"Murder, killing and maiming Negroes, raping Negro women in the 80s and in the southern South, this was not even news; it got no publicity; it caused no arrests; and punishment for such transgression was so unusual that the fact was telegraphed North.

Lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days: from 1885 through 1894, 1,700 Negroes were lynched in America. Each death was a scar upon my soul, and led me on to conceive the plight of other minority groups; ...

... for in my college days Italians were lynched in New Orleans, forcing the Federal government to pay $25,000 in 'indemnity,' and the anti-Chinese riots in the West culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act [renewal] of 1892."

-- W.E.B. Du Bois relating how his experience growing up in the later 19th century led him to be part of organizing the Niagara Movement, the 1906 precursor to the NAACP