Mob Lynching Quotes

Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.

If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war.

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.

Renton looks at her and sees her pain and anger. It cuts him up. It confuses him. Kelly has a great sense of humour. What's wrong with her? The knee–jerk thought: Wrong time of the' month is forming in his head when he looks about and picks up the intonations of the laughter around the bar. It's not funny laughter. This is lynch mob laughter. How was ah tae know, he thinks. How the fuck was ah tae know?

the Southern Strategy introduced cultural memes every bit as powerful as the Confederate flag or a lynch mob’s noose. Only now, their buzzwords were “entitlements,” “big government,” and “the undeserving poor.” They

Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral. If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even the most overwhelming majority can never make it morally permissible). Opinions—even majority opinions—neither create truth nor alter facts. A lynch mob is democracy in action. So much for mob rule.

We’re not a lynch mob, we’re a book club,” Kitty said. “We’ve always been there for each other.

In a perfect world, ignorant notions should die a quick death. A thing like racism, if it can’t find a kindred spirit...it’s like a dog barking at a stone. But if you can find just one other person who thinks like you . ..well even the most irrational belief can grow roots. Small minded people feed off each other and before you know it, you have mobs, and you have burning crosses, and lynchings” .

If this is a lynch mob, you didn’t bring enough people,” I said.

Whoever challenged the racial hierarchy was marked a potential victim of the mob. The endless roster of the dead came to include every sort of insurgent—from the owners of successful Black businesses and workers pressing for higher wages to those who refused to be called “boy” and the defiant women who resisted white men’s sexual abuses. Yet public opinion had been captured, and it was taken for granted that lynching was a just response to the barbarous sexual crimes against white womanhood.

The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death.

A white mob massacred some sixty black people in Ocoee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, burning black homes and businesses to the ground, lynching and castrating black men, and driving the remaining black population out of town, after a black man tried to vote.

Here’s Doc Osborne, first Democratic governor. A lynch mob hung Big Nose George Parrott back in the 1870s. Doc got the body, skinned it, tanned the hide, made himself a medical bag and a pair a shoes. Wore the shoes to his inauguration. They don’t make Democrats like that anymore.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.

Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was how lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic strategy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver.

judge catches up to John with the lynch mob he has assembled.

THE YEAR AFTER THE WAR ENDED, white mobs lynched eleven black veterans. Seventy-eight African Americans were lynched in 1919, including fourteen who were burned alive.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.

How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch.

Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.

Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.

A hanging typically occurs after someone is found guilty in the eyes of the law and irredeemable in the eyes of society. A lynching is the killing of an individual for how they look and what they represent to a vigilante mob.

Though they were mobilising for a good cause, there was something in the atmosphere, a whiff of mob mentality, a vindictiveness, that self-righteous determination so often witnessed before a lynching. (Three Days and a Life - English Translation)

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smart-ass.

You can never trust the deceptive, manipulative and abusive financial solicitors/beggars of political funds of handsome putschists who commit defamation, calumny, polemics mongering, gossip-mongering, mob lynching, group bullying, cyber libel, threats, blackmail, digital aggression, character assassination, mudslinging and Machiavellian manipulators who habitually commit various crimes: forgery, fraud, libel, slander, identity theft, racketeering, and malversation of funds. ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Sfidatopia Book 2, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: Inspirational, political literary novel © Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

All you had to do was take a visit to Dachau or Auschwitz or Srebrenica to see what kind of monsters humans could be. Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.

You’re supposed to be the big boss.” Sam said nothing. The crowd hushed, ready to watch this one-on-one confrontation. “You’re the big boss of the freaks,” Zil yelled. “But you can’t do anything. You can shoot laser beams out of your hands, but you can’t get enough food, and you can’t keep the power on, and you won’t do anything about that murderer Hunter, who killed my best friend.” He paused to fill his lungs for a final, furious cry. “You shouldn’t be in charge.” “You want to be in charge, Zil? Last night you were running around trying to get a lynch mob together. And let’s not even pretend that wasn’t you responsible for graffiti I saw driving into town just now.” “So what?” Zil demanded. “So what? So I said what everyone who isn’t a freak is thinking.” He spit the word “freak,” making it an insult, making it an accusation. “You really think what we need right now is to divide up between freaks and normals?” Sam asked. “You figure that will get the lights turned back on? That will put food on people’s tables?

