Frederick Douglass Quotes
To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.
The mental conditioning and brainwashing that was forced upon slaves in the American Chattel Slavery system was a major factor in the poor intellectual, analytical, emotional, and egocentric and moral development of Black slaves.
Frederick Douglasss, ~1817-1895, Abolitionist & Editor, Recorder of Deeds, District of Columbia, U. S. Minister to Haiti, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglasss, An American Slave, 1845
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This statement was made long after slavery had been abolished and Jim Crow was on the rise in the South.
Parker and other escaped slaves in Christiana fought off slave catchers and killed the slave owner leading them. Charged with treason, he escaped to Canada with his family and lived there the rest of his life. While not a polished writer, after he himself had escaped and went to Christiana and leaned to read and write. He wrote this narrative of his life as a slave—one of the few written works we have from slaves.
Contrast this view with that of Union General Ulysses S. Grant.
Newsletter of the United Sons of Confederate Veterans
This quotation illustrates the Catch 22 dilemma that faces a minority. Black slaves were not allowed to marry and have formal families. After the Civil War racists warned against Blacks who had no respect for marriage monogamy end civil family life. See {619099} But when the slaves were freed and the ex slaves attempted to formalize and solemnize their marriages, they were castigated for that – acting like white people.
This quotation is significant. Ibn Khalodun was one of the great intellectual Arab scholars, yet he looked upon Blacks as subhuman and fit for slavery. While Islam preaches the equality of all people, the Arabs had and many still have a raciest view of Blacks. The Arabs were the leaders among the slave traders and many an American Captain of a slave trader bought his slaves from Arab slave traders. Saudi Arabia was the last nation to outlaw legal slavery (1963) and it is still illegally practiced in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states of the Middle East. The attitude can be seen in much of the Arab Middle East even today. For examples, the Muslim Arabs in Northern Sudan refer to the Black non-Islamic Southerners using a derogatory term that means slave.
In 1831 a slave preacher, Nat Turner, led a rebellion in North Carolina killing over 50 white men. Even though Turner and the rebels were captured and executed, whites throughout the South, took vengeance on any slaves they could find.
Phelps was a Copperhead Democrat who was a virulent racist, an enemy of Lincoln and supported McClellan against Lincoln in 1864. His extreme disrespect for the President and his racism was not appreciated in Vermont, and Phelps not only failed to help McClellan but destroyed his own credibility in his home state of Vermont. Phelps had been practicing law in New York City where there was a large Copperhead, racist and anti-Lincoln part of the population there.
The President often referred to this statement as an example of his wife’s acumen. She had been born to a Southern plantation and inherited the land and the slaves. Her view, and his, were typical of the Southern point of view in early America.
Christian had just briefed the President about the riots in many cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Christian had expressed surprise that the Blacks were so violent.
This quotation illustrates how the racist South defeated the objectives of the Civil War and Reconstruction by the institution of Jim Crowe laws and so called “states’ rights”. It would take more than another half century for the Yankees and the vast majority of the non-Southern Americans decided that the Southerners could no longer “do as they pleased” with fellow human beings. It is hard to believe for us today that an entire section of our country could actually believe in the morality of the South but that is the tragic history of race relations in America.
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
