Quotes About Slavery

The problem for those who assert biblical authority in support of traditional definitions of marriage is that one could, with equal validity, assert that the lending of money or certain kinds of haircuts are forbidden by God, or that slavery and the subjugation of women are authorized by the Lord.

When Landon Carter, a Virginia plantation owner, read the Declaration of Independence two days after it was issued, he wondered whether its ringing affirmation of equality meant that slaves must be freed. If so, he confided to his diary, 'You must send them out of the country, or they must steal for their support.'

'A living dog is better than a dead lion.' Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don't care anything about it.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Christian abolitionists gave their lives by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery.

If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.

Sir, there is no Christian nation, thus free to choose as we are, which would establish slavery.

Yet thousands of slaves throughout the southern states are thus handed over by the masters who own them to masters who do not; and it does not require much demonstration to prove that their estate is not always the more gracious.

There has never been a prosecuted case of slavery. There's no criminality to it. So, it was just like, 'It's over,' and thus, because it was over, and it was never considered 'wrong' in the prosecutable, criminal sense of the word, the country doesn't take it as wrong.

The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead...

One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense to Black folk. How does one narrate that?

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.

The Texas Republic, whose constitution expressed an overheated enthusiasm for America's peculiar institution, had been created in 1836 in part as a way for slave-owners to keep their human property by effectively seceding from Mexico where slavery was illegal. These are well-known facts, except possibly in Texas,

Fire, slavery, cloth, coin, and stone - these are the basis of civilized life. Sometimes it happens that one or another of them gets hopelessly involved in the most basic appetites of a woman or a man. There are people I have met in my travels who cannot eat food unless it has been held long over fire; and there are others, like me, who cannot love without some mark of possession. Both, no doubt, seem squally strange and incomprehensible to you, 'ey, barbarian?

to be courted as princesses for a few weeks, in order to be treated as slaves for the rest of our lives.

So that originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his brethren, then they were to him: and they no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him. [Genesis 37].

The city of Paris, France, became a place of refuge for biracial Americans during slavery and at the time of the Harlem Renaissance for black musicians, fine artists, writers and others seeking opportunities to practice their craft free from American racism.

From my spirit's gray defeat, From my pulse's flagging beat, From my hopes that turned to sand Sifting through my close-clenched hand, From my own fault's slavery, If I can sing, I still am free. For with my singing I can make A refuge for my spirit's sake, A house of shining words, to be My fragile immortality.

In the whole, long war, Seceshes never took one black prisoner of war. It was slavery or death if they caught you.

Again and again, readers told me about the altered version of history they'd been taught during their required two years of state history. It was news to many of these extremely well-educated, progressive readers that Texas had fought not one, but two wars for the right to own slaves.

Time was made for slaves.

I declare and protest in advance, that I do not intend, at this time at least; to be drawn or driven into the question of slavery, in either of its subdivisions or forms.

Slavery was incredibly prosperous for some people, at that time. It was not a bad business plan, but it was terrible and inhumane. But as a business it worked.

We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time.