Quotes About Lynching

#1. 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.

Studs Terkel

#2. She didn't believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.

Amy Bloom

#3. 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.

Carter G. Woodson

#4. 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.

Bryan Stevenson

#5. Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret?
[Theodore Roosevelt 1901 relating reports of water torture in the Philippines to lynching in the south]

Theodore Roosevelt

#6. The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#7. 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.

#8. From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana.

Gilbert King

#9. Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.

Ray Stannard Baker

#10. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

Frantz Fanon

#11. I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.

Ida B. Wells

#12. For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

Robert Charles Wilson

#13. Wells-Barnett's experience with the ways that lynching victims were criminalized, and her progressive belief in the ability of persons to change for the better, gave her another perspective.

Paula J. Giddings

#14. 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.

Samuel L. Jackson

#15. The white man who begins by cheating a Negro usually ends by cheating a white man. The white man who begins to break the law by lynching a Negro soon yields to the temptation to lynch a white man.

Booker T. Washington

#16. There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.

Mark Twain

#17. 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.

Bryan Stevenson

#18. I'd done it, I'd crossed the line between accepted behavior and behavior most of the population would consider a lynching offense, and that morning I felt as real as any of the men in the Escape commercials. It had been dirty and nasty but I wanted more.

Matthew Stokoe

#19. The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

Ida B. Wells

#20. 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

#21. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.

Ida B. Wells

#22. America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.

Malcolm X

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

Liz Cheney

#24. I was participating in my own lynching, but the problem was I didn't know what I was being lynched for.

William Westmoreland

#25. Lynching is color line murder.

Ida B. Wells

#26. This is not a trial. This is a lynching. There is no law.

Jack Kevorkian

#27. 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

#28. Black folks never bungie jump. That's too much like lynching for us. I'm gonna let you tie a rope around me and push me off a bridge? You must be out your damn mind.

D. L. Hughley

#29. While the subject matter is lynching, on a deeper level, this novel is about identity. Whom and what we identify ourselves with determines our characters, determines who we are, and what we do.

Julius Lester

#30. No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

H.L. Mencken

#31. 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.

Albert Maltz

#32. 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.

E.W. Jackson

#33. You know, I am against lynching and lynching is a tendency of the people.

Jacques Verges

#34. 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.

Sean O'Grady

#35. 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.

Carter G. Woodson

#36. 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. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.

Carter G. Woodson

#37. Today's lynching is a felony charge. Today's lynching is incarceration. Today's lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, 'I'm going to hang you up and burn you.' Once you get that F, you're on fire.

Michelle Alexander

#38. 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.

Ida B. Wells

#39. 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.

Aviva Cantor

#40. We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.

Rosa Parks

#41. Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

#42. The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution.

Vernon A. Walters

#43. I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.

George Allen

#44. Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.

Ida B. Wells

#45. An execution carried out in secrecy is no better than lynching from a dry branch.

Loren D. Estleman

#46. 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.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#48. Such public shaming is rampant and sometimes appropriate, but unfortunately, in recent years, shaming has morphed into coordinated reputation murders, and anyone who is slightly insensitive or not PC enough can be led to a public character lynching without due process.

Gudjon Bergmann

#49. 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.

Jim Goad

#50. You ever think about the noose?'

'I been thinking about the noose since I was born.

Stacey Lee

#51. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

#52. I mean it used to be, there was a time ... when lynchings of African Americans were not that incredibly rare. Now the lynchings are the police and it's just an outrage.

Ben Stein

#53. A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#54. 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.

Charles Diggs

#55. 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

#56. A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.

James Weldon Johnson

#57. 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

#58. The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation - that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

#59. 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.

Rosa Parks

#60. When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before.

Mamie Till

#61. Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease among the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
-Strange Fruit

Seamus Heaney

#62. America don't have no future! America's going to be destroyed! Allah's going to divinely chastise America! Violence, crimes, earthquakes- there's gonna be all kinds of trouble. America's going to pay for all its lynchings and killings of slaves and what it's done to black people.

Muhammad Ali

#63. 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.

James Weldon Johnson

#64. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#65. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?

Philip Dray