Cornel West Quotes

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

I do not believe in the anti-slavery of Abraham Lincoln … Two years ago I went to … prominent Republicans … to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition to give me the right to testify in a court of justice.

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

Not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery.

Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

The day dawns; the morning star is bright upon the horizon! The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers and sisters shall march out into liberty. The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the place of common equality with all other varieties of men.

The contest is becoming—has become—one, not alone of freedom for the black, but freedom for the white.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must.

If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another.

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.

I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery.

Outlets for the freed blacks are alone wanted for the erasure of the blot from our Republican character.

Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil.

..remember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

Antislavery England continues to coquet with the Southern Slaveocracy.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? But once freed, could they be made politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit this.

Freedom's Journal

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [blacks] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.

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

Lincoln’s talking nigger citizenship!