Emancipation Proclamation Quotes

“Same difference,” he said. “The South lost and the North won. Abraham Lincoln came and gave the Emancipation Proclamation.”
“The Gettysburg Address,” Mrs. Anderson said. “The Emancipation Proclamation was delivered six months before the battle.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Who's giving the report here?”
She waved her hand. “Proceed then.”
“Like I said, the North won. The slaves were all freed. Hurrah, hurrah. The end.”
― J.M. Darhower

“Freedom is an expensive gift always worth fighting for. Even if it costs us!”
― Marck E. Estemil

“Frederick Douglass called Republicans the ‘Party of freedom and progress,’ and the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the Republicans in Congress who authored the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments giving former slaves citizenship, voting rights, and due process of law. The Democrats on the other hand were the Party of Jim Crow. It was Democrats who defended the rights of slave owners. It was the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who championed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but it was Democrats in the Senate who filibustered the bill.”
― Elbert Guillory

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of
specious humbug designed to conceal it's desire for economic control of
the Southern states.”
― Charles Dickens

“Happy belated 4th of July to the Americans July 2, 1776, was meant for. Not the American's; some of whom's ancestors fought for the British against a nation that DIDN'T then, COULDN'T after The Emancipation Proclamation, and still CAN'T seem to recognize our basic human rights.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“All the talk and publicity accompanying the centennial [of the Emancipation Proclamation] only served to remind the Negro that he still wasn't free, that he still lived a form of slavery disguised by certain niceties of complexity. As the then Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, phrased it: "Emancipation was a Proclamation but not a fact." The pen of the Great Emancipator had moved the Negro into the sunlight of physical freedom, but actual conditions had left him behind in the shadow of political, psychological, social, economic and intellectual bondage. In the South, discrimination faced the Negro in its obvious and glaring forms. In the North, it confronted him in hidden and subtle disguise.

The Negro also had to recognize that one hundred years after emancipation he lived on a lonely island of economic insecurity in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Negroes are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the basis of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty. The average Negro is born into want and deprivation. His struggle to escape his circumstances is hindered by color discrimination. He is deprived of normal education and normal social and economic opportunities. When he seeks opportunity, he is told, in effect, to lift himself by his own bootstraps, advice which does not take into account the fact that he is barefoot.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“I am releasing everything so I can be nothing—or perhaps, everything.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Slipping into another world

“The need for the amendment was obvious. Of the nation’s four million slaves at the outset of the war, no more than five hundred thousand were now [15 June 1854] free, and, to his disgust, many white Americans intended to have them reenslaved once the war was over.”
― Leonard L. Richards, Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment

“Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year’s, 1863.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“The Juneteenth Sonnet

Once upon a time but not long ago,
They brought us to America in chains.
Thinking of themselves as superior race,
White barbarians kept us as slaves.
But the sapling of humanity found a way,
To break those chains causing ascension.
Whites and blacks all stood up together,
And lighted the torch of emancipation.
Juneteenth is now declared holiday,
Yet to some it feels like a critical dishonor.
The human race comes from a black mother,
Yet they treat people of color as inferior.
The America handed to us is far from civilized.
But together we'll make our home humanized.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“When you come down to the ground of humanity from your pedestal of intellect, then you realize that though white Americans received independence from British occupation on July 4th, 1776, it meant nothing as to the fate of the Black Americans, for they still continued to suffer as slaves officially until the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st 1863, and somewhat unofficially till Juneteenth, that is, June 19th, 1866. I say somewhat unofficially because, it ought to be clear to anybody with half a brain by now that, slavery didn’t actually end either with Emancipation Proclamation or on Juneteenth, it morphed into racism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“I will tell you what abolishing the trade did. When a man cannot buy stock, he breeds it. Every woman at Paradise was a belly woman then! Lining up on Sundays, waiting at the front porch for their half-dollars and their maccarronis. "See Massa! Me breed good new neger for Massa. Big strong neger.”
― Sara Collins

“Why is it that every white you'll ever meet either wants to tame you or rescue you?”
― sara collins

“What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they've all got a slaver's appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it.”
― Sara Collins

“[On slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Confederacy] Now, gentlemen, we have got our harpoon into the monster, but we must still take uncommon care, or else by a single flop of his tail, he will send us all to eternity.”
― Abraham Lincoln