If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.
Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.
From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.
The Spanish Civil War, Britain was not involved in it. Going back a bit, there was the naval blockade to stop the slave trade in the 19th century; that was morally just. Shame they didn't bother to abolish slavery at the same time.
As a white, female, half-Jewish writer, when I read 'The Underground Railroad,' it reminded me that America isn't just the sort of Sesame Street that I grew up with that tolerated and embraced diversity in the Northeast, but in fact was built on the foundation of slavery.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.'
Slavery was our nation's original sin.
Slavery is America's original sin and was the great global injustice of that age.
In the end, of course, Republicans ended slavery and permanently outlawed it through the Thirteenth Amendment.
For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.
We are the first to honour the memories of those who perished through slavery, by declaring August 1 as Emancipation Day.
True, permanent peace can never be restored, until slavery, the occasion of the war, has ceased.
All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.
It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.
The existence of slavery cast the shadow of hypocrisy over the otherwise noble proclamation of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence.
More than 150 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is illegal almost everywhere. But it is still not abolished - not even here, in the land of the free. On the contrary, there is a cancer of violence, a modern-day slavery growing in America by the day, in the very places where we live and work. It's called human trafficking.
Southern politicians who have tried to rise above the passionate rhetoric surrounding the Civil War have frequently found themselves dragged back into the mire. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was forced to apologise when his proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month failed to make any reference to slavery.
