A lynching victim’s self-defense account was reframed by white media as a monstrous attack

Evidence

One of the most chilling demonstrations of the compatibility of white Protestant Christianity with the racial violence of Redemption was the lynching of Samuel Thomas Wilkes, a black Georgia farmhand, on the third Sunday after Easter in 1899. Wilkes, who was referred to as Sam Hose or Sam Holt in contemporary news accounts, was accused of murdering Alfred Cranford, a prominent white planter, without cause as he ate dinner with his family. According to white newspaper accounts—each of which seemed motivated to outdo the other with shocking details—Wilkes snuck into the Cranford house, buried an ax deeply in Alfred Cranford’s head, then tore an infant from Mattie Cranford, dashed it to the floor, and subsequently raped her multiple times in a puddle of her husband’s blood. … Wilkes himself never denied killing Cranford but gave a very different account of the events. According to Wilkes, he and Cranford had a dispute after Wilkes asked to be paid for work completed and permission to go see his ailing mother. Cranford refused the request for pay and leave and told Wilkes if he pursued the matter, he would shoot him. The next day, while Wilkes was chopping wood in the yard, Cranford approached Wilkes, and they began arguing again. Cranford pulled out a revolver, and Wilkes threw his ax at Cranford, wounding him mortally in the head. He then fled directly into the woods, hiding and heading for his mother’s Marshallville cabin, near which he was eventually captured. He denied assaulting Mrs. Cranford until his last breath. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 88

Categorization

• XREF: The dramatic gap between the white press’s monster-fantasy account and Wilkes’s mundane self-defense story parallels the contrast of monstrous Muslim caricatures against ordinary men in Muslims in the Western Imagination. — connects to: Dehumanizing targets as non-human makes racist violence self-excusing — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1873; A racists self-image as objective truth-teller can coexist with degrading claims. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 65
• SEED: The competing narratives of the same event — white press fiction of the ax-wielding raper vs. the labor-dispute self-defense account — could anchor an essay on how lynching’s justificatory stories were manufactured.

Broader Connections

• A racists self-image as objective truth-teller can coexist with degrading claims. #expands (0.82) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 65
• Dehumanizing targets as non-human makes racist violence self-excusing #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1873