Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?

A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves!

If ten men are trying to lynch one allegedly vile person, than we can be completely sure that there are ten vile people and one allegedly vile person over there! Don’t forget, violence makes you a low man!

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watcha Christ go up in flames, smiling,as if he were a hookedfish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned.His charred bodygives off light--a haloburns 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 armslung over the shoulder of a friend,as if this moment were large enoughto hold affection.

Partial skinning may be less painful, perhaps delay unpleasantness, how pain set in breasts, back, and belly offers less agony, some reprieve, while the skinning of fingers, nose, cheeks and lips feels like spears. . .

The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation—that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward.

You ever think about the noose?''I been thinking about the noose since I was born.

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.