Quotes About Oppression

Get them off the plantation and they learned to read, it was a disease.

The white men were silent. As if they'd given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An

The white boys didn't get it as bad as the black boys, but they were not in Nickel because the world cared overmuch. Big Chet was their Great White Hope.

THE music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The

Stulna kroppar som arbetade på stulen mark.

the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down

racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon

Wainwright was pale-skinned, but all the black boys knew from his hair and nose that he had some Negro blood. He beat the black boys for knowing what he pretended not to know about himself.

My part is finished, my friends." He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn't help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?

if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away. But this man did not. He nodded before passersby took him from

Con el tiempo les fueron quitando a palos las palabras del otro lado del océano. Por simplificar, por borrarles la identidad, por sofocar revueltas.

Och att de sedan, efter allt världen hade lärt dem, inte kände igen bojorna när de fästes vid deras händer och fötter. South Carolinas bojor var av ett nytt slag – nycklarna och tillhållarna präglades av lokala syften – men fungerade ändå som bojor. De hade inta alls kommit särskilt långt.

a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something.

Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord's will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.

To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.

He was all of them in one black body that night in the ring, and he was all of them when the white men took him out back to those two iron rings.

Each night, with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver's seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes. Ridgeway caught Cora looking. "He says it's the only way he can sleep." Homer snored like a rich old man every night.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

He was jailed for inciting riots that weren't riots but peaceful gatherings.

Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation.

According to Connelly, who heard the story from the nigger trader, Michael's former master was fascinated by the abilities of South American parrots and reasoned that if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.