Chris

“Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person.” Sixty-six were killed after being accused of “insult to a white person.” One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents. Like the cotton growing in the field, violence had become so much a part of the landscape that “perhaps most of the southern black population had witnessed a lynching in their own communities or knew people who had,” wrote the historian Herbert Shapiro. “All blacks lived with the reality that no black individual was completely safe from lynching.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Owing to the scarcity of labor,” the Labor Department reported, “a Georgia farmer near Albany this year laid aside his whip and gun, with which it is reported he has been accustomed to drive his hands, and begged for laborers.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” James K. Vardaman, the white supremacy candidate in the 1903 Mississippi governor’s race, declared. He saw no reason for blacks to go to school. “The only effect of Negro education,” he said, “is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook.” Mississippi voted Vardaman into the governor’s office and later sent him to the U.S. Senate.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Not unlike European Jews who watched the world close in on them slowly, perhaps barely perceptibly, at the start of Nazism, colored people in the South would first react in denial and disbelief to the rising hysteria, then, helpless to stop it, attempt a belated resistance, not knowing and not able to imagine how far the supremacists would go.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration