Abolitionists

"A lot of the times the people who make the decision to kill people - if they make that decision, it's because of patriarchy. It's because they're trying to control someone else's sexuality, especially if it's a woman, and they are concerned about, she's going to sleep with someone else - or if they're concerned someone else is going to try to sleep with her. So then that leads to a homicide. Or it's two men who are fighting or going back and forth, and one feels as if their manhood has been disrespected. And so we see the No. 1 reason for certain kind of homicides is a petty argument that escalates."

"it's going to class, learning about other kinds of Christians, learning about James Cone and Howard Thurman, reading texts like "Jesus And The Disinherited," that teaches that God is on the side of the oppressed, meeting other kinds of Christians who are making sense of their faith through justice and - right? And so it's - I was so grateful to be to be pushed to think about these ideas through, you know, the Children's Defense Fund and Marian Wright Edelman and their invocation of Ella Baker and Martin Luther King. And so now I see myself in the tradition of people of faith who are much more like them and less like, you know, the people who I found myself finding refuge with early on."

"Every year, someone from my high school gets killed from gun violence. It's one of the scariest statistics that I live with on a daily basis. Like, who is it going to be this year?"

"The police can't fight patriarchy. They perpetuate it in so many circumstances."

"as a trained lawyer, what I try to do is use my legal skills to help organizers figure out how to wage campaigns against oppressive institutions. Sometimes that means reducing power for the police. Sometimes it means trying to close a jail or a prison."

"One avenue is prevention, right? We need gun buyback programs. We need people doing street violence interruption programs. A second set of avenue is responding. So we have prevention and we have response. And response really is a local - is really a local endeavor. Sometimes it happens through these formal restorative justice processes. Sometimes it happens informally - right? - with the families trying to come together and mediate the conflict between those people, right? And then a lot of times it's not the case that they want people to go to prison. What victims and survivors often want is some measure for them to be heard, some level of accountability. And when we have more options than prison and police, that the survivors of harm and violence choose that - you know, for sexual violence and for homicides and attempted homicides, right?"

"we called 911 because it was often the default response to a lot of harm that we were facing in our homes, in our families when fights broke out, when someone needed medical assistance. It was the only resource, and so it became the default resource. There were no clinics in my neighborhood, no grocery stores. The last grocery store in that neighborhood closed down in the year 2000. There hasn't been a fresh food source since, right? And so there were all these unhealthy, toxic pieces of our environment that made us sick that - there were stressors that made us fight. So 911 became the go-to response to solve a lot of these crises that could have been prevented."

"why do we have to run from cops in our neighborhood and then go to school and run from, quote, "school resource officers," unquote, in order to learn, in order to get an education?...I watched that from sixth grade all the way until I graduated high school."

"One reason why I love defund the police is because it's a policy demand. It's actually a policy demand. One critique of Black Lives Matter from people who are sympathetic to its cause is that it didn't mean anything. Where is the policy? Where is the plan? What are you really asking for? Black Lives Matter is just a slogan. And so then, you know, six years later, in 2020, instead of saying Black Lives Matter, people started saying take away resources from the police as a very specific policy demand, well, now that's much harder to co-opt. We're hearing people say, well, this is the policy that we want. We want you to take away resources from the police, and we want you to invest it in all of the other resources that make us safe. We want better schools. We want better housing. We want health care. We want quality jobs. We want to be able to work with dignity. We want child care. We want our student debt canceled. So we want to remove resources from the carceral state and pour into all of these other avenues that make us live healthy lives full of dignity and joy."

"I envy the students who were called bad students, who chose not to run during the flight-and-fury time in between classes, who just walked very slowly in defiance of the entire system because they knew that it was wrong. And I was like, oh, man, these students - like, they're going to always get in-school suspension. But they were subtly critiquing the system itself. And I wish I had been more understanding of that when I was younger, instead of judgmental."

"writing, to me, is so important 'cause it allows me to think publicly about ideas that I'm working through as a lawyer or I'm working through as an organizer or as I'm working through as a parent, for example."

"If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves."

"I never thought I had a right to sacrifice another being to my own good or pleasure; but whatever else ensued you would be placed in circumstances infinitely more favourable to happiness than before."