While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

A black minister in Waterloo, Mississippi, explained his outrage at the fate that has befallen African Americans in the post–civil rights era. “It’s a hustle,” he said angrily. “‘Felony’ is the new N-word. They don’t have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you’re a felon. In every ghetto you see alarming numbers of young men with felony convictions. Once you have that felony stamp, your hope for employment, for any kind of integration into society, it begins to fade out. Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.”69

Sentimentality about Lee's story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee's endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter, Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him. Today, dozens of legal organizations hand out awards in the fictional lawyer's name to celebrate the model of advocacy described in Lee's novel. What is often overlooked is that the black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus. Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black defendant, is found guilty. Later he dies when, full of despair, he makes a desperate attempt to escape from prison. He is shot seventeen times in the back by his captors, dying ingloriously but not unlawfully.

And I do talk a lot, obviously, about my clients; those are the people I have to advocate for, and when I say that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, I am thinking specifically about them. But I’m also thinking about everybody else. I mean, I believe that for every human being. I think if someone tells a lie, they’re not just a liar, that if someone takes something, they’re not just a thief. If you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. But it’s also true, a nation that committed genocide against Indigenous people, a nation that enslaved Black people for two and a half centuries, a nation that tolerated mob lynchings for nearly a century, a nation that created apartheid and segregation laws throughout most of the 20th century, can also be more than that racist history suggests.

In a community where mobs do not appear to take white prisoners from jail cells to lynch them, who is really responsible for the lynching of a Negro prisoner, the band who actually blew out his brain or those of us in the church who say of Willie Earle and his kind, “RACA”—you’re an empty-headed, worthless nigger! (That’s about the meaning of the word “Raca” as Jesus used it in the 5th Chapter of Matthew.)

Anonymity to outsiders appears to be the crucial factor when individuals feel that they are not accountable, which leads to greater antisocial behavior. Riots, lynching, and hooliganism are all believed to be examples of mob mentality that are thought to thrive through the process of deindividuation.10 In contrast, the more that we lose anonymity, the more we conform and behave. In one simple study, researchers placed a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall above a collection tin in the coffee room where staff members paid for their beverages.11 For the next 10 weeks, they alternated posting pictures of flowers or watchful eyes above the coffee pot. People were more honest in paying for their beverages when the eyes were posted. Just like the self-conscious Halloween children, we are more honest when a mirror is present to reflect our behavior. When we are made self-conscious, we become more accountable.

In the port city of Liverpool, similar race hatred was gaining ground. Post-war employment was scarce, and over a hundred black factory workers suddenly and swiftly lost their jobs after white workers refused to work with them. On 4 June 1919, a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette. Numerous fights followed, with the police ransacking homes where they knew black people lived. The frenzy resulted in one of the most horrific race hate crimes in British history. Twenty-four-year-old black seaman Charles Wootton was accosted by an enraged white crowd and thrown into the King’s Dock. As he swam, desperately trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted with bricks until he sank under the surface. Some time later, his lifeless body was dragged out of the dock. It was a public lynching. The days after Charles Wootton’s murder saw white mob rule dominating Liverpool’s streets as they attacked any black person they saw.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

(Lynched for Wife Beating) In nearly all communities wife beating is punishable with a fine, and in no community is it made a felony. Dave Jackson, of Abita, La., was a colored man who had beaten his wife. He had not killed her, nor seriously wounded her, but as Louisiana lynchers had not filled out their quota of crimes, his case was deemed of sufficient importance to apply the method of that barbarous people. He was in the custody of the officials, but the mob went to the jail and took him out in front of the prison and hanged him by the neck until he was dead. This was in Nov. 1893.

We live in a society where the individual is far more empowered, but that brings other challenges. Once the mob gets going, it is very easy to silence authors, or to get publishers to pull books from publication. And that raises questions about the books that are getting out: who is writing them? And who is being approved to write them?” said Ginsberg. The young adult novelist Hennessy pointed to a recent Vulture piece about the “toxic” online community around young adult books, where novels are being “targeted in intense social-media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons – sometimes before anybody’s even read them”.

BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart", on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester: "Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch

In the spring, during the Festival of Flora, when Rome was crowded with visitors from all over Italy, Clodius’s mob found itself for once outnumbered by ordinary citizens who despised their bullying tactics. Clodius himself was actually jeered at the theatre. Unused to anything other than adulation from the people, according to Atticus he looked around him in astonishment at the slow handclapping, taunts, whistles and obscene gestures, and realised—almost too late—that he was in danger of being lynched. He retreated hastily, and that was the beginning of the end of his domination, for the Senate now recognised how he could be beaten: by appealing over the heads of the

Epigraph The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American . . . preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 and 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the crucifixion of Jesus. . . . As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror. —James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

The lynching tree is the most potent symbol of the trouble nobody knows that blacks have seen but do not talk about because the pain of remembering—visions of black bodies dangling from southern trees, surrounded by jeering white mobs—is almost too excruciating to recall. In that era, the lynching tree joined the cross as the most emotionally charged symbols in the African American community—symbols that represented both death and the promise of redemption, judgment and the offer of mercy, suffering and the power of hope. Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable ontological thirst”[1] for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning.

