Slave Trade Quotes

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.

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.

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.

I mean, of course “King Kong” is a metaphor for the slave trade. I’m not saying the makers of “King Kong” meant it to be that way, but that’s what, that’s the movie that they made – whether they meant to make it or not.

Zwarte Piet, or ‘Black Pete,’ is a relic from slavery. It is something that should have long been eliminated, and it’s very insulting to black Dutch people. It’s shocking to me that it still exists, but I think it’s about the lack of knowledge and education regarding the roots of the character in the slave trade.

What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

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.

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.

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.

Montgomery’s unique role in the domestic slave trade was that it was the first community that had a rail line that connected the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic region.

People-trafficking is modern day slavery. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the slave trade.

When you tell yourself that there is nothing you can do to arrest the global slave trade, you underestimate your own potential and abandon hope for those trapped in captivity.

So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the [slave] trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

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.

The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes.

You can actually muck with history and think about what if, why not. What if there were dragons in the Incan Empire that allowed them to resist colonization? What if there were a massive dragon empire in the middle of the interior of southern Africa that decided to take objection to the slave trade?

Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that’s how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space.

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.

After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.

If I were to meet the slave-traders who kidnapped me and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands, for if that did not happen, I would not be a Christian and Religious today… The Lord has loved me so much: we must love everyone… we must be compassionate!

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.

The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind.

Remember, Sir, that [England] began the slave trade!

. . . 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!

Because of all our presidents, Barack Obama is the one most likely to be descended from a slave trader, since Kenya had a major slave-trading port, and the Muslims were heavily involved in the slave trade.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

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

The Arabs are deep in the slave trade right now.

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.

Cannot the love of Christ carry the missionary where the slave-trade carries the trader? I shall open up a path to the interior or perish.

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.

There are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today – that’s double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.

There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Put another way, today’s slave population is greater than the population of Canada, and six times greater than the population of Israel.

In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker , on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade.

God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners (morality).

The American sense of the importance, the fundamental importance of the black-white dichotomy, comes out of societies founded in the era of the African slave trade, so societies like ours, that is to say the western hemisphere, the Caribbean and so forth, we share a lot in common.

I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it’s clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

There’s still nearly the same amount of slavery, if not more, in the world today, as there was at the height of the slave trade.

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.

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.