Quotes About Lynching

In March 1955, Powell called for a boycott of Harlem savings banks that "practice 'Jim Crow-ism' and 'economic lynching.'" He urged Abyssinian Baptist Church's fifteen thousand members to withdraw their funds from white-woned banks and transfer them to either the black-owned Carver Federal Savings in Harlem or the black-owned Tri-State Bank in Memphis, Tennessee (108).

girl rabbits in an' tells the law she been raped. The guys in Weed start a party out to lynch Lennie. So we sit in a irrigation ditch under water all the rest of that day.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

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.

By mid-September, after postponing the start of his concert tour until October 24, Paul was leading a crusade against lynching. When Walter White and most other leaders of the black establishment, such as A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Mary McCleod Bethune, refused to back such an initiative, Paul asked W. E. B. DuBois and Albert Einstein to join him in a national call for a mass protest meeting in Washington, D.C. They agreed

Du Bois spoke about the relationship of black disenfranchisement to cheap surplus labor in the South; Celia Parker Woolley delineated the relationship between race, women's rights, and labor. Wells-Barnett began her talk by enumerating the 3,284 men, women, and children who had been lynched since Reconstruction, and she illustrated the relationship between lynching and the lack of citizenship rights.

Ida was clearly exasperated by the fact that despite the motives that accompanied the lynching statistics published year after year—which Ida included in nearly every article—"law-abiding and fair-minded people should so persistently shut their eyes to the facts." Ida continued, "This record, easily within the reach of every one who wants it," made it "inexcusable" for anyone not to debunk the presumption from the beginning.

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.