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Plantations Quotes

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Plantations Quotes

“But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.”

“Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm: What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears. An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.”

“Journalist Tony Horwitz describes its laser show as an unfortunate mix of Coca-Cola, the Beatles, the Atlanta Braves, and Elvis sining "Dixie," followed by the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Television ads end with the inclusive slogan, "Stone Mountain: A Different Day for Everyone." Eventually the desire for everyone's dollar may accomplish what the physical elements cannot: eradicating Stone Mountain as a Confederate-KKK Shrine.”

“Plantations of good morals are easily captivated, colonized and corrupted by the pests of a bad company. Spray away bad companies and you will experience a bumper harvest of your dream fruits!”

“As she gracefully descended down portico, the white gloved hand of the lady of the estate met the white-glove worn by a Negro footman, as a vast expanse of hoop skirt filled the carriage doorway. It was a skirt of fine white lawn with ruffles embroidered with little pink and blue flowers complete with green stems. The white trash girl looked on in amazement, involuntarily wincing at the thought of the long hours plantation slave seamstresses had devoted to decorating a dress that might only be worn a half dozen times and survive as many launderings.”

“..the guests milled back and forth: men stood with their heads together, discussing politics and crops, their stiff white shirts puffed and ruffled, their voices rising and falling in steadfast opinions as women of fair whispered to one another and laughed behind silk fans, occasionally calling out gaily to pull another into their ring of white shoulder flounced with satin as house niggers dipped and weaved all around them bearing trays of syllabub and sack, almost invisible as the shadows they cast”

“Nya nodded. "So many people come here without an understanding of the primary cause of the Civil War. Some people think Jefferson wrote the Constitution. I mean there are just so many ways that our public education is failing people by just not giving them the context to understand that Monticello is a plantation, and that slavery was a system that created the economic prosperity that enabled our country to exist. That is not something most people understand. I don't really blame them, because they're not taught to engage that history, and most people are not out here reading all these books that are piled on my desk.”

“When the Planters fled from Haiti, they established coffee farms or cafetales, as part of their newly formed Plantation. Generally, coffee profits were about 5%, whereas sugar gave them a 10% return, but much was dependent on the economy and local conditions. Cafetales were easier to start and with as little as 10 slaves, a planter could begin his enterprise. Most of the French plantation owners took great pride in their holdings and beautified their plantations with magnificent palms lining grand entryways and spectacular wrought iron gates. The eastern end of Cuba was still available for development and many big plantations started in this modest way, but eventually the coffee plants were replaced with sugar cane due to the greater profit margin. Though blamed by many as the sole cause for the decline of Cuba’s coffee industry, the U.S. Import Tariff of 1835 was only partially to blame for the fall in coffee production. From the beginning, the prices of sugar fluctuated and prevented the Cuban economy from ever becoming stable. The first time was when the prices reached a high, during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The treaty only survived for a year and shortly thereafter prices plunged, when the supply exceeded demand. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the price of sugar soared again, until the British conquest of Martinique and Guadeloupe brought the price tumbling down. The following year during the War of 1812 prices rose again, and by 1814 they reached another all-time high. This continued into modern times, creating a feast or famine economy.”

“There was no mistaking it, throughout the 1950’s, Liberia proudly brandished its American roots by flaunting the palatial homes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean near Monrovia or the antebellum style mansions dominating rubber plantations owned by wealth Americo Liberians who considered themselves privileged. Their homes were closely modeled after the affluent homes of the pre-civil war era in the Confederacy. These beautiful homes stood out when compared to the dirt floor, thatch roofed village homes most Liberians lived in. The best visual description of Liberian architecture,would be in film clips taken from the movie Gone With The Wind.. In the 1950's, Liberia had all the trappings of an American colony stuck in the past. To a great extent it was this great social divide between the indigenous natives and the Americo-Liberians that brought on the two civil wars in Liberia. This aspect of life in Liberia is highlighted in Seawater Two and will be covered in my upcoming book about the history of West Africa. Many of the Americo Liberians including President Talbert, have been killed of displaced. Because of the fierce civil wars in Liberia the coastal ships of the Farrell Lines fleet were sunk in “The Port of Monrovia” and much of Liberia’s antebellum architecture has been destroyed .”