"It was at this time that the suggestion of studying medicine was first presented to me, by a lady friend. This friend finally died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her. She once said to me,'You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.' But I at once repudiated the suggestion as an impossible one, saying that I hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book. ... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust."

"The people of Henderson were all very friendly to me personally, and my relations always pleasant with them; but the injustice of the state of society made a gradually deepening impression on my mind. The inhabitants lived in constant fear of an outbreak among the slaves. Women did not dare to walk in the pleasant woods and country around the village, for terror of runaway slaves. Painful social contrasts constantly forced themselves on my notice."

"If an idea, I reasoned, were really a valuable one, there must be some way of realising it. The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed great attraction for me."

"In carrying on the grand work of improving national health, extirpating loathsome disease, discovering and removing the causes of disease, the distinction must be carefully drawn between the object to be accomplished and the means by which it shall be attained. The object is a grand one; the method of accomplishing it must be equally so, i.e., it must be guided by moral principle."

"For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women."

"The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women."

"In 1845 when I resolved to become a physician, six eminent physicians, in different parts of the country were written to, for advice. They all united in dissuading me, stating, "That it was an utter impossibility for a woman to obtain a medical education; that the idea though good in itself, was eccentric and utopian, utter impracticable!" It was only by long-continued searching through all the colleges of the country, that one was at last found willing to grant admission. When I entered college in 1847, the ladies of the town pronounced the undertaking crazy, or worse and declared that they would die rather than employ a woman as a physician. In 1852, when establishing myself in New York there was the utmost difficulty in finding a boarding house where the simple name, as a physician could be placed; ladies would not reside in a house so marked, and expressed the greatest astonishment that it should be allowed in a respectable establishment."

"I am prepared for this. Prejudice is more violent the blinder it is...a work of the ages cannot be hindered by individual feeling. A hundred years hence women will not be what they are now."

"The essence of all religions is the recognition of an Authority higher, more comprehensive, more permanent than the human being. The characteristic of Christian teaching, however, is the faith that this Supreme Authority is beneficent as well as powerful. The Christian believes that the Creative Force is a moral force, of more comprehensive morality than the human being that it creates. Under the symbol of a wise and loving parent—the most just, efficient, and attractive image that we know of—we are encouraged to regard this unseen Authority as being in direct relation with every atom of creation, and as desirous of drawing each atom into progressively higher forms of existence."

"The great importance to the nation of the prevalence of a high standard of morality in the body of the Medical Profession is evident from the confidential character of the services they are called on to perform. Very few are investigators or experimenters. The great majority become the trusted friends of the family in its time of greatest weakness and need."

"A serious difficulty in understanding how to educate and regulate the relations of sex arises from the fact that it is the relation of two equal but distinct halves of the human race, and exists in the dual form—male and female. Unless the distinctive characteristics and requirements of each of these equal halves are fully understood, the relation between them cannot be satisfactory."

"Every physician knows the numerous sources of error that may lead an able advocate to wrong conclusions. The difficult art of statistics, which is no simple arrangement of numbers, but often requires very elaborate calculations, may lend itself to error; the neglect of some facts, or the undue prominence of others, the comparison of dissimilar conditions, or observations made on too short a scale or for too short a period—all these various conditions must be considered as sources of possible error."

"When Elizabeth Blackwell studied medicine and put up her sign in New York, she was regarded as fair game, and was called a "she doctor." The college that had admitted her closed its doors afterward against other women; and supposed they were shut out forever. But Dr. Blackwell was a woman of fine intellect, of great personal worth and a level head. How good it was that such a woman was the first doctor! She was well equipped by study at home and abroad, and prepared to contend with prejudice and every opposing thing."

"The anarchist-feminists' denial of gender-based distinctions precluded their use of many of the arguments for equality utilized by the mainstream feminists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, the followers of Catharine Beecher could demand access to the teaching profession on the grounds that the female nurturing instinct made women biologically better suited than men to educate the young. Elizabeth Blackwell sometimes used similar arguments in her attempts to open the medical profession to women."

