Ray Stannard Baker Quotes

Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

I would willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault upon a white woman.

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.

Abolish lynching

Lynchings were public events attended by the town’s leading citizens. They were almost a sport ….Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

I grew up in the once segregated South. I experienced forced integration during my formative school years. I lived the sacrifices, burdens, and tears. I also lived the moments of understanding, of acknowledgment, of fellowship and success. I saw my parents and grandparents coming home beaten down - and some of my friends beaten up.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

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.

In the South the white men used to call all Black men “boy” until they got to be old enough to call them “uncle.” It was sex-the feat of sexual competition. When they used to get liquored up and talk they would always say, “The schoolroom leads to the bedroom” to justify school segregation.

You suggest that a visit to the place of my nativity [Kentucky] might be pleasant to me. Indeed it would. But would it be safe? Would not the people lynch me?

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.

I must tell you something about the Ku Klux, they are raging on the other side of the River. They have whipped several white men, whipped and killed several Negroes. They whipped Colonel Huggins, the Superintendent of the free schools nearly to death, and everybody rejoiced when they heard it, for everybody hated him. He squandered the public money, buying pianofortes, organs, sofas, and furniture for the Negro School house in Aberdeen. The people are taxed beyond endurance. The Ku Klux gave him seventy lashes, and then gave him ten days to leave the country. he left and went to Jackson. There was a Regiment of Militia came into Aberdeen Friday. They are sent here to put down the Ku Klux. Huggins has come back with the Militia, but I wouldn't give a straw for his life, for he will be killed. It is the opinion of most everybody there will be war. the Yankees coming here will make the Negroes more insolent. With Country full of Yankees, things are going too far, for the free whites of the South are determined not to put up with it.

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.

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.

I abhor the brutality that smears the good name of one of the fairest sections of our land. Shame on you, George Wallace.

Since the 1950s (when lynching was still “allowed” in parts of the South, and no jury would ever find KKK members guilty) there has been inestimable progress. Race and racism will always be with us, for such propensities seem to be hard-wired into the human brain.

One often-cited abuse of the [jury] nullification power is the acquittal by bigoted juries of whites who commit crimes (lynching, for example) against blacks. That repellent practice cannot be directly arrested without jeopardizing important constitutional protections.

The Southern States have enacted Black Codes with the aim of keeping former slaves subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, 'Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty.' In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.

Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.