Illustration of Nat Turner captured by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer
Wikimedia Commons

You can read this Nat Turner quote, from the book The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read the quote in its full context here.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.