1,063 Quotes About Slavery

Why was it I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?

My life, my whole damn life before that courtroom before that trial before that night was like Africa And this door leads to a slave ship And maybe jail maybe jail is is America

When the Founding Fathers put quill to parchment and scrawled 'all men are created equal' they codified this country as a shining beacon of hope in the world. On paper. In reality, the same men who signed that document went back to their homes and were greeted by their slaves. Slaves to cook for them. Slaves to clean for them. Slaves to fuck.

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace.

We can't go back can we?" She stopped walking and touched his arm. She looked more serious than she had all night, like she was only just considering that he was a real person and not someone she had dreamed up when he found her asleep. "We can't go back to something we ain't never been to in the first place. It ain't ours anymore. This is." She swept her hand in front of her, as though she were trying to catch all of Harlem in it, all of New York, all of America.

Perhaps in a way, then, the kindly old South is responsible for the violent present we have inherited. Since the founding of the republic the South has dictated and defined us. Perhaps the South, more even than the wild wild West, more in fact than any other region, is responsible for who we are as a people and as a nation. Since the very beginning the South has compromised us.

To be enslaved then, you needed to be ignorant. To be enslaved today, you need to be knowledgeable.

In a democracy, there will be more complaints but less crisis, in a dictatorship more silence but much more suffering.