Quotes About Slavery

As much as I value an union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agreed to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union.

A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy.

All the principal people in the town are concerned in the slave trade, and their chief wealth consists in the number of slaves they possess; therefore there is little chance of the trade being, for many years, totally abolished.

Wealthy men, too, like several of those in our neighborhood, had so many slaves that they were compelled to buy other plantations on which to employ them.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone-cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation-owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it.

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

Farming with live animals is a 7 day a week, legal form of slavery.

No pope ever condemned slavery.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

Colonialism is the cousin of slavery.

I believe our current system of capitalism is slavery by another name.

The slaves had food stamps, too. It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'

People say that slaves were taken from Africa. This is not true: People were taken from Africa, among them healers and priests, and were made into slaves.

The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

Elizabeth Keckley was a woman of remarkable strength, courage, perseverance, and dignity. She was exceptionally talented, but also very diligent and ambitious, and together those qualities enabled her to deliver herself from slavery and become a successful businesswoman.

If you read the 13th Amendment, it doesn't talk about narratives of racial difference. It doesn't talk about ideologies of white supremacy. It only talks about involuntary servitude and forced labor.

Constantly the Bible deals decisively with the inner spirit of slavery that an idolatrous attachment to wealth brings. "If riches increase, set not your heart on them," counsels the psalmist (Ps. 62:10). The tenth commandment is against covetousness, the inner lust to have, which leads to stealing and oppression. The wise sage understood that "He who trusts in his riches will wither" (Prov. 11:28).

Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.

You all know how black humor started? It started on slave ships. Cat was rowing and dude says, "What you laughin' about?" And he says, "Yesterday I was a king."

In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.

Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.

What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor.