Quotes About Slavery

As a final objection to Blair's entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.

this terrible baptism of blood and fire through which our nation is passing . . . not as has been most cruelly affirmed, because of the presence of men of color in the land, but by malignant . . . vices, nursed into power . . . at the poisoned breast of slavery, it will come at last . . . purified in its spirit freed from slavery, vastly greater . . . than it ever was before in all the elements of advancing civilization.

The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity's most universal aspiration. Douglass's life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.

The Proclamation, even with its limitations (freeing slaves only in the Confederate states or in occupied areas), brought about a world-historical moment, "a complete revolution in the position of a nation." The republic was undergoing a second founding, and Douglass felt more than ready to be one of its fathers. An amazing change was under way, argued Douglass, not only for blacks and for the nation, but for "justice throughout the world.

Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition

Education and Slavery were incompatible with each other. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1845

In America Bibles and slaveholders go hand in hand. The church and the slave prison stand together, and while you hear the chanting of psalms in one, you hear the clanking of chains in the other. The man who wields the cowhide during the week, fills the pulpit on Sunday. . . . The man who whipped me in the week used to . . . show me the way of life on the Sabbath

the sobering admission that slavery "did not die honestly." It had died in all-out war, from necessity, not from enlightenment and morality alone. It had been crushed in blood, not merely legislated out of existence

Above all, Douglass is remembered most for telling his personal story—the slave who willed his own freedom, mastered the master's language, saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation, and then captured the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as perhaps no one else ever has in America.

The cynic in Douglass left him saying, "Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people.

Are you so simple as to assume that the Big Surrender banished the concept of human slavery from the earth? What is the principle of slavery? Only the literal buying and selling of human flesh on the block? That was only an outside symbol. Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others. All of the outward signs come out of that.

The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.

Hurston writes. "The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on—that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away."24

The four men responsible for this last deal in human flesh, before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox should end the 364 years of Western slave trading, were the three Meaher brothers and one Captain [William "Bill"] Foster. Jim, Tim, and Burns Meaher were natives of Maine. They had a mill and shipyard on the Alabama River at the mouth of Chickasabogue Creek (now called Three-Mile Creek)

Once Africans could all fly because they never ate salt. Many of them were brought to Jamaica to be slaves, but they never were slaves. They flew back to Africa. Those who ate salt had to stay in Jamaica and be slaves, because they were too heavy to fly.

Slavery is something that affects all of us. It's all of our history.

We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.

Ambition makes more trusty slaves than need.

My parents came from the south. So their ancestors were actually slaves in this country.

There's never really been a true apology for slavery.

Slavery discourages arts and manufactures.

Le baptême de la Ligne lui fit perdre beaucoup de préjugés ; il s'aperçut que le meilleur moyen d'arriver à la fortune était, dans les régions intertropicales, aussi bien qu'en Europe, d'acheter et de vendre des hommes.

Sharpe had owned forty-three enslaved Black folks, but had caught religion during a sermon by a Great Awakening minister. After hearing the sermon, Edward Sharpe had decided he was against slavery. But instead of freeing the Black folks he owned and giving them a plot of land to work, he'd sold them for a profit, and bought land and started a university with the proceeds.

Unofficially—for not even white men would write such rules down—if Matthew wanted to take Rabbit by force, no one would challenge him. It was not even against the law in Georgia for a white man to ravish a slave woman. If the woman was a white man's own slave, it was his right. If he ravished another white man's slave, it was only a crime against property, such as hurting a horse or dog that belonged to another. Yet