Al Sharpton Quotes

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.

Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.

My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s and, therefore, was born into slavery but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.

In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.

Well, before the New Deal...[The Emancipation Proclamation] would be a good start.

Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.

Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects.

Presidents in wartime, embattled presidents, unpopular presidents, they all look to Lincoln. He's their patron saint because no president was more embattled or more unpopular than Lincoln was during his presidency. We think he was born on Mount Rushmore. Not so.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

There is no disputing that Lincoln was a great man.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour.

The Emancipation Proclamation was fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human foresight could not penetrate…..

If Abraham Lincoln had had his way, there would be no Black people in America—None!

President Bush blames the LA riots on the 60's. Which 60's is he talking about the 1960s or the 1860s when Lincoln freed the slaves?

Public opinion polls would have maintained slavery.

The people of Illinois agreed with the people of Massachusetts [about slavery] except perhaps they do not so constantly keep thinking about it.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued 90 years ago. I believe in gradualism. But 90 years is gradual enough.

By a series of legislative acts, by executive proclamations, by military orders, and by the adoption of the amendment to the Constitution by the people of the United States, the gigantic system of human slavery that darkened the land, controlled the policy and swayed the destinies of the Republic, has forever perished.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes

Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.