#slave

But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me! ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#human-rights #racism #slavery #social-justice #slavery

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#activism #agitation #dissent #human-rights #liberties

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#bad #body #contact #european #five

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature. ↗

— Aristotle

#apprehend #enough #nature #participates #reason

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#black americans #book #civil #civil rights #context

Is America truly a democracy? Has America ever been a democracy with the institution of slavery? ↗

— Tatyana Ali

#been #democracy #ever #institution #slavery

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? ↗

— Mary Astell

#free #how #men #slaves #women

What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression. ↗

— Roy Ayers

#around #been #call #comes #culture

To depend upon the Will of a Man is Slavery. ↗

— Algernon Sidney

#man #slavery #upon #will

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him. ↗

— Jim Bishop

#both #despises #enslaved #father #him