W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

The history of slavery and the complication of slavery is that it is an international concept. It is something that affected people who were our people. For example, there were people from the west of Nigeria who were taken by the hundreds of thousands and brought to Louisiana. I'm Igbo; my family is Igbo. So it is a story that I'm connected to.

The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.

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.

I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of the Americans.

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.

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

This process of Magyarization, of implanting a Hungarian mentality in the Slovaks, was so intense throughout many centuries in former Hungary, and so completely dominated generation after generation, that even the breaking up of Hungary and the liberation of Slovakia has not entirely freed the Slovaks from the moral consequences of the thousand years of subjugation and serfdom.

There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence

The Atlantic Slave Trade was greatest planned accumulation of wealth that the world has ever known.

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

Isn’t this [the United States] the Government that massacred the original inhabitants of the land of America? … who seized millions of Africans from their houses and carried them off into slavery…?

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.

The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa. We were brought to America and our foreparents were sold; white people bo ught them; white people changed their names my maiden name is supposed to be Townsend, but really, what is my maiden name? What is my name?

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.

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.

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

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.

No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

History proves that the white man is a devil.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.