Lynching Quotes

• It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Inspirational, Acceptance

  1962 Speech at Cornell College, Mt Vernon, Iowa. Reported in the Wall Street Journal, 13 Nov.

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• 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

  Country, Insane, Brutality

  "Crime and Punishment in America". Book by David B. Wolcott and Tom Head, p. 144, 2010.

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• 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

  America, Important, Dramatic

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Men, Bravery, Defense

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• We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.

  Rosa Parks

  Girl, Sleep, Night

  "Standing Up for Freedom". Academy of Achievement, October 31, 2005.

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• 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

  Past, Rights, Years

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• 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

  Cutting, Ears, Body

  "Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought". Book by everly Guy-Sheftall, p. 73, 1995.

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

  Jack Kevorkian

  Law, Trials

  "The Michigan Alumnus". Book by University of Michigan Alumni Association, p. 28, 1996.

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• 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

  Rights, Law, Numbers

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

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Government, People

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• Lynching is color line murder.

  Ida B. Wells

  Color, Lines, Murder

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• 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.

  Carter G. Woodson

  Change, Struggle, Teaching

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• Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Art, Justice, Censorship

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2014). “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism”, p.30, Oxford University Press

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• 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

  Country, Years, Numbers

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• 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

  Country, Government, Numbers

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  The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.

  Heraclitus

  Inspirational, Motivational, Sports

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• 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

  Country, Civilization, White

  "Reconstruction and Africa" (1919)

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• 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

  White, Legacy, Slavery

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Lynching is the method of vulgar men! He who is deprived of compassion is deprived of everything!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Compassion, Men, Method

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• 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

  Important, Would Be, Movement

  Carter G. Woodson (2006). “The Mis-Education of the Negro”, p.3, Book Tree

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Desire

  Source: www.progressive.org

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

  William Westmoreland

  Problem, Participation, My Own

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• It's impossible to separate our contemporary practice of the death penalty from our history around race and slavery, and specifically, lynching. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions are happening today. And that's a haunting and eerie thing.

  Shane Claiborne

  Race, Years, Practice

  Source: medium.com

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• Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Life, Motivational, Inspiring

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• 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

  Women, America, Inability

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