Back Quote by Dee Rees

Please remember that my great grandmother was a slave. My grandmother was a sharecropper. My mother was a factory worker.

— Afeni Shakur

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be.…

— Colson Whitehead

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be.…

— Colson Whitehead

Be not the slave of your own past.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am a descendant of slaves. My great grandmother Mary Thomas, born in 1865, was the child of a slave. That is just three…

— Linda Thomas-Greenfield

Some people try to get you out of slavery for you to be their slave.

— Mike Tyson

“If any one thing in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill…

— Frederick Douglass

“their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the…

— Frederick Douglass

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

— Ntozake Shange

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to…

— Bob Edwards

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

— Frederick Douglass

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of…

— Laura Lippman