Fanny Kemble Quotes

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free laborers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish.

“Slavery always degrades labor. The white people who work with their hands are ranked with the other laborers— the slaves ... They feel that they are degraded and despised.

Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves. Indeed, they have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die.

White Man’s Road Thru Black Man’s Home!

African slaves, the substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.

For people who have been slaves for 150 years doing all the work to be called lazy and shiftless by the man who was sitting on the porch—that is a phenomenon in itself.

There is not an inn between Washington and Montgomery, a distance of over 1000 miles, that will accommodate me to a bed or a meal. Now then, is there a man on this floor who is so heartless, whose breast is so void of better feelings, as to say that this brutal custom needs no regulation. I hold that it does, and Congress is the body to regulate it.

One fact, when I was a slave, often filled me with indignation. There were many poor white lads of about my own age, belonging to families scattered around, who were as poor in personal effects as we were; and yet, though our companions, (when we chose to tolerate them,) they did not have to be controlled by a master, to go and come at his command, to be sold for his debts, or whenever he wanted extra pocket-money. The preachers of a slave-trading gospel frequently told us, in their sermons, that we should be "good boys," and not break into master's hen-roost, nor steal his bacon; but they never told this to these poor white people, although they knew very well that they encouraged the slaves to steal, trafficked in stolen goods, and stole themselves.

The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue, -- that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment. Then, amid all this crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery.

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved

With what moral authority can they [the U. S.] speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated?

I have seen the Indian in his forests and the negro in his chains, and thought as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland …. In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered but an entire nation of paupers is what never was seen till it was shown in Ireland. The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown elsewhere.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

Slavery was gone but its inequalities remained.

When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.

Blacks were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Every planter South of the Potomac has three votes in effect for every five slaves he keeps in bondage; while a New England farmer who contributes ten-fold as much to the support of the Government has only a single vote.

I don't believe in segregation. I believe in slavery.

Slavery was a faith-based institution. It was supported by the churches and their ministers who provided a religious and moral justification of the institution.

White men are taking advantage of black men all over the world because black men are disunited.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.

The condition of white people in this State is such that they must labor in competition with the negro laborer.

No Inhabitant of Charlestown shall be permitted to keep more than two male Slaves, to work out for Hire, as Porters, Laborers, Fishermen or Handicraftsman.