Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

Slavery is an evil, a deep, detestable, damnable evil; an evil in all its aspects; an evil to the blacks and a greater evil to the whites …

The enslavement of Africans [in America] built the world's strongest economy.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties... It constitutes the very mudsills of society...Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to the purpose...We use them for that purpose and call them slave.

Everything that America has done crudely and shamelessly to suppress the Negro, England in Sierra Leone has done legally and suavely …

The Negro race is so averse to labor that without force we have hardly anywhere been able to obtain it.

We live in a country that has profited for hundreds of years off the labor of individuals without having to pay for it.

America was founded on the backs of slaves.

How can a Negro say America is his nation? He was brought here in chains; he was put in slavery an worked like a mule for three hundred years; he was separated from his land, his culture, his God, his language!

Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man's quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

I've heard 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe's pen hasn't begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I've seen de real thing, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no theater.

What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.

No blessing, no good, can follow in the path trodden by slavery.

The slaves had food stamps, too. It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'

The very flag of freedom that waves over our heads is formed from material cultivated by slaves, on soil moistened with their blood drawn from them by the whip of a republican taskmaster!

I will not remain silent, resigned to watch as my fellow prisoners collapse under the strain of slavery-like conditions.

Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

The love of the slave for his chains is a huge, unnatural lie, and the daily lives of the whole slave-holding fraternity bear continual testimony against the assumption.