quotations about slavery
I have often been asked how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the "quick round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions."
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
"My Escape from Slavery", The Century Illustrated Magazine, November 1881
If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. Why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
fragment of a speech from 1854, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
If we would trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes and all princes from slaves: But fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy, in a long story of revolutions.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
So why do some people treat modern icons as if they were ancient relics, like marbles from the Parthenon? Fear. History isn't being erased, but it is being corrected. Relocating a Confederate statue to, say, a museum, is an acknowledgement that we see the naked emperor; we see through the contorted logic that it is possible to separate the Confederacy from the institution of slavery, that it's a whites-only story and slavery is blacks-only, and that treason is the same as patriotism.
LISA RICHARDSON
"A daughter of the Confederacy corrects history", Gulf Times, August 29, 2017
The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well, and even gave him a little education -- a little education; gave him a long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him. Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used in those days is used today, by the same white man.
MALCOLM X
Message to the Grass Roots, November 10, 1963
Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.
OLIVE SCHREINER
Thoughts on South Africa
Slave screams he spends his life learning conformity
Slave screams he claims he has his own identity
Slave screams he's going to cause the system to fall
Slave screams but he's glad to be chained to that wall
NINE INCH NAILS
"Happiness in Slavery"
Slavery is not an institution worthy of pride. What is worthy of pride was that we, as a nation, united, eventually stood for human dignity and liberty for all.
SUSAN APPLEGATE
"Those opposed to racism aren't the violent ones", The News-Review, August 24, 2017
The prospect in the United States is certainly not favorable to the perfection of the race of man, nor to the duration of the good institutions we live under. Injudicious attempts to liberate the slaves that swarm in this land of liberty seem far more likely to lead us back to anarchy, or more certainly to war and bloodshed than to any political millennium. And the bonds of government are everywhere loosening to the manifest benefit of the unruly rather than to the encouragement of the peaceful.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
diary, July 1837
I can empathize with people whose ancestors were treated like cattle, families regularly separated at auction houses, children then made to work long hours in the fields. Looking upon the Civil War monuments that celebrated the glory and righteousness of slavery would communicate to me that, "You should still be slaves and we resent it that you're not." These are memorials to the antithesis of freedom and liberty.
SUSAN APPLEGATE
"Those opposed to racism aren't the violent ones", The News-Review, August 24, 2017