“Returning to Jamaica, he had the sense of re-entering a place much less likely to alter in the coming years. Year in, year out, the cane fields produced their riches, the gangs swung their way through them, slaves were brought, seasoned, used up, replaced. Planters would go on making improvements to their great houses, to methods of production, and yes, to the conditions in which their slaves lived and worked, because it was in their interest to do so. But fundamentally the structure of life and of society did not change.”

“Angola prison has been regularly and casually referred to as a plantation by state authorities and media for over a century. When many people say "Angola is a prison built on a former plantation," it is often made as an unsettling observation, not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery, and its inherent violence, is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country--Black and white--to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.”

“I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read 'The Piano Fairy Girl.”

“It certainly makes sense to expand the pulp industry in Indonesia, .. It's clear that it will be a very competitive exporter of pulp to the rest of the world, including China and India. So the interest by the Indonesian government is clearly to establish a really competitive plantation fiber base to support a globally attractive export industry.”

“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kowtow before any United States proconsul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”

“To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.”

“The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.”

“The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation and they got infected with malaria, and partly cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.”

“It was that period in the vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season. The vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts.”

“Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people... There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view... That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned.”

“Young man, if God gives me four years more to rule this country, I believe it will become what it ought to be-what its Divine Author intended it to be-no longer one vast plantation for breeding human beings for the purpose of lust and bondage. But it will become a new Valley of Jehoshaphat, where all the nations of the earth will assemble together under one flag, worshipping a common God, and they will celebrate the resurrection of human freedom.”

“The transformations of the French empire itself or of French power structures themselves as well as the emergence of a kind of language of equal rights starting with the American Revolution and the French Revolution provided an opportunity and in some ways connected with other kinds of ground level desires or hopes and ideologies for freedom that were coming out of the plantation regime itself.”

“I remember, and I will never forget, one day - I was six years old and I was playing beside the road and this plantation owner drove up to me and stopped and asked me "could I pick some cotton." I told him I didn't know and he said, "Yes, you can. I will give you things that you want from the commissary store," and he named a huge list that he called off. I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again.”

“The other slaves in the field never let that house slave knew - know what they were really thinking. If the house slave said, well one of these days all of us will live in the plantation, they said, uh huh. They went along with him. But if you came up to them and said, let's go, they would be gone just like that.And in, in America you have the same situation.You have the vast masses who are still slaves.”

“You have the upper class Negroes who are the modern day Uncle Toms or the 20th century Uncle Toms. They don't wear a handkerchief anymore. They wear top hats. They're called Doctor, they're called - Reverend, but they're still - they play the same role today that Uncle Tom played on the plantation.”

“The same thing that Uncle Tom did on the plantation before [Abe] Lincoln issued the so-called Emancipation Proclamation.I have no thinking on the matter. But he's teaching the black people to suffer peacefully, patiently, until the white man makes up his mind that you're a human being the same as he.”

“Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day.”

“When you think about the abolition of slavery for example, for the ruling class with the rich white people owning plantations and states, and things like that, slavery was to their benefit. To oppose it didn't make any sense at all on a rational basis. But on a rights basis, on a principle basis, it made obvious, overwhelming sense.”

“My grandmother's grandparents were slaves. My grandmother Big Mama would tell me about the stories she heard as a child growing up in the shadows of a North Carolina plantation. It's only been in my lifetime that blacks have had the right to vote, live in certain areas or hold certain jobs. It is with this black history that I write about the financial challenges African-Americans still have.”

“The process of creating art allows me to learn about the subject I'm illustrating. So, if I want to learn more about plantation life and slavery, I try to find clients that will give me an opportunity to work on projects that will visualize those experiences of the enslaved African and people of color. I get to learn about my roots, and my artwork allows the reader into that world by creating images that are accessible.”