THE SEGREGATED SOUTH ★^667onlookers, some of whom arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta.
A crowd including young children watched as his executioners cut off Hose’s
ears, fingers, and genitals, burned him alive, and then fought over pieces of his
bones as souvenirs. Law enforcement authorities made no effort to prevent the
lynching or to bring those who committed the crime to justice.
Like many victims of lynchings, Hose was accused after his death of hav-
ing raped a white woman. Many white southerners considered preserving the
purity of white womanhood a justification for extralegal vengeance. Yet in
nearly all cases, as activist Ida B. Wells argued in a newspaper editorial after a
Memphis lynching in 1892, the charge of rape was a “bare lie.” Born a slave in
Mississippi in 1862, Wells had become a schoolteacher and editor. Her essay
condemning the lynching of three black men in Memphis led a mob to destroy
her newspaper, the Memphis Free Press, while she was out of the city. Wells
moved to the North, where she became the nation’s leading antilynching cru-
sader. She bluntly insisted that given the conditions of southern blacks, the
United States had no right to call itself the “land of the free.”
A crowd at the aftermath of the lynching of Laura Nelson and her teenage son L. D. Nelson,
African- American residents of Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1911. They were accused of shoot-
ing to death a deputy sheriff who had come to the Nelson home to investigate the theft of
livestock. A week after being lodged in jail, they were removed by a mob and taken to the
bridge. Members of the mob raped Mrs. Nelson before the lynching. The photograph was
reproduced as a postcard, sold at local stores. As in most lynchings, no one was prosecuted
for the crime.
How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South?