The idea of you lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s day-time and you’re not behind him. “Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men, in the day-time, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do. “So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake, and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark, and fetch your masks. You brought part of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you hadn’t had him to start you, you’d a taken it out in blowing. “You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts ‘Lynch him, lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves onto that half-a-man’s coat tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do, is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. Now leave—and take your half-a-man with you...

A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched—they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice—and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s. “A child is the very devil,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents.

The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms – which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinker-tons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.

Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn’t serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became “sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that

Emmett White became a firm, even unyielding, sheriff. Still, he showed remarkable consideration toward the people in his custody and insisted on making arrests without brandishing his six-shooter. He did not philosophize about the law or his responsibilities, but Tom noticed that he always maintained the same manner, no matter whether the prisoners were black or white or Mexican. At the time, extrajudicial lynchings, particularly of blacks in the South, were one of the most egregious failures of the American legal system. Whenever Emmett heard that locals were planning to throw a “necktie party,” he would rush out to try to stop it. “If a mob attempts to take the negro” from the sheriff, a reporter noted in one case, “there will be trouble.” Emmett refused to put young, nonviolent prisoners in the jail alongside older, more dangerous convicts, and because there was no other place for them, he let them stay in his own house, living with his children. One girl remained with them for weeks on end. Tom never knew why she was in jail, and his father never discussed it.

When Hodges was presented to Harmon the next morning for a positive ID, Harmon reportedly couldn’t be sure he was her attacker. “I can’t tell,” she said. “I can’t say he is the negro, but I can’t say he is not the negro.” Unfortunately, many citizens of Tyler subscribed to the guilty until proven innocent philosophy where African Americans were concerned. At approximately 11:15 a.m., a white mob three to four thousand strong broke into the county jail and seized Hodges. The lynch mob transported Hodges to the site of the new Smith County Courthouse, which was then under construction. A few members threw a rope up over an enormous derrick—which was being utilized at the site for hoisting large stones for the new courthouse—and fashioned a noose on one end, placing it around Hodges’s neck. Several men then took hold of the other end and, with one simultaneous pull, jerked Hodges up into the sky. Hodges squirmed as he swung back and forth high above the mob, and then his movements dwindled to a twitch or two before he grew still. Within ten minutes, the construction site was empty, save the deceased, whose gruesome figure hung motionless in midair. No one involved in the crime even attempted to conceal his identity. As the May 7, 1909 edition of the Alto Herald put it, “Those who took part in the lynching went about it just as they went about their daily business.

When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

He’s a murdering chud,” Zil was yelling. “What do you want to do? Lynch him?” Astrid demanded. That stopped the flow for a second as kids tried to figure out what “lynch” meant. But Zil quickly recovered. “I saw him do it. He used his powers to kill Harry.” “I was trying to stop you from smashing my head in!” Hunter shouted. “You’re a lying mutant freak!” “They think they can do anything they want,” another voice shouted. Astrid said, as calmly as she could while still pitching her voice to be heard, “We are not going down that path, people, dividing up between freaks and normals.” “They already did it!” Zil cried. “It’s the freaks acting all special and like their farts don’t stink.” That earned a laugh. “And now they’re starting to kill us,” Zil cried. Angry cheers. Edilio squared his shoulders and stepped into the crowd. He went first to Hank, the kid with the shotgun. He tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Give me that thing.” “No way,” Hank said. But he didn’t seem too certain. “You want to have that thing fire by accident and blow someone’s face off?” Edilio held his hand out. “Give it to me, man.” Zil rounded on Edilio. “You going to make Hunter give up his weapon? Huh? He’s got powers, man, and that’s okay, but the normals can’t have any weapon? How are we supposed to defend ourselves from the freaks?” “Man, give it a rest, huh?” Edilio said. He was doing his best to sound more weary than angry or scared. Things were already bad enough. “Zil, you want to be responsible if that gauge goes off and kills Astrid? You want to maybe give that some thought?” Zil blinked. But he said, “Dude, I’m not scared of Sam.” “Sam won’t be your problem, I will be,” Edilio snapped, losing patience. “Anything happens to her, I’ll take you down before Sam ever gets the chance.” Zil snorted derisively. “Ah, good little boy, Edilio, kissing up to the chuds. I got news for you, dilly dilly, you’re a lowly normal, just like me and the rest of us." “I’m going to let that go,” Edilio said evenly, striving to regain his cool, trying to sound calm and in control, even though he could hardly take his eyes off the twin barrels of the shotgun. “But now I’m taking that shotgun.” “No way!” Hank cried, and the next thing was an explosion so loud, Edilio thought a bomb had gone off. The muzzle flash blinded him, like camera flash going off in his face. Someone yelled in pain. Edilio staggered back, squeezed his eyes shut, trying to adjust. When he opened them again the shotgun was on the ground and the boy who’d accidentally fired it was holding his bruised hand, obviously shocked. Zil bent to grab the gun. Edilio took two steps forward and kicked Zil in the face. As Zil fell back Edilio made a grab for the shotgun. He never saw the blow that turned his knees to water and filled his head with stars. He fell like a sack of bricks, but even as he fell he lurched forward to cover the shotgun. Astrid screamed and launched herself down the stairs to protect Edilio. Antoine, the one who had hit Edilio, was raising his bat to hit Edilio again, but on the back swing he caught Astrid in the face. Antoine cursed, suddenly fearful. Zil yelled, “No, no, no!” There was a sudden rush of running feet. Down the walkway, into the street, echoing down the block.

Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit, entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s. Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law triumphed.” Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair, and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said, “May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his death!

Mike continued to walk unhurriedly toward the crowd until he loomed up in the stereo tank in life size, as if he were in the room with his water brothers. He stopped on the grass verge in front of the hotel, a few feet from the crowd. "You called me?" He was answered with a growl. The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of golden light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in his own beauty, beauty that made Jubal's heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, "Look at me. I am a son of man." . . . . "God damn you!" A half brick caught Mike in the ribs. He turned his face slightly toward his assailant. "But you yourself are God. You can damn only yourself and you can never escape yourself." "Blasphemer!" A rock caught him just over his left eye and blood welled forth. Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself... for Thou art God and I am God * . . and all that groks is God-there is no other." More rocks hit him, from various directions; he began to bleed in several places. "Hear the Truth. You need not hate, you need not fight, you need not fear. I offer you the water of life-" Suddenly his hand held a tumbler of water, sparkling in the sunlight. "-and you may share it whenever you so will . . . and walk in peace and love and happiness together." A rock caught the glass and shattered it. Another struck him in the mouth. Through bruised and bleeding lips he smiled at them, looking straight into the camera with an expression of yearning tenderness on his face. Some trick of sunlight and stereo formed a golden halo back of his head. "Oh my brothers, I love you so! Drink deep. Share and grow closer without end. Thou art God." Jubal whispered it back to him. . . . "Lynch him! Give the bastard a nigger necktie!" A heavy-gauge shotgun blasted at close range and Mike's right arm was struck off at the elbow and fell. It floated gently down, then came to rest on the cool grasses, its hand curved open in invitation. "Give him the other barrel, Shortie-and aim closer!" The crowd laughed and applauded. A brick smashed Mike's nose and more rocks gave him a crown of blood. "The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes." Another shotgun blast was followed by two more shots. One shot, a forty-five slug, hit Mike over the heart, shattering the sixth rib near the sternum and making a large wound; the buckshot and the other slug sheered through his left tibia five inches below the patella and left the fibula sticking out at an angle, broken and white against the yellow and red of the wound. Mike staggered slightly and laughed, went on talking, his words clear and unhurried. "Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened." "God damn it-let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!"- "Come on, men! Let's finish him!" The mob surged forward, led by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down. He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose. At last someone called out, "Back away a little so we can get the gasoline on him!" The mob opened up a little at that waning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you." An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face; Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle names becomes “boy” (however old you are), and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

MY OWN BUSINESS . . . M. O. B. MOB assumes the right of every individual to possess his inner space, to do what interests him with people he wants to see. In some areas this right was more respected a hundred years ago than it is in the permissive society. 'Which is it this time, Holmes? Cocaine or morphine?' asks a disapproving Watson. But Holmes won’t have fink hounds sniffing through his Baker Street digs. If he accepts an American assignment 8 narks won’t beat his door in with sledge hammers, rush in waving their guns “WHATZAT YOU’RE SMOKING?” jerk the pipe out of his mouth and strip him naked. We will make the MOB stand on criminals and crim­inal communes clear. A criminal is someone who commits crimes against property and crimes against persons. We feel that criminals are not minding their own business. Someone who steals your typewriter, starts barroom fights, kicks an old bum to death, is not minding his own business at all. The Thuggees of India, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan are examples of criminal communes. Strangling someone and stealing his money, throwing acid in his face, lynching beating and burn­ ing people to death is not minding one’s own business. On one side we have MOBS dedicated to minding their own business without interference. On the other side we have the enemies of MOB dedicated to interference. Equipped with new techniques of computerized thought control the enemies of MOB could inflict a permanent defeat. MOB want to know just where everybody stands. Wouldn’t advise you to try sitting on that fence. It’s electric. Your enemies then are the enemies of MOB. You can do more to destroy these enemies with tape recorders and video cameras than you can with machine guns. Video tape puts any number of machine guns into your hands. However, it is difficult to convince a revolutionary that this weapon is actually more potent than gelignite or guns. What do revolu­tionaries want? Vengeance, or a real change? Both perhaps. It is difficult for those who have suffered outrageous brutal­ity and oppression to forget about vengeance, which is why I postulated the wholesome catharsis of MA, the Mass Assassination of enemy word and image. And this brings us to a basic question that every revolutionary must ask himself. Can I live without enemies? Can any human being live without enemies? No human being has ever done so yet. If the present revolutionary movement is to amount to more than a change of management, presenting the same old good-guy, bad-guy movie, a basic change of conscious­ ness must take place.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.

