Slave Ships Quotes:

His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight.

- Jesse Jackson

topic: Slave Ships, America, Diversity

And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world.

- Marco Rubio

source: "War of Choice" by Ken Auletta, www.newyorker.com. January 9, 2012.

topic: Airplane, Men, Slave Ships, Havana, Mayflower

Sacrifice and neon lights, Slaveships don't wait, Love many, trust few, And don't be late...

- Tom Morello

source: "Song: One Man Revolution". April 24, 2007.

topic: Sacrifice, Light, Slave Ships, Neon Lights

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

- Henry Louis Gates

topic: Roots, Slave Ships, Envy, Haley, Middle Passage

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.

- Marcus Rediker

source: Marcus Rediker (2007). “The Slave Ship: A Human History”, p.13, Penguin

topic: Real, America, People, Britain And America, Slave Ships

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

- John Henrik Clarke

topic: People, Hemisphere, Ships, Trinidadians, Slave Ships

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

source: "Pat Buchanan Thinks You Should Be More Thankful For Slavery, Barry Obama". The Jezebel Interview, jezebel.com. March 24, 2008.

topic: Christian, Country, America, Best Country, Slave Ships

Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

topic: Light, Sharks, Missionary, Heathen, Procession

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon connected with terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.

- Olaudah Equiano

source: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, Willie Lynch, Nat Turner (2017). “BREAKING THE CHAINS – The Essential & Powerful Narratives that Shook the Roots of Slavery (17 Books in One Volume): Memoirs of Frederick Douglass, Underground Railroad, 12 Years a Slave, Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom and many more”, p.1171, e-artnow

topic: Eye, Anchors, Sea, Cargo, Slave Ships

The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now.

- Carol Moseley Braun

source: "40thCconvention of the Islamic Society of North America [John Esposito recognized as the "Abu Taleb of Islam"]". www.campus-watch.org. September 6, 2004.

topic: Mother, Country, Struggle, Ellis Island, Rio

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

topic: Games, People, Black, Slave Ships

The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust... Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today. The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change.

- E. B. White

topic: Running, Lying, Silly, Touchy, Planters

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

- Zora Neale Hurston

topic: Shoes, People, Ships, Slave Ships

from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship

- Amiri Baraka

topic: Ships, Citizenship, Slave, Slave Ships

Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.

- William J. Clinton

topic: Years, Land, Yesterday, Lax, 21st Century

In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago, Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes. Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings, to bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today's globe.

- Adam Hochschild

topic: Determination, Years, Two, Human Trafficking, Skinner

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

- Kendrick Lamar

topic: Writing, Pyramids, Ships, Slave Ships