Jurnee Smollett Quotes

There were slaves in the North which were tolerated for some time, but the South was built upon slavery.

On the eve of the Civil War about a quarter of a million black people lived in the North in freedom. Some of them, of course, were descended from people who never were slaves, who slipped through the net of slavery. The vast majority of them gained their freedom as a result of the American Revolution and the emancipations that followed the American Revolution and hence were free for generations.

In the end, of course, Republicans ended slavery and permanently outlawed it through the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it's actually a very empowering side of our history.

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.

Southern states in the confederacy were not ready to give up their fight to secede or give up their way of life, which was made possible in large part through the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves.

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

Lincoln’s talking nigger citizenship!

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.

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

I should sooner remain in Southern bondage than avail myself of the opportunity of Northern freedom.

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

… 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.

The war against slavery was a war against the Southern economy.

My opinion is that the Northern States will manage somehow to muddle through.

William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston.

If you look at what happened with Underground Railroad, there is so much action. There is so much intrigue; there is so much of historical importance.

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 United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.

The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.

I don't think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.

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

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.