John E. Osborne, a member of Sisco Lodge 259 in Westport, New York, was Wyoming's third governor and the first Democrat to occupy that office.  After a mob lynched the notorious outlaw George "Big Nose" Parrott in 1881, Brother Osborne, also a physician, took possession of the body to perform an autopsy.  Completing that, Brother Osborne sent Parrott's skin to a tannery, where it was made into a pair of shoes.  Subsequently, in 1883, having been elected governor, Osborne wore those shoes to his inaugural ball.

Walter White’s more remarkable achievement in print was the book Rope and Faggot, which distilled his firsthand accounts of more than forty lynchings. Passing for white, he witnessed the murderous rage, carnival atmosphere, and unfathomable barbarism of the mob. With few discernible Negro characteristics, Walter White stood in the crowds and reported back on the very worst mob violence of the early twentieth century. Some of the details are so gruesome, they read like slasher fiction, doubly horrifying against the new prosperity of the Industrial Revolution and happy images of flappers dancing the Charleston.

Too often, when a defense attorney wins a case on constitutional grounds, it is offhandedly described in the press, and sometimes even by our society in general, as a “loophole.” This is always done so in the pejorative sense, as in, “That scumbag lawyer got his terrible criminal client off on a goddamned loophole. It’s a travesty of justice.” Unfortunately, this statement, this sentiment is completely ass-backward. When a defendant is convicted of a crime in spite of his or her constitutional protections, that is the loophole—that is the true travesty. Otherwise, why have a Constitution? Why don’t we just revert to mob rule, mob lynchings? Why is it so often accepted practice in the minds of some in this country that the police can break the law in their efforts to get the bad guy, as long as they get the bad guy? How silly is that, the police can break the law in order to arrest a person that broke the law? What?

on iz February 1948 a British patrol disarmed a Haganah roadblock and arrested its members on Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi Street. The four men were later "released" unarmed into the hands of an Arab mob, which lynched them and mutilated their bodies.'9 A similar incident occurred a fortnight later, on 28 February, when British troops disarmed Haganah men at a position in the Hayotzek Factory near Holon. Eight men were "butchered.""' (The next day, LHI terrorists blew up a British troop train near Rehovot, killing twenty-eight British troops and wounding dozens more.)

Starving lynch mobs might well have been roaming the fields of southern England demanding reform, but here within its heavily policed boundaries, London pursued its pushing, shoving, shouting commercial life without shame, without hindrance, without distraction.

Sharia Justice [10w] Sharia justice is a lynch mob masquerading as Allah's will.

Wells was incensed. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” she wrote. She noted “that the Southerner had never gotten over this resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” and said that whites were using charges of rape against black business owners to mask this resentment. The lynching of Moss, she wrote, was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’”59 White mobs destroyed Wells’s newspaper, Free Speech, which railed against white vigilante violence, the inadequate black schools, segregation, discrimination, and a corrupt legal system that denied justice to blacks. Wells was forced to flee the city, becoming, as she wrote, “an exile from home for hinting at the truth.

The Chinese were the first Asians to immigrate to the United States in large numbers, arriving in California in 1850 as part of the rush for gold. These first arrivals were single men who paid their own way to the California gold fields, hoping to get rich and then return to China. As the gold rush waned, many Chinese did not have enough money to go home. Hired at wages one-third below what Whites would have been paid, Chinese men found employment as laborers working on the transcontinental railroad and on California farms.126 When the US economy took a sharp downturn in the mid-1870s, White labor union leaders blamed Chinese workers for the depressed wage levels and the Chinese became a frequent target of racial bigotry and violence. In fact, in 1871 the largest mass lynching in US history took place in Los Angeles when a mob of White men attacked and lynched more than twenty Chinese men.

