#lynching

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charred body gives off light--a halo burns 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 arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection. ↗

— Toi Derricotte

#poetry #racism #violence #men

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#censorship #justice #lynching

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

— Jack Kevorkian

#lynching #trial

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

#body #century #crowd #cuts #distributes

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

#after #coming #day #house #killing

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.

#cannot #him #i #i think #important

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 #creature #crime #fury #hour

There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. ↗

— Ida B. Wells

#arms #lynching #nothing #now #without

Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West. ↗

— Ida B. Wells

#disappeared #emergency #existing #far #gradually