Racial Terror Quotes
For years through the Jim Crow years, Whites murdered many Blacks with impunity if they were perceived to be uppity or to try and obtain their Constitutionally Protected rights. Most took place in the South. The Negroes were typically tortured, mutilated, burned and hung from trees where they would be left for days as the major purpose was to strike terror in the Southern Black population. The Southern State and local governments never opposed the policy via oratory, legislation of law enforcement. The Federal Government did not interfere either. And much of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover actually enabled the White Citizen’s Councils and the Klu Klux Klan. The NAACP began an anti-lynching campaign and Ms. Holiday was a one-woman public exposure campaign centered around this song. The anthem itself was written by a New York City schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol, using the pen name, Lewis Allan. It reached millions of Americans and Holiday fans the world over. To view some of the historical scenes described in the song, see http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
Wells, more than any individual in American history, documented and publicized the horrid practice of lynching in the belief that if the American people knew the horrors of what was going on, they would put a stop to it. She was right in the long run but it took more than 50 more years before the last vestiges of this form of racial torture and murder was ended in the South. The morality of the South was so warped that the torture, burning and killing was entertainment—viewed by many townspeople including women and children. The leading citizens of the South refused to investigate and prosecute those who actually performed the lynching even though there were photographs and hundreds of eye witnesses and newspapers carried the horrible stories.
