Thirteenth Amendment Quotes

“Mississippi recently, and recently being 1994, finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment and agreed that the Civil War was over and black people are free. I'm talking 1994. So you know it is kind of time that people got caught up. It's a shame that we are still looking at a world that can use those kinds of concepts, that can think some people have no right to be free.

Everybody owns themselves. It's all we've got. We have every right to be us. We have every right to satisfy our own needs with the life that we were given. I have no idea, no concept, of why people could ever thing that they could own other people.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems

“Since 1865, when the [Thirteenth] Amendment was passed, Black men were getting charged, set up, arrested, and convicted for the pettiest of offenses--like child support. They were getting harsher punishments and longer sentences than their white counterparts. That way, the cotton could still get picked and the tobacco could still get plucked. The Confederate way of making money could still survive despite the abolishment of slavery.”
― Amy Watkins