Black Slave Sayings

#1. < ... > black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call "America." This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.

David Brion Davis

#2. 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

#3. The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.
If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown 'soulless' black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization

Viktor Vijay Kumar

#4. I have made some enemies. My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the north are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers

Albert Parsons

#5. Let me state here and now that the black woman in America can justly be described as a 'slave of a slave.

Frances M. Beal

#6. No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.

Henry Louis Gates

#7. I think the whole stigma of 'black movies' is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like '12 Years A Slave,' to 'The Butler,' to 'The Best Man,' to 'Ride Along,' to even 'Think Like a Man' from last year - these movies are just good movies.

Kevin Hart

#8. Haiti is unique - the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it's like nothing the world has ever seen.

Ben Fountain

#9. Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?

Wilbur Smith

#10. It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.

John Henrik Clarke

#11. To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such.

Mark Twain

#12. I want to be his love slave. An image of me in a black corset wearing a collar with a leash attached to it pops into my head. Maybe stupid Lydia was right to cut the smut from the book club for a while.

Helena Hunting

#13. The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike.

Henry Louis Gates

#14. That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Hones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfueher Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony - That was how my father in law could contain one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase

Kurt Vonnegut

#15. A guard was sitting on it, smoking a cigarette. He was black. Newt always felt guilty in the presence of black Americans, in case they blamed him for two hundred years of slave trading.

Terry Pratchett

#16. America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Pat Buchanan

#17. A remarkable documentary and the first in-depth record of many black women, slave and free.

Dorothy B. Porter

#18. The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.

Steven Biko

#19. The American sense of the importance, the fundamental importance of the black-white dichotomy, comes out of societies founded in the era of the African slave trade, so societies like ours, that is to say the western hemisphere, the Caribbean and so forth, we share a lot in common.

Nell Irvin Painter

#20. White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

Steve Erickson

#21. I think when black performers performed in blackface, they were kind of taking back slave songs, but it was still a little bit iffy because they were performing, a lot of times, for white audiences who found it hilarious.

Cecile McLorin Salvant

#22. $1,200, That was the price of a man in those days. Now you can call him black, or you can call him a slave, but he was a man nonetheless.

Jay Grewal

#23. The way we value black beauty has changed. I'm single now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I'm 6 feet tall and I'm strong. Look at me, I'm a Mandingo.

Leslie Jones

#24. Workers, black and white, need some kind of international affirmative action to protect them from unfair competition with unorganized or slave labor abroad and unfair competition with robots at home.

Jesse Jackson

#25. The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again.

Yaa Gyasi

#26. The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.

Kurt Vonnegut

#27. Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.

Angie Thomas

#28. I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; even today, inside me, here, and here, I am still a free woman.

Manu Herbstein

#29. A [typical] worker is a part-time slave.

Bob Black

#30. How many of the original songs survive intact from the slave cabins? Probably not many in their original form. Time has transformed them like light in a prism. What we hope to present is a version of those spirituals, and they speak not just to black Americans, but to people worldwide.

Kathleen Battle

#31. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people's lives too. Saving them from their "wild African ways." Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.

Angie Thomas

#32. All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

Muhammad Ali

#33. I play a slave. How black is that? I have to wear chains. How whack is that? But don't worry. I get free. I save my wife and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?

Jamie Foxx

#34. Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.

Malcolm X

#35. The U.S. Army cancelled an order for 600,000 black berets that were made in China. It's not just that they were made by slave laborers. It's that no soldier can feel good about himself wearing headgear from the Kathie Lee Collection.

Argus Hamilton

#36. If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

Edward Ball

#37. When he was young, his father told him that black people didn't like water because they were brought over on slave ships. What did a black man want to swim for? The ocean floor was already littered with black men.

Yaa Gyasi

#38. I'm a TV junkie, so it's hard to choose just one. Currently I'm a slave to 'Black Sails,' 'Vikings,' 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Mindy Project.'

Victoria Aveyard

#39. The mythology of black women as promiscuous was important to maintaining the profitable exploitation of slave society. In freedom, it remained important as a means of racial and gender control.

Melissa V. Harris-Perry

#40. Funny. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people's lives too. Saving them from their "wild African ways." Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving. One-Fifteen

Angie Thomas