Slave Trade Quotes - Page 2

• I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition - but also to express our deep sorrow that it could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today.

  Tony Blair

  Believe, Sorrow, Today

  "Blair: Britain's 'sorrow' for shame of slave trade" by David Smith, www.theguardian.com. November 25, 2006.

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• 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

  Light, Years, Needs

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• When I heard the truth about my name was not Cassius Clay, like I knew a black man in America named John Hawkins. Now, you know who John Hawkins was.He was a slave trader from England. But the white people of that time, if one had five slaves and his name was Jones, they would be called Jones' property. [...] Now that I'm free, now that I'm no longer a slave, then I want a name of my ancestors.

  Muhammad Ali

  Men, Names, White

  Interview with Michael Parkinson, www.mirror.co.uk. June 5, 2016.

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• Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Here I Am, Giving, World

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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• Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Thinking, Hypocrisy, Slavery

  "35 Million Ways to Be Black". Interview with Adam Hochschild, www.motherjones.com. March 14, 2007.

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• E have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.

  Frederick Douglass

  Religious, Heart, Men

  Frederick Douglass (2017). “FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ NARRATIVE – Memoirs of an American Slave, Freedom Fighter & Statesman: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & My Bondage and My Freedom”, p.98, e-artnow

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• In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Lynching, People, Slavery

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The incomparable James Walvin has done it again: he has crafted a beautifully written and deeply informed single volume history of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences on three continents. This book is full of fresh ideas and astounding detail; it is at once great storytelling, punctuated with real people and voices, and an unblinking analysis of numerous great questions and paradoxes about the power of slavery in creating the Atlantic world over four centuries.

  David W. Blight

  Real, Book, Ideas

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• The story [in 12 Years a Slave] serves as a metaphor for the fear of having your family taken away, and for being abused in such a horrific way. I lost it a lot of times watching that film, particularly when seeing the grace of the man when he finally makes it back home aged, changed, forever brutalized, and yet he apologizes to his family for his long absence. That was such a profoundly moving moment capturing the triumph of dignity over the disgraceful behavior of those involved in the slave trade.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Moving, Taken, Home

  "The Cumberbatch Kid Comes of Age and is All the Rage". Interview with Kam Williams, pittsburghurbanmedia.com.

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• I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, People

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• The violinist must possess the poets gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.

  Yehudi Menuhin

  Lying, Piercings, Slave

  Yehudi Menuhin (1986). “Life class: thoughts, exercises, reflections of an itinerant violinist”, Vintage

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• . . . what a burning shame it is that many of the pieces on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, contained in different school books, have been lost sight of, or been subject to the pruning knife of the slaveholding expurgatorial system!

  Robert Purvis

  Book, School, Sight

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• In the same way that we today think that the slave trade and colonial exploitation were inhuman and inconceivably bestial ways of acquiring riches, there is no doubt that coming generations will think that our form of world trade and distribution of the world's benefits were just as inconceivable and inhuman.

  Erik Dammann

  Thinking, Doubt, Generations

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• When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Slave, Traders

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• There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade - a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world - was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Country, Men

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• Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.

  Sheryl WuDunn

  Sex, Years, People

  Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn (2010). “Half The Sky: How to Change the World”, p.243, Hachette UK

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• Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.

  Ana Castillo

  Giving, Diversity, Going Away

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• 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

  Thinking, Land, Cities

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• The proceedings of this House in 1790, in reference to petitions on the matter of the slave trade, and of slavery in the States, have been cited. It has been said that those petitions were not received.

  Caleb Cushing

  House, Matter, Slavery

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• This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religious, Blessed, America

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.171, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling.

  Henry Charles Carey

  Feelings, Slavery, Abandonment

  Henry Charles Carey (1859). “The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why it Exists, and how it May be Extinguished”, p.365

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• That's our mirror. Every dip, every crash, every bubble that's burst, a testament to our brilliant stupidity. This one gave us the railroads. This one the Internet. This one the slave trade. And if we hope to do anything about saving the environment, or getting to other worlds, we'll need a bubble for that too. Everything I've ever done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble: in a state of extreme hope and trust and stupidity.

  Lucy Prebble

  Mirrors, Other Worlds, Stupidity

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• William Wilberforce...w as a great man who impacted the Western world as few others have done. Blessed with brains, charm, influence and initiative, much wealth ... he put evangelism on Britain's map as a power for social change, first by overthrowing the slave trade almost single-handed and then by generating a stream of societies for doing good and reducing evil in public life... To forget such men is foolish.

  J. I. Packer

  Blessed, Men, Evil

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• Of course slavery and the Muslims were deeply implicated in the slave trade, Islam was an Imperialist religion which destroyed Christianity in the Near East, yet nobody mentions those facts.

  Ibn Warraq

  Islam, East, Slavery

  Source: ibnwarraq.com

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• I have no faith in much organized religion because I think it's by a bunch of hypocrites and practiced by a bunch of hypocrites. They don't mean what they say because all of them are in the slave trade one way or the other.

  John Henrik Clarke

  Hypocrite, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.ourtimepress.com

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