The Family Tree Quotes

“The “bad” includes alcoholism, emotional instability, poor parenting, unfaithful relationships, and self-condemnation. I was beset by my own demons, perhaps as a result of my father having told me that he killed that young woman, coupled with my mother telling me I was just like him and later blaming me for serial killings.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Again and again throughout my research, these findings cast my halcyon childhood summers in an entirely different light, amounting to a belated and harrowing coming-of-age experience.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“President Roosevelt refused to support it on the grounds that it would lose him his southern support in Congress, which was vital to his New Deal programs.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“At home in Columbus, Georgia, two black men found their own way to fight white supremacy and created a tool that would enable the upcoming civil rights movement to succeed. In 1943, when I was two years old, a black Columbus barber and his physician friend, Dr. Thomas Brewer, head of the local NAACP, courageously took the state’s white primary system to court and won. Along with a Supreme Court decision the following year that ruled that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to vote in primary elections, regardless of race, this created a radical shift for blacks throughout the United States and set the stage for the emergence of the civil rights movement. In”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“A massive base of black veterans were returning home and expecting to share equally in a democracy they’d risked their lives to defend. This dissonance laid the groundwork for a new American Revolution that would be known as the civil rights movement.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“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.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“increasingly, white women of the South were opening their eyes to the fact that what they’d so long called “the Negro problem” was, instead, “the Anglo-Saxon problem.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Working together without the debilitating divisions of race and class, the Miss Lulas, the Dr. Coopers, and the Duskys would doubtless have accomplished more change more quickly.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“been influencing a generation of young black women writers eager to fight lynching and other racial violence with the weapon of literature.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“They called they mens into the church and they says ‘Y’all better stop spinnin’ all these haints or we gone move to Columbus.’ Yes’m, that’s what they said. And they meant it. And they mens knowed they meant it. That’s when the ladies got their Voice. We got our Voice, too, but that took a while. So they said, ‘Stop the killin’, stop stealin’ folks out’n their beds.’ ”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“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,”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“You don’t spend your first twenty years of life in a system defined by racial segregation and white supremacist ideas without damage. That stuff lodges inside you and it’s hard to get out. While I have spent the past fifty years working for racial justice, I still found myself making biased assumptions about African Americans, judging them as a race more than I judged white people as a race.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“One way to solve the problem posed by the true facts of the Hamilton lynching, the editorial suggested, would be to adopt federal laws that would force white men to support their racially mixed children.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Defender was the black newspaper feared most by white Georgians. Its editor, Robert Abbott, was a native Georgian who campaigned furiously for blacks to leave the South, and filled his papers with white-on-black southern crime.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“No big deal was made over the fact that a woman—the first in Georgia—had been lynched. Omitted from Robinson’s reports was the most electric item: Dusky’s heroic refusal. That would remain a secret among a handful of whites.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“southern newspapers and leaders had lambasted the president for attending a celebration in honor of the black president of Wilberforce University at Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, D.C., because the man’s wife was white,”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“The caller must have used the word excitement several times or appeared excited himself, for both Columbus papers that day spoke of the night’s “excitement,” as if a midnight carnival had pulled into town.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Regardless, Georgia’s own Rebecca Felton, also a WCTU leader, had throughout the late 1880s and 1890s lobbied the members and the state legislature for laws to protect, first black women and children in prison from assaults by white guards, and then all women and children. Long under the tutelage and the thumb of her powerful father, Miss Lula was in her seventh year without him and was only now beginning to find her own voice.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“the community wants a lynching, the community will get a lynching.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“They’d grown up on eye-for-an-eye theology and no one gave a damn if they got the wrong eye. There”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“During the Atlanta riots, Atlanta Georgian editor John Temple Graves proposed a municipal unit to monitor blacks’ movements and lynch them when necessary. If a big-city editor like that could think it was right, then wasn’t it? And if their sheriff had said he knew for a fact that these folks were guilty, had told it to the judge, had told it to the papers, then surely these folks were guilty. Who would deny family members the right to avenge their loved one’s murder?”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“It may be difficult for modern readers to understand just how fundamentally white supremacy was undermined by interracial sex between white men and black woman or to fathom the depth and strength of the denial.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“With its potential for testimony about predatory white men, their young Negro prey, a Hamilton Mobley and his sassy black mistress, and a black preacher telling it like it was, this would be a trial made in heaven for the likes of Du Bois, Wells-Barnett, and Baker, and one made in hell for Hadleys and Mobleys and their extended families.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Rumors raced through the county that “Before Day Clubs” were back. This figment of white imaginations, the idea that blacks organized to slaughter whites “before day,” surfaced throughout Georgia whenever white men sought a pretext for large-scale mayhem against blacks.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“far the similarities between that situation and Hamilton’s were obvious: powerful families were seeking a special trial, no militia, no special guard, no change of venue.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“The use of local militia troops to guard black prisoners was highly controversial, given that most came from the “finest families” and had signed on for social, political, and career reasons, expecting their most arduous duties to come during summer camp training and performances at annual Confederate Memorial services.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“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.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Since the turn of the century, congressional liberals had sought federal antilynching laws and lost.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“two Alabama sheriffs had recently been impeached and removed from office by that state’s Supreme Court for negligence in protecting prisoners against mobs.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Recently the influential Gunby Jordan had called on white housewives to stop sending food home with their maids. Such access to free food made black men lazy and unwilling to work, he argued.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth