"If God wills that it (the Civil War) continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" --Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address near the end of the American Civil War

Slave women were the only women in America who were sexually exploited with impunity, stripped and whipped with a lash, and worked like oxen. In the nineteenth century when the nation was preoccupied with keeping women in the home and protecting them, only slave women were so totally unprotected by men or by law. Only black women had their womanhood so totally denied." --Deborah Gray White

"I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong." --Abraham Lincoln

"So many historians conceive it their duty to teach as truth what they or they who pay their salaries believe ought to have been true." --W.E.B. DuBois

"The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia and of Egypt. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gaged their brightness." --W.E.B. DuBois

"All the epithets applied to the Negro race and widely accepted as truth will, simply prove untrue when one lives among them. When all the talk, all the propaganda has been cut, the criterion is nothing but the color of skin." --John Howard Griffin

"Before we have justice, we must first have truth." --John Howard Griffin

"The problem of race in America at the end of the 20th century is not the problem of slavery. If it had been the problem of slavery it would have been over in 1865. But as a nation that saw itself as a Christian nation, as a nation that saw itself built on the principles of freedom, we had to tell ourselves that there was something about the slave that justified slavery. It is that justification of slavery that we are still trying to deal with, more than 100 years after the abolition of slavery." --historian James Horton

So what does James mean? This -- The fact that America taught that there was something wrong with black people in order to justify holding them in cruel, life-long bondage still plagues us today. That belief that black people are inferior to white people is still around, isn't it?