Jurnee Smollett Quotes

Until we really heal the wounds that we dealt with during slavery, I don't think we'll be a fully realized country.

The Holocaust of Nazi Germany is certainly no less of a historic crime than the Holocaust that went on for centuries against African-Americans. That process of reparations, and a truth and reconciliation discussion, was extremely helpful in the country of Germany, and we need to have that here.

We have far more options for black Americans to tell stories outside of slavery, but whenever it comes to slavery, it's an uncomfortable subject. Why? Because it's the most unresolved subject in American history.

Look at the American history of slavery. Can you say that hundreds of years later that has been eased? That pain has not yet been eased.

Nobody wants to get over the legacy of slavery more than Black people do.

I don’t want to see the issue of Black reparations for slavery close the door to historic memory and continuing responsibility.

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

What did you expect? I don’t know why you’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.

America says we are a great democratic society and other people should follow our example. Well, I say we benefited from slavery, and as a nation, we never faced that because the people in power chose not to.

There's never really been a true apology for slavery.

We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.

I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

I'm looking at the head of the household, and the house hasn't been run properly for a long time, ... Clinton was the first person ever to make a formal apology to black people for slavery, which was very warm and appreciated. But African-Americans haven't healed at all . The wound is still very open. And seeing the differences in how people live, it just puts salt in it- constantly . Seeing the way we're treated within these United States ... it burns you even more every day.

Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.

Race, redemption and healing - that's my thing.

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

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.

The issue is whether or not Americans such as myself ... will have to suffer the indignity of being reminded time and time again that at one point in this country's history, we were human chattel. This vote is about race ... and the single most painful episode in American history.

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future ... History must restore what slavery took away

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

To me, as I see it, reparations would be something that is fairly specific to the descendants of slaves, and it would also be an official apology from the United States government for slavery.

There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.