At the Hands of Persons Unknown

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (2002), a non-fiction book by the American author and historian Philip Dray, seeks to provide a comprehensive history of anti-black lynching in America, while also examining the social and legal phenomena that helped enable these vicious attacks.

Dray begins with a long retelling of the Sam Hose case. In April 1899, Hose asked his employer, Alfred Cranford, if he might have some time off to visit his mother who was severely ill. Cranford declined his request and an argument ensued. The argument became so heated that Cranford pulled a gun on Hose and threatened to shoot him. As an act of self-defense, Hose—who was working with an ax at the time—threw the tool at Cranford, resulting in his death. Hose fled the premises, sparking a manhunt that lasted more than a week. During the manhunt, a number of local newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, published a series of scandalous and salacious accounts of the incident. Journalists fabricated a number of stories about the event, such as that Hose had raped Cranford's wife, Mattie, and thrown their infant son across the room.

Politicians also helped spread the misinformation. Georgia congressman James Griggs was quoted in many newspapers as saying Hose had "crept into that happy little home . . . with an ax knocked out the brains of that father, snatched the child from its mother, threw it across the room out of his way, and then by force accomplished his foul purpose. [He] carried her helpless body to another room, and there stripped her person of every thread and vestige of clothing, there keeping her till time enough had elapsed to permit him to accomplish his fiendish offense twice more and again!" The Atlanta Constitution published a front-page headline about the manhunt that read, "Determined Mob After Hose; He Will Be Lynched if Caught." And indeed, after Hose was caught—he was apprehended by a mob of more than 500 people, some reports suggest as many as 2000—who cut off his fingers, ears, and genitals, removed the skin from his face, poured kerosene on him, and burned him alive.



Meanwhile, Dray asserts, many Americans who hadn't directly witnessed such atrocities believed that lynching was something tragically out-of-the-ordinary, the result of angry mob behavior and not reflective of true attitudes of white Americans in the South. That included W.E.B. DuBois, the prominent civil rights activist and professor. He ventured one day to the offices of the Atlanta Constitution to speak with its editor in hope of convincing him to change how such manhunts and alleged crimes committed by African-Americans would be covered in the future. However, on the way to the editor's office, DuBois heard that a local shop was selling Hose's knuckles on that very street. According to Dray, DuBois did not meet the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, but “walked home in a distracted state of mind, having had the sudden recognition that one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”

Dray spends the rest of the book offering up evidence and history to show that the widespread lynching of African Americans was more than merely the result of angry mobs whipped into frenzies. Rather, there were significant political, legal, and societal pressures at work that could not be fixed easily by simply hoping that cooler heads would prevail. To make this argument, Dray discusses cases like that of Willie McGee, for example. In 1945, in Laurel, Mississippi, McGee was accused of rape by a white housewife. After he was arrested, some residents plotted to break him out of jail in order to lynch him, but they were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, McGee was advised to plead insanity rather than admit what many believed to be the truth: That McGee and the woman were engaged in a consensual affair. Other suspect details were added to the alleged victim's testimony, like that McGee had a knife and that the act took place next to her baby. The trial only lasted the better part of an afternoon; the jury only needed two-and-a-half minutes to determine that McGee should be put to death for rape, despite the fact that no white man had ever received the death penalty for rape in the entire state. The point of stories like these is to show that even when mobs don't take control of the situation, the justice system was long ill-suited to handle allegations against black men, especially when the crimes were of a sexual nature.

Full of tragic and well-researched details, At the Hands of Persons Unknown was awarded the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.