Lynched Quotes & Sayings

If I'd been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I'd merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching. — Jim Goad

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

When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I hear that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead. — Aime Cesaire

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

In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king." Mr. Bahu's face was positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. "He gets lynched. — Aldous Huxley

Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida history professor who studied racial violence in the South, concluded that "a black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country. — Gilbert King

What is most difficult to face, but increasingly obvious as gay visibility provokes containment, but not equality, is that homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of supremacy. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It's not fear - it's fun.
We know from photographs of happy picnicking white families laughing underneath the swinging body of a tortured, lynched black man, or giggly white U.S. soldiers leading naked Iraqis on leashes, or terrified humiliated Jews surrounded by laughing smiling Nazis that human beings love being cruel. They enjoy the power, and go far beyond social expectation to carry out the kind of cruelty that makes them feel bigger. In short, homophobia is not a phobia at all. It is a pleasure system. — Sarah Schulman

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities are closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate-We are America! — Carlos Bulosan

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered. — Aime Cesaire

After 1889, however, excited by rumors of "black beast rapists," Southern whites began to lynch African American men in record numbers. In 1892, the violence reached its apogee, with 161 African Americans murdered by white mobs. Ten years before, in 1882, only forty-nine black men had been lynched.8 As lynchings grew in frequency, they also grew in brutality, commonly including burnings alive, castrations, dismemberments, and other deliberate and odious tortures. — Gail Bederman

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us."
"Who?" Lily asked.
"Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me." — Bebe Moore Campbell

Yes, the ugliness of humanity can destroy you, it can lead to your destruction, you can sabotage others unknowingly or self-sabotage yourself and in the end, you will learn to secretly despise yourself and despise others at the same time. People never talk about what comes with freedom. The price of freedom. The lives that were lost in the process of its beautiful acquisition. They do not seem to realise that in the wrong hands it was a commodity for generations. People were lynched for it. They were raped for it. Nasty things (instead people will say let us sign papers and treaties and draw up constitutions). The bits and pieces of history become the literally and figuratively the past. Change yourself and you will change the past's 'yolk of blood'. — Abigail George

I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day. — Assata Shakur

After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance. — Gilbert King

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too. — Alice Walker

When I was in the Sex Pistols, I listened to Boston. But I couldn't tell anybody, you know. I'd get lynched. — Steve Jones

But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalized. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. Should I write a play I wonder- Gandhi Get Your Gun. Or will I be lynched? — Arundhati Roy

If mob law is going to rule, better dismiss, judge, sheriff, etc., and let's all take chances alike. I expect to be lynched in going to Lincoln [New Mexico.] Advise persons never to engage in killing. — Billy The Kid

There is a place in the United States for the Negro. They are real American citizens, and at home. They have fought and bled and died, like men, to make this country what it is. And if they have got to suffer and die, and be lynched, and tortured, and burned at the stake, I say they are at home. — Amanda Smith

I thank God that I've lived long enough to see what I have seen, and I pray that people will continue to do better. We are doing better, it may not seem so, but there was a time when people were lynched in the middle of the street and it was not against the law. We are doing better, but we have so much more to do. — Maya Angelou

I grew up in the South [USA states] under segregation. I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. That's terrorism, too. — Alice Walker

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched. — Aldous Huxley

No sooner are her glass toes thrust into the mud grave than the revolutions begin. Uprisings, fire and steel. The prince is lynched in the ballroom with the dead girl's hair. Royalty's a thing of the past. The kingdom chooses their monarch.
Naturally, they elect a wolf. — Allyse Near

These were Jim Crow days, and as I grew older I found that people in the United States were still being murdered because of their color. I heard things like, "You Negroes shouldn't be so pushy, they only lynched five last year." By this we were supposed to understand that things weren't so bad, by God, they were getting better. — Anonymous

I was going to be lynched. I had to go into hiding in the mountains for two weeks. — Patrick McGoohan

In other words, Texans lynched one person a month for thirty years, and almost 80 percent of the time the man or woman hanging on the end of a rope or smoldering in the remains of a fire was African American. — E.R. Bills

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass. — Douglas Adams

Sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white southern women. — Spike Lee

Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation, and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son, lynched? — Mamie Till

I'm much more likely to get lynched over 'The Killing' than 'Macbeth.' — David Hewson

My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father ... Shoot them for what? How do I got to go shoot them, poor little black people, little babies, children, and women? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail. — Muhammad Ali

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year. — Ishmael Reed

If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched. — George H. W. Bush

That is the greatest source of my anxiety on this film [The Hobbit], is that I'm going to be lynched. — Evangeline Lilly

But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan. — Jon Ronson

Priority is placed on the chastity of women. You can be corrupt, or a murderer and still hold your head up high on the street without problems, whereas if there are any suspicions of your chastity and moral behaviour as a woman, you get lynched. — Safak Pavey

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched. — Ida B. Wells

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. — Teju Cole

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot. — Bharati Mukherjee

There had not been a lynching in America in a quarter century, and no one standing looking at the body had ever seen such a crime, but they had heard about it from family members and read about it in social science books in school. And they believed they knew what had occurred. White men had lynched a black man, and they had done it to send a message of intimidation and terror. This was something they thought would never happy again, and many of the black onlookers wept, others fell to the ground beating their fists against the earth. — Laurence Leamer

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. — Toni Morrison

In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. If you're not a bloodsucking monster, then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In the spring, during the Festival of Flora, when Rome was crowded with visitors from all over Italy, Clodius's mob found itself for once outnumbered by ordinary citizens who despised their bullying tactics. Clodius himself was actually jeered at the theatre. Unused to anything other than adulation from the people, according to Atticus he looked around him in astonishment at the slow handclapping, taunts, whistles and obscene gestures, and realised - almost too late - that he was in danger of being lynched. He retreated hastily, and that was the beginning of the end of his domination, for the Senate now recognised how he could be beaten: by appealing over the heads of the — Robert Harris

[W]hen nations crumble, they often crack along racial or ethnic lines, and there's no reason why it won't happen here, but since racial hatred is as barbaric as they come, I don't wish to live long enough to witness this catastrophe. From 1882 to 1968, white mobs lynched 539 blacks in Mississippi alone, the most in the entire nation, but now, there are white groups who keep tabs on the staggering number of black-on-white murders, maimings, rapes and recreational assaults. Seeing their share of the population decreasing relentlessly, they speak of a white genocide. As for the elites, though they don't welcome social unrest, since it's bad for business, they will benefit from increasing racial animosity since it distracts from the serial crimes they're inflicting on us all. — Linh Dinh

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched. — Malcolm X

It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ. — Desmond Tutu