Quotes About Lynching

first year to pass without a single recorded lynching anywhere in the United States was 1952,

In the "lynching era," between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these "Christians" did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted. I offer my reflections because I believe that the cross placed alongside the lynching tree can help us to see Jesus in America in a new light, and thereby empower people who claim to follow him to take a stand against white supremacy and every kind of injustice.

Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching.

tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution.

In a community where mobs do not appear to take white prisoners from jail cells to lynch them, who is really responsible for the lynching of a Negro prisoner, the band who actually blew out his brain or those of us in the church who say of Willie Earle and his kind, "RACA"—you're an empty-headed, worthless nigger! (That's about the meaning of the word "Raca" as Jesus used it in the 5th Chapter of Matthew.)

The thousands of black bodies incarcerated on death row are one legacy of lynching. The highest rates of execution in the United States can be correlated with those states where lynching was most prevalent. America's practice of lynching morphs rather than dies.

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.

Catherine Fowler has a car so pretty that if she drove it back down to her little town in Mississippi, they would hang the car. John White noticed. John White said, "You called out an ambition hidden in every lynching: a desire to slaughter our beauty. Ofays are made crazy by our beauty." I have committed to be beautiful as often and as publicly as I can. And I have determined to help more of mine see and be their beauty. John White conspired with me to achieve this.

In late twentieth-century America, this "jurisprudence of lawlessness" is a bit out of (fate. While there is a vigorous victim-rights movement in our nation'' and increasingly strong compassion for the victims of rape,7 the day is long since past when rapists are routinely lynched as in Kernan's time. The killing of the seducer of a virgin is no longer it common occurrence, and unapologetic traducers of women stand in little danger of being shot.

Russell called the move "a lynching of orderly procedure in the Senate." Johnson's angry response—that "this was the only kind of lynching he had ever heard Russell object to"—was blurted out only in private

Nothing was as revolting to American southerners (and many northerners) as sexual relations and marriage between black men and white women. Sex between the races became the greatest taboo and any violation, or suspected violation, was viewed as deserving immediate and summary punishment in the form of lynching. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society, perpetrated many such killings. They could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity laws.

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois was walking from his rooms on campus to deliver to the offices of a city newspaper a restrained essay about the lynching of Sam Hose, a black farmer, when he saw, displayed in a store window, Hose's knuckles. Hose had been dismembered, and barbecued, his body parts sold as souvenirs.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

the ADL was created in the wake of the Leo Frank lynching in 1915 to engage in domestic spying and blackmail, if necessary, to protect Jewish interests in the United States.

As they marched across the yard, at one point the black flier glanced over toward the two white men and grinned as he said, "Don't look so glum, Tommy, Hugh. I've been looking forward to this day since I was first accused of this crime. Usually lynchings don't work this way for black folks. Usually we don't get the chance to stand up in front of everyone and tell them how goddamn wrong they are

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.

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.

A lynching always makes a town look bad," Alan Brownfield said. "But a card cheat often makes it look worse.

The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind - as long as it's day-time and you're not behind him.

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

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.