Lynching Quotes

If I’d been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I’d merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching.

Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims.

In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.

I think the picture in Jet magazine showing Emmett Till's mutilation was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years because that picture stimulated a lot of interest and anger on the part of blacks all over the country.

I thought about Emmett Till, and I could not go back. My legs and feet were not hurting, that is a stereotype. I paid the same fare as others, and I felt violated. I was not going back.

Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.

You are the sum total of your choices.

Lynching is the method of vulgar men! He who is deprived of compassion is deprived of everything!

Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.

This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.

It's impossible to separate our contemporary practice of the death penalty from our history around race and slavery, and specifically, lynching. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions are happening today. And that's a haunting and eerie thing.

I think there is a contempt for the human dignity of people who were enslaved. You couldn't see them as fully human and so you didn't respect their desire to be connected to a family and a place. That was the only way you could tolerate and make sense of lynching and the terror that lynching represented.

And the fact that Emmett Till, a young black man, could be found floating down the river in Mississippi, as, indeed, many had been done over the years, this set in concrete the determination of people to move forward.

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.

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.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

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.

We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them.

The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

And weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.

Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

I said, "Suppose communists come out against cancer, do we have to automatically come out for cancer?'" I can't take back that I'm against the poll tax, that I'm against lynching, that I'm for peace.

No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States  of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders

Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.

Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that’s a fact.

I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Anyway, what is a country? When people say, "Tell me about India," I say, "Which India?.... The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?"

You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame and self-pity. There is a better way to live.

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.

I don't believe in lynching, I just don't support legal action being taken against the KKK

Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.

The uncomfortable truth is that we all enjoyed the party far too much to query where all the booze was coming from. Now we seem intent on lynching the barman for letting us get drunk and attacking the Government for letting us get a hangover.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you.

It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people... catching and lynching blacks or smoking out Jews during the Holocaust.

The Senate wants you to know how terribly, sincerely sorry they are even though not a single member of today's Senate was even in office the last time America saw a lynching. Some were not even born. But that's the way we prefer our apologies in American politics. We don't apologize for our own sins.

We can be resentful of our age, or we can be grateful for having attained it.

American civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine.

When we really began executions rather than lynchings, black folks were 22% of our population in 1950, for instance, but they were 75% of the executions. Now, African-Americans are 13% of the population, but they're still almost half of death row, and over a third of the executions. 34% of the executions are black folks. So, like, I mean, things like the race of the victim is one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed.

What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there's a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this 'the broad-brush smear.'

In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.

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

The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased.

The choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.