I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. Frederick Douglass
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him. Booker T Washington
It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges. Booker T Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography
I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger. Harriet Tubman
I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. Harriet Tubman
I looked at my hands to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory over everything, de sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven. Harriet Tubman
I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room – room for the human mind. Robert G Ingersoll
On the contrary, the invention of the cotton gin and mechanical spinning machines actually reinforced the archaic and brutal institutions of slavery in the Old South. Dr Richard Barbrook
The generation from 1830 to 1860 was perhaps one of the greatest generations of white people we have had in this country. They were very much like the civil rights generation of the 1960s and the 1970s. They marched, they organised against slavery, they organised in the churches, they staged sit-ins, they refused to capture fugitive slaves, and they prepared the ground which made it possible for emancipation to triumph. Lincoln did absolutely nothing. Lerone Bennett junior, historian
Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories. John Adams
Yes here’s to the founding fathers – slave-owners, British citizens who didn’t want to pay taxes. Dave Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
The accursed system of slavery will fall, as did Satan from Heaven. Austin Steward, Coloured American 2 June 1838
I am a poor ignorant man ... The Declaration says all men are created equal, and the Bible says God has made us all of one blood ... We are entitled to good treatment, that it is wrong to hold men in slavery. Arthur Tappan
The blood of many thousands of our helpless, much injured fellow creatures is crying against us. John Newton
We ask you to consider that slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason. It seems to us the most obvious truth that whatever strengthens or fortifies slavery drives home the wedge intended to divide the Union. Horace Green, August 20th 1862, open letter to President
There was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the constitutional convention. Owing to the cotton gin it was more than half awake. Thereafter slavery was on everyone’s mind, though not always on his tongue. John J Chapman
Did not Jesus condemn slavery? Let us examine some of his precepts. ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’. Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart; am I willing to be a slave? Am I willing to see my wife the slave of another? Am I willing to see my mother a slave, or my father, my sister or my brother? If not, then in holding others as slaves, I am doing what I would not wish to be done to me or any relative I have; and thus have I broken this golden rule which was given me to walk by. Angelina Grimke
For the prime design of society is the extension of the operation of law, and the equal treatment and protection of the citizens. Slavery, therefore, being the negation of law, cannot arise from law, or be compatible with it ... Slavery, indeed, in the manner wherein it is found there, is an unnatural state of oppression on the one side, and of suffering on the other; and needs only to be laid open or exposed in its native colours, to command the abhorrence and opposition of every man of feeling and sentiment. Reverend James Ramsay
Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be. Charles Sumner
No day ever dawns for the black man. Nor is it looked for. For a slave it is all night. All night for ever. Freed black man
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. Ralph Ellison
Man is not free to watch impassively the enslavement and dishonor of men, nor their struggles for liberty and honor. Jose Marti, My Race, 1893
I heard Memphis Slim and Muddy Waters say the white man can’t play the Blues. They should never say such a thing as that ... Anybody can play the Blues – white or black. But he can’t feel what I feel. Because he never lived a slave life. He didn’t have nobody to spit in his face and he couldn’t do nuttin’ about it and he’s a man. So this is what the Blues is all about: whisky, women and blues. Champion Jack Dupree, blues master later married and settled in Halifax Yorkshire
Ever since I come into England and er I found England was a heavenly place for me. I don’t care who else finds it difficult. But for me it’s Heaven. When you leave from slavery and go into a place where you are free I couldn’t go back there. Because if anybody spin on me I’ll kill em. Everybody here know me including the police so I’m known by everybody here and this is home for me. Champion Jack Dupree
Why did the new world need the ancient institution of slavery so badly? The answer had everything to do with man-power. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? III Property, Channel 4 2011
Slavery and segregation were quite simply the original sin of the United States, giving a lie for two centuries to the American claim to be the zenith of civilisation. ibid.
Fewer than four out of a hundred lived to be sixty. Ken Burns, The Civil War: The Cause, PBS 1990
Northerners were increasingly hostile to slavery. Still, most southerners refused to acknowledge even the possibility of changing their way of life. ibid.
When Union forces took parts of the South Carolina coast, plantation owners fled leaving behind empty houses and ten thousand slaves. Ken Burns, The Civil War: Forever Free
On the morning of July 22nd 1862 the President called a Cabinet meeting. What he said took everyone by surprise: after long thought, he told them, he had decided to emancipate the slaves. ibid.
White supremacy was brutally reimposed throughout the old Confederacy. The white south won that war of attrition. It would take another century before blacks gained back the ground for which so many had given their lives. Ken Burns, The Civil War: The Better Angels of Our Nature
That state is a state of slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. Eric Gill, Art-Nonsense and other Essays, 1929
In the election of 1960 with the world around us the question is Whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free. John F Kennedy
My name is not Clay. Clay is the name of the people that owned my ancestors, and I no longer wanna be called by that slave name. Muhammad Ali
Sell a man as merchandise
On his body, put a price,
So my friends, it’s easy to tell,
White man’s heaven, black man’s hell. Muhammad Ali sings, cited Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes, Sky 2020 *****
Even in the twenty-first century we are only three or four generations away from people that not only could not get paid for their labor, it was against the law for them to read and write, it was against the law for them to marry, it was against the law for them to name their children after themselves. Reverend Al Sharpton
Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and will always remain a slave. G I Gurdjieff