"Elizabeth Blackwell had no interest in training separately from men. But others began to set up medical schools for women only, such as the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 1868, the Blackwells bowed to pressure (and the ongoing lack of coeducational opportunities) and established the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. Their work was a constant financial battle. Elizabeth struggled to attract benefactors and frequently clashed with potential allies."

"The subject of love is always of the most absorbing interest to the younger and more active portion of a people; sexual passion, in its ennobling or debasing form, exercises irresistible attraction."

"Another way in which professionalization worked to the detriment of women can be seen in the cases of Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Marie Zakrzewska, and Ann Preston, who despite their M.D.s and excellent training were denied access to hospitals, were refused recognition by county medical societies, and were denied customary referrals by male colleagues. Their experiences were similar to those of most of the pioneer women physicians."

"Slaveholders, the world over, have sung the praises of their tender mercies towards their slaves. Even the wretches that plied the African slave trade, tried to rebut Clarkson's proofs of their cruelties, by speeches, affidavits, and published pamphlets, setting forth the accommodations of the "middle passage," and their kind attentions to the comfort of those whom they had stolen from their homes, and kept stowed away under hatches, during a voyage of four thousand miles."

"About this time two others, men of great talents and learning, promoted the cause of the injured Africans, by the manner in which they introduced them to notice in their respective works. Dr. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, had, so early as the year 1759, held them up in an honourable, and their tyrants in a degrading light. "There is not a Negro from the coast of Africa, who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the gaols of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtue neither of the countries they came from, nor of those they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished." And now, in 1776, in his Wealth of Nations he showed in a forcible manner (for he appealed to the interest of those concerned,) the dearness of African labour; or the impolicy of employing slaves."

"It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free."

"(The last book that made you cry?) “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs."

"My favorite collection of slave narratives was a nineteen-volume set called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It was assembled in the 1930s by the Writer's Project [of the Works Progress Administration], and these people interviewed the slaves who were left, the very last ones. It was depressing reading not only because bad things happened to slaves, but because slavery could become so pedestrian when you read enough of it, so ordinary. I remember someone telling me that they'd read the Harriet Jacobs narrative, and they said it was mild compared to other slave narratives. And, horribly enough, it was, but that doesn't make her any less a slave. It wasn't something you'd want to undergo."

"The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences."

"O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice."

"Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend."

"I met my grandmother, who said, "Come with me, Linda;" and from her tone I knew that something sad had happened. She led me apart from the people, and then said, "My child, your father is dead." ... The good grandmother tried to comfort me. "Who knows the ways of God?" said she. "Perhaps they have been kindly taken from the evil days to come." Years afterwards I often thought of this. She promised to be a mother to her grandchildren, so far as she might be permitted to do so; and strengthened by her love, I returned to my master's. I thought I should be allowed to go to my father's house the next morning; but I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings."

"I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America. I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress. The felon's home in a penitentiary is preferable. He may repent, and turn from the error of his ways, and so find peace; but it is not so with a favorite slave. She is not allowed to have any pride of character. It is deemed a crime in her to wish to be virtuous."

"We are passing through times that will secure for us a higher and nobler celebration. American gold will never secure freedom equal rights and justice to our race. No! before these can come American slavery must be crushed, and its foul stain wiped from the Nation[‘]s escutcheon."

"I do not like slavery. There are very few you can find to resist it more strongly. If that makes me an Abolitionist, I cannot help it. But let me say to my northern Democratic friends, who are Jeffersonian Democrats, who make that their boast on every stump from Maine to Chicago, that no boast could be more glorious, for no one, in my judgment, be more glorious has ever breathed the breath of life, even among that great galaxy of worthies of revolutionary memory. I have always admired him. I have endeavored to imitate him; and now, if I have Abolitionism about me more than is due, I have come very honestly by it, for he taught me. He told me all about it, as he has told those Jefferson Democrats and Abolition men so often."