Hohoff might have found it difficult to imagine segregationists who despised the Klan, but Lee knew that the South was full of them. She had known countless men like the Atticus of Watchman, who would defend a black man in court only to bar him from the ballot box, not to mention the neighboring booth or bar stool. In fact, the majority of whites in Alabama would never have joined a lynch mob, yet openly opposed the integration of schools, or anything else. But Lee's efforts to convey that complexity had turned Watchman into a didactic stage play between "Enlightened Daughter" and "Benighted Father," and the characters could not bear their political weight.

Their work ethic and strong arms and backs were sought to build a rapidly growing America, but Italian workers were often both underpaid and resented by other Americans looking for jobs. At the turn of the century, a public notice printed in New York City newspapers offered the following pay for laborers at the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County, New York: Common labor, White $1.30–$1.50 a day Common labor, Colored $1.25–$1.40 a day Common labor, Italian $1.15–$1.25 a day On March 14, 1891, an angry mob had stormed a jail in New Orleans, pulled out nine Italian men accused of murdering the chief of police, grabbed two more off the street, and hanged them all, the largest mass lynching in American history. Another five Italians were lynched in New Orleans eight years later. Between 1880 and 1920, at least 50 Italians were lynched, and during his Memorial Day speech in St. Louis in 1917, former President Teddy Roosevelt insisted that all immigrants must speak English and become “Americans,” not people with hyphenated identities like Italian-Americans.

It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility.

Le Bon claimed that when individuals assemble in the street or at a political meeting, they spark in each other a mass reversion to a primitive state: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd,” Le Bon wrote, “a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization.” By himself, “he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian”—and becomes capable of the sort of irrational and brutal actions that characterize a street riot or lynch mob. “He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity,” but also the “enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.”41 Since modern urban life and democratic politics create a wealth of opportunities for this kind of mass reversionary behavior (what another theorist, William Trotter, would call “the herd instinct”), enormous dangers loomed ahead for European industrial society. As Le Bon explained, echoing Jacob Burckhardt, “the advent of power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilization … Its civilization is now without stability. The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts.”42 Therefore, the “true” character of mass democracy required a new approach to politics. Traditional parliamentary or legal institutions can no longer control the masses, Le Bon warned. What the crowd looks for, in its atavistic way, is instead a leader, a single powerful figure who can direct its irrational energies to constructive ends.*

Migration is the story of America. It is foundational. From Pilgrims fleeing oppression in Europe, to the millions who took advantage of the Homestead Act to “go West,” to the erection of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor, all the way up to the U.S. Congress tying Most Favored Nation status to the human right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, the movement of people fleeing tyranny, violence, and withered opportunities is sacrosanct to Americans. In fact, “freedom of movement” is a treasured right in the nation’s political lexicon. Yet, when more than 1.5 million African Americans left the land below the Mason-Dixon Line, white Southern elites raged with cool, calculated efficiency. This was no lynch mob seeking vengeance; rather, these were mayors, governors, legislators, business leaders, and police chiefs who bristled at “the first step … the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”12 In the wood-paneled rooms of city halls, in the chambers of city councils, in the marbled state legislatures, and in sheriffs’ offices, white government officials, working hand in hand with plantation, lumber mill, and mine owners, devised an array of obstacles and laws to stop African Americans, as U.S. citizens, from exercising the right to find better jobs, to search for good schools, indeed simply to escape the ever-present terror of lynch mobs. In short, the powerful, respectable elements of the white South rose up, in the words of then-secretary of labor William B. Wilson, to stop the Great Migration and interfere with “the natural right of workers to move from place to place at their own discretion.

Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was “rather a good thing” and told her he had said as much at a dinner with “various dago diplomats … all wrought up by the lynching.

When they destructively branded me as a threat, risk, a brain-damaged person, a mentally-ill person, and a danger: I became the target of their mob lynching and cyber bullying through calumny, defamation, threats, digital aggression, libel and slander. Afterwards, the financial scammer, con, coward, political, financial, habitually abusive harridan in the Land of Windmills, Dykes and Bikes, and her Machiavellian manipulators asked again for help, food, homemade meals, and groceries delivered to her residence, restaurant bills paid, car services, urgent favours and donations. Under the halo of magnetising advocacy, they played their Machiavellian games of manipulations, their video smear campaigns, and global financial, well calculated opportunism in the legal limits but not within the moral limits.” ~ Angelica Hopes, Calunniatopia Book 1 Stronzata Trilogy

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.

Many blacks must know that newly arrived Asians are a powerful threat to the theory of white racism. When these nonwhites with little education, who hardly speak English, get ahead through determination and hard work, it undercuts blacks’ excuses. Asian successes are galling for another reason. Asians never had black slaves, never supported the KKK or joined lynch mobs. It is hard to persuade Korean grocers to go along with special treatment for blacks in the name of historical redress.

