Quotes About Slavery

To believe in predestination is to deprive us of our free will. No freedom, but we are all slaves to our actions.

The serfdom was as much a cultural as an economic matter. "Slavery is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law," Frederick Douglass lamented. "Customs, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South.

Our local communities, once vibrantly self-governing, have lost vital autonomy, as the Court has hemmed in their ability to police themselves and regulate their schools, all in the name of atoning for America's original sin of slavery but in fact harming black Americans more than helping them.

The heirs of that liberal theology are today keen to marginalize the Bible, declaring that it supports slavery and other wicked things, because they don't like what it says on other topics such as sexual ethics. But if you push the Bible off the table, you are merely colluding with pagan empire, denying yourself the sourcebook for your kingdom critique of oppression. The Sadducee didn't know the Bible or God's power; that's why they denied the resurrection and supported Rome.

has happened before—literally, with the ending of the slave trade and the subsequent freeing of the slaves—and it needs to happen again. And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well.

Romans 6:2–11 is all about the death of the Messiah and about the fact that those who are baptized into him must "reckon" that they too have died. This death was like the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea: those who pass through the waters of baptism are reminded that they have left behind the old world of slavery ("Egypt") and are on the way home to their inheritance

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.5 Of course, if you have to choose between beautiful slavery and an ugly Exodus, you must go for the Exodus, but, as William Temple said in a different (though related) context, fortunately we don't have to make that choice.

The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they have rejected; that this rejection involves a turning away from the living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols—"forces" within the creation—a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the Creator.

By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds. More than half of white men owned no land at all, working as tenants or hired laborers, or contracted as servants.

The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.

Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South.

proslavery southerners contended that the greatest failing of the North was its dependence on a lower-class stratum of menial white workers.

Nothing like this had occurred in Virginia before. Slavery had been slow to take hold, with only around 150 slaves counted in 1640, and barely 1,000 out of a total population of 26,000 in 1670. Massachusetts and English possessions in the Caribbean, not Virginia, were the first colonies to codify slave law.

Slaves." As one of his loudest critics exclaimed in 1776, "Such was the language of the humane Mr. Locke!" Nor was this surprising. For Locke was a founding member and third-largest stockholder of the Royal

leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children a collateral asset.

Indians captured in "just wars," and "strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us." The "strangers," in this case, were indentured servants from outside the colony as well as imported African slaves.44

The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African.47

Slaves were a lure, dangled before poorer men in order to persuade them to put up their land as collateral.

By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds.

the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves. Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.

Slavery ruined the "industry of our White People," he confessed, for they saw a "Rank of Poor Creatures below them," and detested the thought of work out of a perverse pride, lest they might "look like slaves.

Northerners, especially those who joined the Free Soil Party (1848) and its successor, the Republican Party (1854), declared that poor whites were proof positive of the debilitating effects of slavery on free labor.

The 1648 Laws and Liberties established two classes of an even lower order who could be divested of liberty: Indians captured in "just wars," and "strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us." The "strangers," in this case, were indentured servants from outside the colony as well as imported African slaves.44

this was an era when for a male or female slave to refuse porneia could mean capital punishment. Some of the early martyrs were slaves who proclaimed their freedom in Christ by refusing to sexually service their masters—and were executed for it.