Jurnee Smollett Quotes

I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge.

Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.

In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.

The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.

The Oberlin/Cleveland area is where the underground railroad came out, so it's an interesting historical place. I love Ohio and really loved Oberlin.

A lot of people, when they first hear about the Underground Railroad, think it really is a subway or a locomotive. When they find out it's not, they feel a little disappointed. So I thought, What if it was a literal underground train network traveling from state to state, with each state it goes through representing a different opportunity or danger?

Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.

I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.

… a number of us had formed an organization for mutual protection against slaveholders and kidnappers, and had resolved to prevent any of our brethren being taken back into slavery, at the risk of our own lives…. Kidnapping was so common … that we were kept in constant fear.

New York [City] was a kind of receiving depot, whence we forwarded to Albany, Troy, sometimes to New Bedford and Boston, and occasionally ... Long Island .... When we had parties to forward from here, we would alternate in sending between Albany and Troy, and when we had a large party we would divide between the two cities. We had on one occasion, a party of twenty-eight persons of all ages .... We destined them for Canada. I secured passage for them in a barge, and Mr. Wright and myself spent the day in providing food, and personally saw them off on the barge. We succeeded ... to send them all the way from here with safety.

No, Islam did not free African-Americans from slavery, not in Africa and not in Europe or America. Evangelical Christianity did that.

Oftentimes, a history book in school will talk about the Underground Railroad as if it's one sentence. But thousands of people decided to run, and they single-handedly changed the trajectory of our nation. By running to the North, they put a face to slavery, which recruited a lot of abolitionists.

I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.

I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.

We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare. We believe - nay, we know, that that is the only thing that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

I read "Up From Slavery" and then my dream - if I may so call it - of being a race leader dawned.

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

...Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.

All my life I've been involved with racial politics. I was a Freedom Rider in the South. I was the author of books on gang violence, I was a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, and when I spoke to the Black Caucus, congressional and state, I realized they were going all the way for Hillary [Clinton] and so was the Latino caucus in Sacramento and I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to cast my vote against these people who have been central to my life and to the soul of the country?" And so I went with them. Period.

Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude. I am therefore utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territory, and heartily wish that every Constitutional measure may be adopted for the preservation of it.

I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District of Columbia.

Converting the war into an antislavery crusade was a brilliant move on Lincoln's part, and it resulted in a surge of voluntary recruits into the Union army. But this did not last. Northerners may have disapproved of slavery in the South but, once the bloodletting began in earnest, their willingness to die for that conviction began to wane. [...] Lincoln faced the embarrassing reality that he soon would have no army to carry on the crusade.