Quotes About Slavery

The Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery

Even if a slave woman became pregnant by another man because of rape, there is evidence that some black men were unwilling to be understanding of the situation.

told someone that the slave had disappeared so quickly that he "must have gone on an underground road." Allegedly this was the origin of the nickname Underground Railroad.1

And, since I had learned that whites were once enslaved as generally as any other race, how did it come about that slavery was finally concentrated in Africa on Blacks only? In short, no books or other studies in high school and college answered or gave clues to answers to the problems that puzzled me the most.

questions which none seemed able to answer :How is it that white folks have everything and we have nothing? Slavery-how and why did we become their slaves in the first place? White children go to fine brick, stone and marble schools nine months a year while we go to a ramshackle old barn-like building only five-and-ahalf months, then to the cotton fields. Why?

We are the first to honour the memories of those who perished through slavery, by declaring August 1 as Emancipation Day.

If you feel like the beginning of your history is rooted in slavery, that really, I think, messes with your sense of self, your self-esteem, and your self-worth.

Thomas Paine said, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."1

Slavery allows its victims no decision-making power over any aspect of their lives, including the decision to live. The lone exception, the only power they have, is that they may choose to die.

The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.

Slavery] will yield in time to temperate & steady pursuit, to the enlargement of the human mind, and its advancement in science. We are not in a world ungoverned by the laws and the power of a superior agent, our efforts are in his hand, and directed by it; and he will give them their effect in his own time.

The African-American classical scholar Frank Snowden has argued that color prejudice did not exist in the Greco-Roman world.35 "In the Mediterranean world," he notes, "the black man was seldom a strange, unknown being." Further, "in antiquity slavery was independent of race or class," so the stereotype of the black human as inherently slavish never developed as it did in the era of the middle passage.

if you think you see no slaves in pennsylvania, replies capt. zhang, his face as smooth as suet, why, look again. they are not all african, nor do some of them even yet know,--may never know,--that they are slaves. slavery is very old upon these shores,--there is no innocence upon the practice anywhere, neither among the indians nor the spanish nor in the behavior of the rest of christendom, if it come to that.

When Melos eventually had to surrender to the besieging army of Athenian and allied forces, its men were killed and its women and children sold into slavery.

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.

This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.

The ideal of freedom behind the American Revolution had its effect in freeing thousands of people from slavery in the newly formed United States, something that was happening nowhere else in the world at that time. To call slavery "America's original sin" is to turn reality upside down.

The ending of the slave trade was one of many European policies imposed upon Africa by the conquerors.

The highly moralistic and uncompromising outlook of the Puritans eventually put them and their descendants on a collision course with the institution of slavery and produced. among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was called by Abraham Lincoln the little lady who started the Civil War because of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The numbers of people enslaved within Africa itself exceeded the numbers exported. History has largely forgotten them.

The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7'Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74

Most of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were purchased, rather than captured, by Europeans.

The greatest abuse of all-the slave trade-was ended as a direct result of the political influence of evangelical Christians in Britain, who were connected with missionary work in Africa.

Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65