Booker T. Washington: “These opportunities have slipped from us largely because we have not learned to dignify labour.”

In order to defend and protect the women and children who were left on the plantations when the white males went to war, the slaves would have laid down their lives.

I never saw a man who so completely lost sight of himself.

Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.

The whole machinery of slavery was so constructed as to cause labour, as a rule, to be looked upon as a badge of degradation, of inferiority.