Georgia led most other states in incidents of lynching, second only to Mississippi. Between 1880 and 1900, mob violence in Georgia steadily escalated, peaking in 1899, when twenty-seven lynchings occurred. Among the most savage was the April 23, 1899, lynching of Sam Hose, a black farmer accused of killing his white employer. Hose was summarily abducted from jail, tortured, and burned at the stake. His charred knuckles were displayed in an Atlanta grocer’s store window as a trophy.  Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her friends hired Louis P. Le Vin, a white private detective, to investigate Hose’s lynching and those of ten other black men. Wells-Barnett reprinted Le Vin’s report along with excerpts from the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution in this pamphlet.