Top 63 American Slavery Quotes
#1. Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.
Frederick Douglass
#2. American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.
Spike Lee
#3. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery - Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy - were Democrats.
Dinesh D'Souza
#4. A startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery.
Sherley Anne Williams
#5. The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.
Bryan Stevenson
#6. The account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#7. The tobacco business is a conspiracy against womanhood and manhood. It owes its origin to that scoundrel Sir Walter Raleigh, who was likewise the founder of American slavery.
John Harvey Kellogg
#8. Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#9. I think then I may safely conclude and I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin but especially commanded by God through Moses and approved by Christ through His Apostles.
James Henry Hammond
#10. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians' collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.
Edward E. Baptist
#11. < ... > tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.
David Brion Davis
#12. The enemies of American civilization
for such are the enemies of slavery
seem to be more on the alert than its friends.
William Walker
#13. That was when I realized we weren't born to be
slaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there were good people helping to heal this broken world.
Jay Grewal
#14. The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
John Henrik Clarke
#15. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.
Ntozake Shange
#16. Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.
Steve Erickson
#17. What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle - the sheet anchor of American republicanism.
Abraham Lincoln
#18. But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves.
Jay Grewal
#19. Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.
John Quincy Adams
#20. From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#21. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
Carl Bernstein
#22. In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#23. Most of what Congress does fits the description of forcing one American to serve the purposes of another American. That description differs only in degree, but not in kind, from slavery.
Walter E. Williams
#24. American feminism must become less parochial, so that it is every bit as concerned with sex slavery in Asia as with Title IX sports programs in Illinois.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#25. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#26. The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.
John Niven
#27. Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.
Hari Kunzru
#28. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln
#29. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.
Howard Zinn
#30. The american dream wasn't meant for me, cause lady liberty's a hypocrite she lied to me, promised me freedom,education, and equality never gave me nothing but slavery but now look at how dangerous you made me callin me a mad man because im strong and bold.
Tupac Shakur
#31. Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
Gerry Spence
#32. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.
William Lloyd Garrison
#33. Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.
Bryan Stevenson
#35. Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.
Michelle Alexander
#36. I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#37. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Eric Foner
#38. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#39. Everything on this earth right now is about labor and slavery. War is the only American export left that anyone wants to buy.
Roseanne Barr
#40. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.
Andrew Roberts
#41. The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.
Pete Seeger
#42. Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.
Joy DeGruy
#43. There was a uniqueness to the American case of slavery. 10 million people, a conservative estimate, were brought to America ... hundreds of people were set up in work camps, and hereditary-forced labor was put in place. That's a very different thing than the personal slavery that existed elsewhere.
Edward Ball
#44. Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.
Bill T. Jones
#45. Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.
Joseph J. Ellis
#46. It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church ... With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.
William Lloyd Garrison
#47. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.
Bernie Sanders
#48. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
Colson Whitehead
#49. The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.
P. J. O'Rourke
#50. Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands ...
Booker T. Washington
#51. As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and television show.
Jill Scott
#52. We French, we have never, never, never had slavery, so we feel we don't understand the American racism. Maybe
Maya Angelou
#53. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery
Trent Franks
#54. To see an African-American elected president means that this country is really finally coming full circle from the birth defect of slavery.
Condoleezza Rice
#55. George, I know you're tired. But President Lincoln, he didn't free us to be lazy and no good. He freed us to work hard and improve ourselves.-George's Grandmother.
George Dawson
#56. It's therapy. [people] say true healing requires honest confrontation, and that can be seen on a macro scale with America and the things that have been swept under the rug, whether it be with the native Americans or slavery, or whatever holocaust that's happened on this soil.
Nate Parker
#57. Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.
Henry Louis Gates
#58. For the Afro-American in the 1920's being a 'New Negro' was being 'Modern'. And being an 'New Negro' meant, largely, not being an 'Old Negro', disassociating oneself from the symbols and legacy of slavery - being urbane, assertive militant.
Nathan Huggins
#59. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.
Randall Robinson
#60. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#61. Look, [Mitt] Romney comes from a religion founded by a criminal who was anti-American, pro-slavery, and a rapist. And he comes from that lineage and says, 'I respect this religion fully.'
Lawrence O'Donnell
#62. How a member of the church - one who had read the Good Lord's bible - could sit so calmly and watch a man be led to his destruction frightened me.
Jay Grewal
#63. In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies - even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!
Rodney Stark
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
