African American Freedom Quotes

Lincoln's paper proclamation must now become iron, lead and fire.

The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, was put into effect on January 1, 1863, but news of the Proclamation and enforcement did not reach Texas until after the end of the Civil War almost two years later.

The Emancipation Proclamation was fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human foresight could not penetrate…..

Force sometimes does change things. I see not reason to believe that slavery in America would not have continued to the present day if it did not meet a violent end.

Slavery was the immediate cause of the late rupture and revolution..

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

In the end, of course, Republicans ended slavery and permanently outlawed it through the Thirteenth Amendment.

But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour.

President Lincoln desires the right to hold slaves to be fully recognized. The [Civil] war is prosecuted for the Union, hence no question concerning slavery will arise.

It's crazy: the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards. That's something for me - as a black American, it gives me a little bit of pride because we were free and respected somewhere else before slavery became what it was.

Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.

The history of the black man did not begin with slavery.

The American Colonization Society hereby grants to the colonies or settlements in Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, under its care, the following Constitution: