According to Philip Dray's "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America", the noted civil rights leader and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, who lived in Atlanta at the time, was on his way to a scheduled meeting with "Atlanta Constitution" editor Joel Chandler Harris to discuss the lynching, when he was informed that Hose's knuckles were for sale in a grocery store on the road on which he was walking. He turned around and did not meet with Harris after learning this. Du Bois had until then believed that lynching was an aberrant phenomenon, and that he could use reason and a sense of fairness to appeal to the majority of the white community. The spectacular nature of Hose's lynching and the sale of body parts convinced him otherwise.