Quotes About Lynching

More than two hundred antilynching bills were introduced to the U.S. Congress during the twentieth century, but none were passed. Seven presidents lobbied for antilynching legislation, and the House of Representatives passed three separate measures, each of which was blocked by the Senate.

In a state where more than three hundred African Americans were lynched, many for the simple crime of trying to vote or helping others vote, referencing "our heritage" and calling black protesters sons of bitches in front of an overwhelmingly white audience was the perfect kind of racial pitch. It was heard clearly and undeniably as racist.

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.

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.

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

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility.

Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was "rather a good thing" and told her he had said as much at a dinner with "various dago diplomats … all wrought up by the lynching.

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.

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

What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.

the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.

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.

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. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

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.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

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]

Every lynching represents by just so much a loosening of the bands of civilisation; that the spirit of lynching inevitably throws into prominence in the community all the foul and evil creatures who dwell therein. No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered

Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running, water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.

If jurors were looking for a way to come back finding for the UKA, Mays had given it to them. Senator Michael Figures made the plaintiff's final arguments. He had been there on Herndon Street the morning of the lynching, and he had seen Donald's body hanging from a tree. He had been

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.

Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America's cross.

Imagine a furious horde….This horde is transported with the wild delight of a crime to be committed without risk. They are armed with sticks, torches, revolvers, ropes, knives, scissors, vitriol, daggers; in a word, with all that can be used to wound or kill. Imagine in this, a flotsam of black flesh pushed about, beaten, trampled underfoot, torn, slashed, insulted, tossed hither and thither, bloodstained, dead. The horde are the lynchers. The human rag is the Black, the victim.

Sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white southern women.