1,063 Quotes About Slavery

It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God’s design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a “slave society.

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own AfricanAmerican culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantlyreducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

<...> tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.

They support freedom for themselves and slavery for everyone else, and they use the freedom of the market to disguise this fact. Economic coercion is just a different form of force, which they couple with the fraud of calling it freedom. I was like them, but I will never be like them again.

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history - whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating deeply entrenched forms of human oppression, and if so, by what methods, misconceptions, and under what conditions?

Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.

Slaves do not have the bravery of free men.

I cannot fail these girls by diverting my eyes from the invisible residue of slavery that clings to them like a shadow.