Claudette Colvin Quotes

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

I think that Abraham Lincoln probably did more to trick negroes than any other man in history.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued 90 years ago. I believe in gradualism. But 90 years is gradual enough.

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

No, Islam did not free African-Americans from slavery, not in Africa and not in Europe or America. Evangelical Christianity did that.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

The gateway to freedom...was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'.

I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.

Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.

America was founded on the backs of slaves.

The anti-slavery parties were also called spoilers, including the Republican party that went on not just to abolish slavery but they actually take over the Presidency moving very quickly from third-party into the Presidency.

I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District of Columbia.

Converting the war into an antislavery crusade was a brilliant move on Lincoln's part, and it resulted in a surge of voluntary recruits into the Union army. But this did not last. Northerners may have disapproved of slavery in the South but, once the bloodletting began in earnest, their willingness to die for that conviction began to wane. [...] Lincoln faced the embarrassing reality that he soon would have no army to carry on the crusade.

The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

I don't think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.

I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge.

Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.

Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong.

We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.