Lynching Quotes

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

The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation—that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

If ten men are trying to lynch one allegedly vile person, than we can be completely sure that there are ten vile people and one allegedly vile person over there! Don’t forget, violence makes you a low man!

Mehmet Murat ildan

A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?