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

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

Many slaves on this continent are oppressed, and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity and certainty of his judgments, that he cannot be partial in our favor.

America is haunted by an apparition steeped in slavery, and I wanted to remind everyone that, 'Yo, we've got to handle this.'

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

From deep in the slave hut is somebody calling over 150 years to all of our experiences and all of our ideas on human respect, and all of our ideas on dignity. And I felt like that's just incredibly powerful.

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.