Jason Morgan Ward

“Racial fear, like the river itself, occasionally overflowed. Just as concrete piers and steel beams kept the Hanging Bridge's rotting deck from collapsing into the muddy Chickasawhay, terror propped up Mississippi's caste system.”
― Jason Morgan Ward, Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century

“To acknowledge the role of violence in shaping our racial past is no guarantee that we can face honestly the ways in which it informs our racial present, but it is a place to start. In the history of lynching, place is often difficult to pin down with precision - hanging trees long since felled, killing fields reclaimed by nature, rivers and bayous that hide the dead. Yet one of America's most evocative and bloodstained lynching sites still spans a muddy river, and it still casts a shadow.”
― Jason Morgan Ward, Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century