Maya Angelou Quotes About Slavery

• 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.'

  Maya Angelou

  Life Changing, Writing, Important

• Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.

  Maya Angelou

  Abolition Of Slavery, Issues, Serious

  "Visions: Maya Angelou". Interview With Ken Kelley, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1995.

• My people couldn't have survived slavery without having hope that it would get better. And there's some songs from the 19th and 18th century that say [sings], "By and by, by and by, I will lay down, this heavy load." And I mean, so many songs that spoke of hope and understand it better by and by. Amazing songs. So that the slaves, just knowing that he, she, did not have the right legally to walk within one inch away from where the slave owner dictated, and yet the same person, wrote and sang with fervor, "If the lord wants somebody, here am I, send me." It's amazing.

  Maya Angelou

  Song, Mean, Slave Owners

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.

  Maya Angelou

  Music, Freedom, Race

  Dr. Maya Angelou (2009). “The Heart of a Woman”, p.85, Random House

• There's racism and sexism and ageism and all sorts of idiocies. But bad news is not news. We've had bad news as a species for a long time. We've had slavery and human sacrifice and the holocaust and brutalities of such measure.

  Maya Angelou

  Sacrifice, Long, Racism

  Source: teentalkingcircles.org

• Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Song, Lonely

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