Lynching Racism Quotes

“[B]y far the majority of Negro murders are never recorded, never known except to the perpetrators and the bereaved survivors of the victim. Negro men and women leave their homes and are never seen alive again.…This is a well-known pattern of American culture.… Mass murder on the basis of race is a powerful source of constant terror, as it is intended to be, to the whole Negro people. As a result of the pattern of extra-legal violence in which they live out their lives, if they do live, the entire Negro people exists in a constant fear that cannot fail to cause serious bodily and mental harm.… Perennial, hour by hour, moment by moment lynching of the Negro’s soul in countless psychological, in myriad physical forms, that is the greatest and most enduring lynching of all. This is written into the spiritual hanging of all those millions, it is carved into their daily thinking, woven into their total living experience. They are lynched in the thousands of glances from white supremacists all over the land every day.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America