Lynchings Quotes

You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you - again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise - that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing. ~ N.K. Jemisin

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition - shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor - no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! ~ Sinclair Lewis

Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the 9/11 attacks. An older African American man once said to me, "You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price. ~ Bryan Stevenson

A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Lynching's legacy, though, is also evident today in law enforcement's freedom from accountability in the shooting of black and other youth of color, thus displaying a de facto, and often actual, legalization of white supremacist killing of black life. ~ Mark Lewis Taylor

In my opinion while lynchings were quite possibly the most heinous crimes ever witnessed in American history, they helped in bringing people together for a sole purpose. It was because of these lynchings that armed self-resistance was created. If white people knew black people were capable of fighting back then there was less of a chance that violence actually would break out. ~ Assata Shakur

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs. ~ Jon Meacham

The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that. ~ John Shelby Spong

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. ~ Nathanael West

Every lynching deprives its victim of his life without due process of law, and denies him an equal protection of the law. The States are charged with punishing all such invasions as the common rights of the citizens, but some of them have failed in their effort to do so, and others have not honestly tried. Meanwhile, lynchings continue, and though they do not increase in number, they show some tendency to increase in savagery. ~ H.L. Mencken

61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws. ~ Ishmael Reed

After 1889, however, excited by rumors of "black beast rapists," Southern whites began to lynch African American men in record numbers. In 1892, the violence reached its apogee, with 161 African Americans murdered by white mobs. Ten years before, in 1882, only forty-nine black men had been lynched.8 As lynchings grew in frequency, they also grew in brutality, commonly including burnings alive, castrations, dismemberments, and other deliberate and odious tortures. ~ Gail Bederman

The racial divides in the United States will not be overcome until lynchings of all kinds are as painful to nonblacks as they are to blacks, until each of us become guardians of the sufferings history has bequeathed us. ~ Julius Lester

The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America's future. ~ Helen Keller

There's also way too much religion in the South to be consistent with good mental health.
Still, I love traveling down there, especially when I'm in the mood for a quick trip to the thirteenth century. I'm not someone who buys into all that 'New South' shit you hear; I judge a place by the number of lynchings they've had, overall. ~ George Carlin

As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners - and wished them well - nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. ~ Michelle Alexander

If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war. ~ Angela Y. Davis

The sight of a cross on fire should be unsettling to any true Christian. To a Negro it is worse. A unique kind of fear enters your mind, one perfected by the South: that you could die for the most harmless of offenses. You could die just for the crime of living. ~ Rashad Harrison

Lynchings aren't a vile,inhuman footnote of white history. Lynchings occur every day on the streets of Western countries.

Every time the neck of a black man,woman or child is pinned to the ground by the knee of a police officer, every time a black man,woman or child is chased down in the street and shot simply for being there, every time a black man woman or child is judged purely because of colour,every time a white individual crosses the street to avoid walking past a black man,woman or child, avoids sitting beside a black man woman or child on public transport or says or does nothing when a black man,woman or child is being subjected to abuse is, in itself, a modern day lynching. ~ R.Patient

The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connection with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reactions to this hostility fed upon itself, grew or diminished according to the news that reached me about the whites, according to what I aspired or hoped for. Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused. It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings. I lived ~ Richard Wright

Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it. ~ Lillian Smith

All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings. ~ H.L. Mencken

In a perfect world, ignorant notions should die a quick death. A thing like racism, if it can't find a kindred spirit...it's like a dog barking at a stone. But if you can find just one other person who thinks like you . ..well even the most irrational belief can grow roots. Small minded people feed off each other and before you know it, you have mobs, and you have burning crosses, and lynchings" . ~ Allen Eskens

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod ~ Nathanael West

Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and heart and soul breaking of the world. ~ Betty Smith

I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings. ~ Richard Wright