Ida B. Wells Quotes

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

I would willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault upon a white woman.

When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.

We must all stand against both the continual, systematic, and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror.

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

The night that George Zimmerman was acquitted, I think, for black people all over the world, there was a collective feeling of incredible grief and incredible rage. And that verdict not only let George Zimmerman go home to his family, but it sent a message to black people everywhere that our lives did not matter.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too.

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

It is really my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.

Lynchings were public events attended by the town’s leading citizens. They were almost a sport ….Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

When education will reduce the large size of the Negro’s penis, as well as bring about the sensitiveness of the terminal fibers which exist in the Caucasian, then will it also be able to prevent the African’s birthright to sexual madness and excess.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist.

Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.

There is a system of racial and social control in communities of color across America.

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

Our country comes from a centuries-long culture of dehumanizing black and brown bodies. So what role does racism play? A huge role. You can't downplay how deeply woven and embedded this is in our country.

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

If I just point out the fact that black people hurt each other, too, then we can ignore the fact that other people harm black people. I think it's an irresponsible argument.