Lynching

Lynching is an illegal form of trial and punishment by an informal group that is mainly associated with the United States. It is most often used to characterize extrajudicial public executions by a mob, often by hanging, in order to punish an alleged transgressor or to intimidate a minority group.  It is an extreme form of group social control such as charivari, skimmington, riding the rail, and tarring and feathering, but with a drift toward the public spectacle.

Lynching mob - My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. ~ Maya Angelou

Quotes

• 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 on Lynch Law in America, quoted in: Wadsworth Wadsworth Classic Readings in Sociology, Cengage Learning, 5 February 2010, p. 24.

• There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.
  • Ida B. Wells quoted in: Anthony B. Pinn By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, NYU Press, 2001, p. 62.

• We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.
  • Benjamin Tillman in his "Congressional Speech on Segregation" (23 March 1900), quoted in: Edward Ayers et al., American Passages: A History of the United States, Volume II: Since 1865, Volume 2, Cengage Learning, 22 October 2008, p. 556.

• The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.
  • Benjamin Tillman's remarks regarding Booker T. Washington's meeting with Theodore Roosevelt on October 16, 1901, as quoted in Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000), by Stephen Kantrowitz. University of North Carolina Press, p. 259.

• If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.
  • Mississippi Governor James Vardaman (early 1900s), as quoted in Public Broadcasting Service (September 2008). "People & Events: James K. Vardaman". American Experience. Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

• I am utterly powerless. The State has no troops, and if the civil authorities at Ellisville are helpless, the States are equally so. Furthermore, excitement is at such a high pitch throughout South Mississippi that any armed attempt to interfere would doubtless result in the deaths of hundreds of persons. The negro has confessed, says he is ready to die, and nobody can keep the inevitable from happening.
  • Governor Theodore Bilbo's speech before the mob lynching of John Hartfield in Ellisville, Mississippi, on June 26, 1919, as quoted in New York Times: "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919, accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. George E. Haynes's report, "summarized at several points."

• This is a white man's country, with a white man's civilization and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.
  • Theodore Bilbo's statement arguing that it would have been practically impossible to prevent Hartfield's lynching, as quoted in "Gov. Bilbo blames French reception and Negro Press. Admits it is practically impossible to prevent rapists' lynching". Jones County News. 8 July 1919.

• This new generation, for example, is not content with preachings against that vile form of collective murder —lynch law— which has broken out in our midst anew. We know that it is murder, and a deliberate and definite disobedience of the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." We do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch law.
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Address before the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. December 6, 1933

• To defeat this measure, so help me God, I would be willing to speak every day of the year 1938.
  • In a speech by Theodore Bilbo opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• When once the flat-nosed Ethiopian, like the camel, gets his proboscis under the tent, he will overthrow the established order of our Saxon civilization.
  • In reference to NAACP head Walter White in a speech by Theodore Bilbo opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.
  • In a speech by Theodore Bilbo opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• It is essential to the perpetuation of our Anglo-Saxon civilization that white supremacy be maintained, and to maintain our civilization there is only one solution, and that is either by segregation within the United States, or by deportation of the entire Negro race to its native heath, Africa.
  • In a speech by Theodore Bilbo opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• I am ready to wage the most strenuous fight of my life to defeat the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the anti-poll tax bill, the anti-lynching bill, and the $4 billion loan to England...If you draft Negro boys into the army, give them three good meals a day, a good uniform and let them shoot craps and drink liquor around the barracks for a year, they won’t be worth a tinker’s damn thereafter.
  • In an announcement by Theodore Bilbo that he would seek re-election to the Senate in 1946 ^{[citation needed]}

• Lynching is an absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear; it is a fault without justification or excuse.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. Philosophical Library. 1948. ISBN 978-0-8065-0160-4.  Part III: The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity

• 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. quoted in: Andrew Sabl Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics, Princeton University Press, 9 February 2009, p. 227.

• For a quarter of a century, in the Congress of the United States, we tried to get passed an anti-lynching bill. A simple law to protect the lives of black citizens below the Mason-Dixon line. This was not legislation, as our protesting brethren so often take us to task for—the legislation of brotherly love with they say is impossible. It was a law making it a federal offense to hang a human being from a tree, cover him with kerosene and cremate him. But the loudest cheerleaders of our current law and order rallies—the Eastlands and the Strom Thurmonds—were the very gentlemen who fought against that legislation until it was ultimately passed.
  • Rod Serling, “Rod Serling Rips Loyalty Oaths, the Vietnam War, and Social Inequity”, “Rod Serling Memorial Foundation”, (Delivered December 3, 1968 at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California)

• Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral.  If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even the most overwhelming majority can never make it morally permissible).  Opinions—even majority opinions—neither create truth nor alter facts.  A lynch mob is democracy in action.  So much for mob rule.
  • Morris Tannehill, Linda Tannehill in: Ch. 4, Government—An Unnecessary Evil, The Market for Liberty (1970), pp. 33–34.

• No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and revolution.
  • H. L. Mencken in: A Choice of Days: Essays from Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1980, p. 57.

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.... - Toi Derricotte.

• 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 in: Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, Penguin, 1 November 1994, p. 176.

• Central High School was where I first learned about the power of circumstances, about economics. I learned about what people of color were like through my neighborhood relationships, and also that there was racist hatred because there was a lynching in our neighborhood...I still have a recurring nightmare--the smell of burning flesh and a boy about my age whose father is trying to put this open pocketknife in his hand, pushing him, and telling him to go up [to the hanged man] and bring back part of his ear.
  • Tillie Olsen Interview with The Progressive Magazine (1999)

• My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped.
  • Maya Angelou in: Ron Eyerman Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge University Press, 13 December 2001, p. 142.

• During the first Intifada, before the PA was established, hundreds of alleged collaborators were lynched, tortured or killed, at times with the implied support of the PLO. Street killings of alleged collaborators continue in the current Intifada ... but so far in much fewer numbers.
  • Human Rights Watch in: VI. Balancing Security and Human Rights During the INTIFADA (2001), Human Rights Watch Organization.

• For lynching was also a woman's issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.
  • Paula Giddings in: Stanlie Myrise James, et al., Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies, Feminist Press, 2009, p. 158.

• Paris ... On this side of the ocean it is difficult to understand the susceptibility of American citizens on the subject and precisely why they should so stubbornly cling to the biblical version. It is said in Genesis the first man came from mud and mud is not anything very clean. In any case if the Darwinian hypothesis should irritate any one it should only be the monkey. The monkey is an innocent animal—a vegetarian by birth. He never placed God on a cross, knows nothing of the art of war, does not practice lynch law and never dreams of assassinating his fellow beings. The day when science definitely recognizes him as the father of the human race the monkey will have no occasion to be proud of his descendants. That is why it must be concluded that the American Association which is prosecuting the teacher of evolution can be no other than the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
  • Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in: edited by Prof Dr Eckart Voigts et al., Reflecting on Darwin, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 8 January 2014, p. 81.

• 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 smart-ass.
  • Douglas Noel Adams in: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, DavCom, 4 June 2014, p. 32.

• The artifacts that persist in my memory are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend...Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another... Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
  • Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America (2021), p 100-101.