"It was believed by many at the time that some of the [moderate] Republican Senators that voted for acquittal [of Andrew Johnson] did so chiefly on account of their antipathy to the man who would succeed to the presidency in the event of the conviction of the [sitting] president. This man was Senator Benjamin Wade, of Ohio, President pro tempore of the Senate who as the law then stood, would have succeeded to the presidency in the event of a vacancy in the office from any cause. Senator Wade was an able man … He was a strong party man. He had no patience with those who claimed to be [Radical] Republicans and yet refused to abide by the decision of the majority of the party organization [as did Grimes, Johnson, Lincoln, Pratt, and Trumbull] … the sort of active and aggressive man that would be likely to make for himself enemies of men in his own organization who were afraid of his great power and influence, and jealous of him as a political rival. That some of his senatorial Republican associates should feel that the best service they could render their country would be to do all in their power to prevent such a man from being elevated to the Presidency … for while they knew he was an able man, they also knew that, according to his convictions of party duty and party obligations, he firmly believed he who served his party best served his country best…that he would have given the country an able administration is concurrent opinion of those who knew him best."

"During the Civil War, one of the nation's leading abolitionists was Republican Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, who would later serve as vice president during President Grant's second term. In December 1861, Mr. Wilson introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District. The measure met with parliamentary obstacles from the adamantly pro-slavery Democratic Party, whom Republicans in those days referred to as the 'Slave-ocrats'. Most Democrats in Congress having resigned in order to join the Confederate rebellion, Wilson's measure sailed through the Senate. The abolitionist senator responsible for outmaneuvering Democrat opposition was Ben Wade, the Ohio Republican who six years later would have assumed the presidency had the bitterly racist Democratic President, Andrew Johnson, been convicted during his impeachment trial. In the House of Representatives, Democrats delayed passage with a series of stalling tactics. Finally, the majority leader, Thaddeus Stevens, bulldozed over Democrat opposition by calling the House into a committee of the whole. He stopped all other business in the House until Democrats relented and allowed a vote on the bill. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, is best known for his 'forty acres and a mule' proposal. Overall, 99 percent of Republicans in Congress voted to free the slaves in the District of Columbia, and 83 percent of Democrats voted to keep them in chains."

"The divorce laws are unequal, practically encouraging immorality on the part of the husband, as it is not a ground for securing a divorce from him unless coupled with cruelty or desertion."

"At the request of the American Academy of Political and Social Science she made a survey of the English Suffrage movement. She was Founder and President of the Pennsylvania Limited Suffrage Society and was active with the National Woman’s Party. At its Draftee Parade on September 4, 1917, she was arrested at the age of 44 and sentenced to 60 days at the Occoquan Workhouse. On August 6, 1918, she was again arrested at the Lafayette statue in D.C. At the trial on August, 15, 1918, for “holding a meeting on public grounds” the arrestees refused to participate in their trial."

"In the United States, though the great majority of women are still disfranchised and many of the unjust laws inherited from England continue to disfigure our statute books, the suffragists are absolutely peaceful. We owe this, not to American women, but to American men. In every country it is the men who should be held chiefly responsible for the tone and conduct of the suffrage movement, as the government is in their hands, authority and power are theirs, and they are able to make the task of the feminist comparatively easy and pleasant."

"The grounds for revolt may be classified, roughly, as follows: The miserable status of English women; the impossibility of obtaining attention for, much less redress of, their grievances by constitutional methods; the historic precedents established by the use of force by the British people whenever the progress of freedom has been blocked by the British government; the insincerity and brutality shown by the present Liberal government in dealing with the women's agitation as compared with the leniency shown to male political offenders both past and present; the determination of the newspapers to stifle the movement by persistently excluding suffrage news and propaganda from their columns."

"In England the militant movement is like a slave insurrection; it presents characteristics of the uprising of a servile class; the bitterness of those who have been treated unjustly, the determination of the down-trodden to rise and at all hazards to themselves to conquer respect and consideration for their sex; and the arming of the one part of the community — women — against the other part. If the word "slave," applied to contemporary English women seems an exaggeration, let me say that our colonial ancestors considered taxation without representation tyranny."

"That the negro mother had no control of her child seemed to Abolitionists a potent argument for emancipation. Today the English woman, if married, is not the legal parent of her child. The father is the parent and has the right to prescribe the child's education, religious training and medical attendance; he may take it away from the mother and may by will appoint a guardian without her consent. The position of a married woman is in many ways wretched: though her husband is supposed to support her, there is no legal machinery by which a woman can enforce this law... a man may disinherit his wife and leave her penniless with destitute children whom the law compels her to support."