Jens Martin Skibsted Quotes

My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ.

The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.

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

For the good of the souls of said cannibals … the greater the number sent over to Spain the better … They [the Caribe Indians] are a wild people, fit for any work, well proportioned and very intelligent, and who … will be better than any other kind of slaves.

The truth that we are required to face about the slave trade is that it was founded on violence and terror … not done to Americans but done by Americans to others.

I have never been able to procure sufficient slaves to cultivate my lands and that of any guilt that attached to this trade we [planters] were at most but partners with the Parliament which tolerated it, and the country which profited so much from it.

People say that slaves were taken from Africa. This is not true: People were taken from Africa, among them healers and priests, and were made into slaves.

I refuse to play the game of American scholars who only see genocide when it occurs for Europeans. American slavery was just as much a genocide as ever occurred in Nazi Germany.

There are at this day in Scotland two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. These are not only no way advantageous, but a very grievous burden to so poor a country … It were better for the nation if they were sold to the galleys or West Indies, than that they should continue any longer to be a burden and curse upon us.

What booty you take or prisoners, whether men, women or children, you may send to Seabrook fort, to be kept and improved for the advantage of the colonies

English merchants were responsible for shipping over three million slaves (half the total) from Africa to the slave plantations of the Caribbean and southern USA, before their trade's abolition by parliament in 1807

We are still living with the ships of the Atlantic slave trade. They are ghost ships that influenced much of what we are today.

Slavery is the first form of Globalization in which America participated.

[In early Colonial America] ironically black slaves, selling for roughly 3 times as much [as indentured servants], often got better treatment because they were a lifetime investment. With indentured servants, an employer’s optimal return lay in obtaining as much sweat and output as possible over 4, 5 or 7 years. ]

Even before the expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West, slavery was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade, and insurance companies underwrote it.

Slavery, our country's original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers.

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

The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.

Think about the amount of crap the US has done! Between slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans - if any of that had been filmed like [Adolf] Hitler, we'd never live it down.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Many attempts had been made by colonial legislatures to cut off or to tax the importation of slaves.

The flow of people into the United States into slavery, it follows the other types of immigration into the United States, so people who are trying to build new lives, trying to build a better life.

Every two, three years there is a movie about the Holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you seen a movie about slavery?

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.