Lynching Quotes - Page 3

• 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

  Hate, Justice, Diversity

  Frantz Fanon (1967). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.53, Pluto Press

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• 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

  Country, Land, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• When we really began executions rather than lynchings, black folks were 22% of our population in 1950, for instance, but they were 75% of the executions. Now, African-Americans are 13% of the population, but they're still almost half of death row, and over a third of the executions. 34% of the executions are black folks. So, like, I mean, things like the race of the victim is one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed.

  Shane Claiborne

  Mean, Race, African American

  Source: medium.com

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• Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Mean, Exercise, Rights

  "First State of the Union Address" by Calvin Coolidge, 1923.

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• Nothing has to be accepted just because we inherited it.

  Deepak Chopra

  Choices, Accepted

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• 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

  Fighting, Self, White

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• 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.

  Jon Meacham

  Dog, Epic, Fire

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• 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

  Should Have, Spirit, Vote

  Ida B. Wells (2014). “The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader”, p.256, Penguin

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• We design our lives through the power of our choices. We feel most helpless when we've made choices by default, when we haven't designed our lives on our own.

  Richard Bach

  Choices, Design, Made

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• 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

  Race, Names, White

  James Weldon Johnson “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.

  James Weldon Johnson

  Country, Race, Democracy

  James Weldon Johnson, Sondra K. Wilson (1995). “The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson: Social, political, and literary essays”, p.352, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• 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

  People, Slavery, Instinct

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool.

  Muhammad Ali

  Two, White, Years

  "Parkinson" with Michael Parkinson, www.mirror.co.uk. 1971.

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• In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Thinking, Gun

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

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• It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people... catching and lynching blacks or smoking out Jews during the Holocaust.

  Aviva Cantor

  Animal, Hunting, People

  "The Club, the Yoke, and the Leash: What We Can Learn From the Way a Culture Treats Animals". Ms. magazine, Vol. 12, No. 2, August 1983.

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• Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.

  Peter Drucker

  Choices, Decision, Facts

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• There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.

  Mark Twain

  War, Names, Southern

  Mark Twain (1976). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II: (1877-1883)”, p.368, Univ of California Press

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• Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Men, Law, America

  "Oates Details Writers' Last Days in 'Wild Nights'". Interview with Liane Hansen, www.npr.org. April 27, 2008.

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• The Senate wants you to know how terribly, sincerely sorry they are even though not a single member of today's Senate was even in office the last time America saw a lynching. Some were not even born. But that's the way we prefer our apologies in American politics. We don't apologize for our own sins.

  Mona Charen

  Sorry, Apology, America

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• The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America's future.

  Helen Keller

  White, America, Political

  Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.96, American Foundation for the Blind

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• One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. I mean, physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who, A, has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.

  Toni Morrison

  Country, Mother, Breakup

  "Toni Morrison On Human Bondage And A Post-Racial Age". "Tell Me More" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. December 26, 2008.

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• 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

  Race, Racism, People

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• 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

  Country, Thinking, Media

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• The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Suicide, Atheist, Stars

  Robert Charles Wilson (2010). “Spin”, p.191, Macmillan

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• What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there's a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this 'the broad-brush smear.'

  Don Feder

  Hate, Dark, Government

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