apprehended, taken into the yard of the house that had been burned down, tied to a stake, and was slowly roasted to death.

Dec. 6, 1899, at Maysville, Ky., Wm. Coleman also was burned to death.  He was slowly roasted, first one foot and then the other, and dragged out of the fire so that the torture might be prolonged.  All of this without a shadow of proof or scintilla of evidence that the man had committed the crime.

Thus have the mobs of this country taken the lives of their victims within the past ten years.  In every single instance except one these burnings were witnessed by from two thousand to fifteen thousand people, and no one person in all these crowds throughout the country had the courage to raise his voice and speak out against the awful barbarism of burning human beings to death.