Lynching Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Albert Maltz

2. "There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South's weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B Russell of Georgia used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills."
Author: Barack Obama

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."
Author: Carter G. Woodson

4. "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."
Author: Carter G. Woodson

5. "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."
Author: George Allen

6. "Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."
Author: Henry Louis Gates

7. "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."
Author: Ida B. Wells

8. "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."
Author: Ida B. Wells

9. "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."
Author: Ida B. Wells

10. "You know, I am against lynching and lynching is a tendency of the people."
Author: Jacques Verges

11. "As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs."
Author: Jon Meacham

12. "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."
Author: Julius Lester

13. "An execution carried out in secrecy is no better than lynching from a dry branch."
Author: Loren D. Estleman

14. "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."
Author: Mark Twain

15. "When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system."
Author: Michelle Alexander

16. "Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing."
Author: Nathanael West

17. "Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape."
Author: Ray Stannard Baker

18. "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."
Author: Samuel L. Jackson

19. "A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watcha Christ go up in flames, smiling,as if he were a hookedfish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned.His charred bodygives off light--a haloburns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip,another with his armslung over the shoulder of a friend,as if this moment were large enoughto hold affection."
Author: Toi Derricotte

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

Lynching Quotes Pictures