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Lynching Quotes

1.
When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before.
Mamie Till

When people perceived the misfortune that had befallen my son, individuals who had never assumed a firm stance before now rose to their feet.
Authors on Lynching Quotes: Ida B. Wells H. L. Mencken Bryan Stevenson James Weldon Johnson Malcolm X Muhammad Ali William Arthur Ward Shane Claiborne Frantz Fanon Stephen Covey Henry Louis Gates Jacques Verges Ted Turner Carter G. Woodson Wayne Dyer Mehmet Murat Ildan Studs Terkel Albert Maltz George Allen Samuel L. Jackson Douglas Adams Will Smith E.W. Jackson Rosa Parks Arundhati Roy Mark Twain Richard Bach Deepak Chopra Helen Keller Jack Kevorkian D. L. Hughley Liz Cheney Sean Covey
2.
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

America's most egregious offense against African Americans was not bondage or mob justice, but rather instilling in them a sense of self-loathing and uncertainty.
3.
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

I am merely a vessel for the narrative of lynching and I have recounted it so often that it is ingrained in my memory. There is no need to exaggerate; its impact speaks for itself.
4.
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.
Ida B. Wells

5.
In fact, for all kinds of offenses - and, for no offenses - from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.
Ida B. Wells

6.
Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.
Ida B. Wells

Fearless individuals do not congregate in hordes to torment and assassinate a solitary human, so muffled and restrained he cannot make any weak struggle or protection.
7.
What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.
Ida B. Wells

What becomes an offense worthy of the death penalty when the roles are reversed is a trifling detail when the African-American female is the one making the accusation.
8.
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

9.
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

10.
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?"
Arundhati Roy

11.
We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them.
William Arthur Ward

12.
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

13.
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.
Malcolm X

14.
Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.
Peter Drucker

15.
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

16.
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.
Ida B. Wells

17.
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

18.
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

19.
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

20.
You can create whatever you want. You just have to know what you want and take the opportunities as they come your way. We are who we choose to be.
Will Smith

21.
This is not a trial. This is a lynching. There is no law.
Jack Kevorkian

22.
Lynching is color line murder.
Ida B. Wells

23.
The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

24.
The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes.
Ida B. Wells

25.
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.
W. E. B. Du Bois

26.
To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.
H. L. Mencken

27.
There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.
Ida B. Wells

28.
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
Ida B. Wells

29.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
Henry Louis Gates

30.
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

31.
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

32.
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.
H. L. Mencken

33.
In my opinion while lynchings were quite possibly the most heinous crimes ever witnessed in American history, they helped in bringing people together for a sole purpose. It was because of these lynchings that armed self-resistance was created. If white people knew black people were capable of fighting back then there was less of a chance that violence actually would break out.
Assata Shakur

34.
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

35.
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.
Stephen Covey

36.
All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.
Henry Giroux

37.
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.
Bryan Stevenson

38.
You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame and self-pity. There is a better way to live.
Og Mandino

39.
Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.
Frantz Fanon

40.
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.
Neil Gaiman

41.
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

42.
We can be resentful of our age, or we can be grateful for having attained it.
William Arthur Ward

43.
I was participating in my own lynching, but the problem was I didn't know what I was being lynched for.
William Westmoreland

44.
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

45.
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

46.
If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.
Sean Covey

47.
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

48.
You are the sum total of your choices.
Wayne Dyer

49.
If you don't do the choosing, life will choose for you, and it may not be the choice you want.
Robert Anthony

50.
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