When a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 failed to find Sidney Johnson, accused of murdering his boss, Hampton Smith, they decided to lynch another black man, Haynes Turner, who was known to dislike Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[2]

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement. The past was great for white people (and white men in particular) because their positions went largely unchallenged.

And not a one of them was guilty,” her sister added. It was Mary Fort, former American history teacher at Columbus High School, who told me, with some sense of satisfaction, that “every man in the mob died with his boots on.” Edna,

two Alabama sheriffs had recently been impeached and removed from office by that state’s Supreme Court for negligence in protecting prisoners against mobs.

But the centerpiece of his proposal was the creation of a state police force. Local jurisdictions, he declared, had long since proved that they would not or could not mete out justice to mob members.

Chained to two deputies, the prisoner was returned to Monroe for trial. The mob stopped the train just outside Monroe. They dragged all three to the site of the alleged rape, released the deputies, and lynched the prisoner. Just to make sure the legal system knew who was in charge, they then marched to the jail to lynch another black man, this one accused of a minor crime. The sheriff’s wife tried to talk them down and a farmer tried to stop them, but to no avail.

Mob violence was bad for business. It made sheriffs look weak. It made white southerners look barbaric in the eyes of the North, especially

On Terra, if he’d ever attempted to work as a medical practitioner, my species would have retaliated with conservative resistance. Which meant reviving public stonings and lynch mobs. Dr.

[W]hen nations crumble, they often crack along racial or ethnic lines, and there's no reason why it won't happen here, but since racial hatred is as barbaric as they come, I don't wish to live long enough to witness this catastrophe. From 1882 to 1968, white mobs lynched 539 blacks in Mississippi alone, the most in the entire nation, but now, there are white groups who keep tabs on the staggering number of black-on-white murders, maimings, rapes and recreational assaults. Seeing their share of the population decreasing relentlessly, they speak of a white genocide. As for the elites, though they don't welcome social unrest, since it's bad for business, they will benefit from increasing racial animosity since it distracts from the serial crimes they're inflicting on us all.

And in December of that year –five months later –The Guardian reported they’d got it wrong. The messages had been deleted, but it was probably done automatically by the mobile network after a set time, and possibly even as a result of the police listening to the messages as part of the missing person investigation. No one gave a toss, of course. That’s always what happens after a lynch mob –those who took part walk away, whistling, and don’t bother to clean up the mess they leave behind. All people remember is they were JUST APPALLED about THAT THING the details of which they CAN’T QUITE REMEMBER.

you need to know the Life Cycle Of A Lynch Mob: 1. Someone says something bad. 2. Someone else notices. 3. The second person broadcasts the offence. 4. Each of the people who hear the news spreads it again, allowing the original offence to multiply like bacteria on a body dumped in a cesspit. The lynch mob is named Something Must Be Done, and attracts people who are more offensive than the first offender. 5. The original offence is magnified by a factor of 50 GAZILLION and the lynch mob achieves critical mass. 6. The originator of the bad thing says sorry. 7. Half of the offended people say, ‘Well, don’t do it again.’ The other half scream, ‘IT’S TOO LATE NOW!’ 8. The originator of the bad thing deletes account, falls on sword, makes charitable donation, or commits suicide. 9. Most people grumble but decide enough’s enough. 10. 84 people are still offended and will be forever.

how dramatically people changed when they joined a mob. Ordinary men with no history of violence—artisans, vendors, or peddlers—turned aggressive to the point of murder when they banded together. Lynchings were common and ended with the corpses put on display to deter others.

As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.

A white mob massacred some sixty black people in Ocoee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, burning black homes and businesses to the ground, lynching and castrating black men, and driving the remaining black population out of town, after a black man tried to vote. The historian Paul Ortiz has called the Ocoee riot the “single bloodiest election day in modern American history.

As a child in the deep South, I’d grown-up fearing the lynch mobs...as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’ve been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington DC where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.

All those years I spent trying to bring the men that murdered Roosevelt Haynes to justice, and turns out my daddy wasn’t Roosevelt but the leader of the lynch mob. How’s that for irony?

They’re not exactly the most physically imposing people in the world (that’s what happens when you live on nothing but soy lattes and veggie burgers), but the sheer force of their numbers is shocking. They have allowed hate to spread at a rate we haven’t seen since the era of civil rights, when Democrats—the party that founded the KKK, in case you’ve forgotten—would organize lynch mobs and counterprotests all across the South, most of which ended in horrific violence. These people are irrational, hysterical, upset, and out looking for enemies. I should know. As of November 16, 2016, I became one of their top targets. Before the election, I was just a guy who appeared on television every once in a while, went to work, and went home at the end of the day and played with my kids. There were probably a few people who thought I was an asshole because I was blessed to have been born into a wealthy family. But no one was mailing suspicious powder to my home or screaming at me in a restaurant where I was celebrating my brother’s birthday. No one was threatening my life. After the election, I became the guy who receives the second highest number of death threats in the country (according to the Secret Service, second only to my father). And that’s a list that includes senators, former presidents, and ambassadors to several war-torn countries. Here’s what the exploding letter filled with powder that sent my then wife and a member of my Secret Service detail to the hospital said: “You are an awful person. This is why people hate you. You are getting what you deserve. So shut the f—k up.

Bilbo made it to the governor’s mansion without citizens like Ida Mae or Miss Theenie having any say as to his getting into or remaining in office. He later ascended without them to the U.S. Senate, where, in 1938, the year Ida Mae finally migrated to Chicago, he helped lead one of the longest filibusters in the history of the Senate, the one to thwart a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. At one point in the filibuster, he rose to speak on behalf of his constituents—not the entire state of Mississippi but the white voters there—and in opposition to the interests of half the state. He spoke in defense of the right to kill black citizens as white southerners saw fit. “If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Bilbo told his Senate colleagues, “you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousand fold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.

The next morning the newspapers carried the news that while our meeting was being held there had been staged in Paris, Texas, one of the most awful lynchings and burnings this country has ever witnessed. A Negro had been charged with ravishing and murdering a five-year-old girl. He had been arrested and imprisoned while preparations were made to burn him alive. The local papers issued bulletins detailing the preparations, the schoolchildren had been given a holiday to see a man burned alive, and the railroads ran excursions and brought people of the surrounding country to witness the event, which was in broad daylight with the authorities aiding and abetting this horror. The dispatches told in detail how he had been tortured with red-hot irons searing his flesh for hours before finally the flames were lit which put an end to his agony. They also told how the mob fought over the hot ashes for bones, buttons, and teeth for souvenirs.

political party was the Democrats. They oversaw the Jim Crow South and turned a blind eye to the thousands of lynchings25 that occurred there. The governors, the mayors, the police chiefs, the angry chanting mobs across the region, as seen in the ugliest footage of the Civil Rights movement, were all Democrats.

South Carolina had thirteen lynchings last year, ten were charged with assault on white women, one with horse stealing and two with being impudent to white women. The first of the ten charged with rape, named John Peterson, was declared by the white woman in the case to be the wrong man, but the mob said a crime had been committed and somebody had to hang for it. So John Peterson, being the available ‘somebody,’ was hanged. At Columbia, South Carolina, July 30th, a similar charge was made, and three Negroes were hanged one after another because they said they wanted to be sure they got the right one.

Two horrific murders, the first of a black man, the second of a white, form the backdrop to this speech. The first was the lynching of twenty-six-year-old Francis McIntosh in St. Louis. McIntosh was tied to a tree and burned alive. A grand jury being convened, the judge instructed them not to blame the mob, but rather those abolitionists who had stirred things up. He called one out by name—the minister and newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. Lovejoy then fled St. Louis for Alton, Illinois, where the mob killed him anyway. In that trial, the jury chair had been part of the mob and the judge himself was called as a witness for the defense. In neither case was anyone found guilty. The death of the white man, Lovejoy, has a national impact. This is allegedly the moment John Brown decides to devote his life to the eradication of slavery. But both murders affect Lincoln deeply. In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

But the truth is, even the monsters—the Klan members, the faces in the lynch mob, the murderers who bombed churches—they all had friends and family members. Each one of them was connected to people who would testify that they had good hearts. They had families who loved them, friends who came over for dinner, churches where they made small talk with the pastor after the service. The monster has always been well dressed and well loved.

How is it that men who want certain things done by brutal force can so often depend upon the mob? Total depravity, human hate and Schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment. It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus. Around this nucleus, to be sure, gather snowball-wise all manner of flotsam, filth and human garbage, and every lewdness of alcohol and current fashion. But all this is the horrible covering of this inner nucleus of Fear.

Between 1818 and 1940, the state hanged eight hundred people, 80 percent of whom were black. Those, of course, were the judicial hangings for rapists and murderers who had been processed through the courts. During that same period of time, approximately six hundred black men were lynched by mobs operating outside the legal system and thoroughly immune from any of its repercussions

during the three decades following the war.50 Whoever challenged the racial hierarchy was marked a potential victim of the mob. The endless roster of the dead came to include every sort of insurgent—from the owners of successful Black businesses and workers pressing for higher wages to those who refused to be called “boy” and the defiant women who resisted white men’s sexual abuses. Yet public opinion had been captured, and it was taken for granted that lynching was a just response to the barbarous sexual crimes against white womanhood.