2051 Abolition Today: Ending Modern Slavery

Rev. William Sinkford
Dr. Charles Jacobs, Full Text of Speech: There are 27 Million Slaves Where are the Abolitionists?
President, American Anti-Slavery Group
Francis Bok
Mr. Vivek Pandit, Full Text of Speech

Slide Presentation

Powerpoint Presentation

	The Rev. William Sinkford (left) introduces speakers (seated, from left) Dr. Charles Jacobs, Francis Bok and Vivek Pandit.

“After all, slavery had been outlawed in this country since Abolition in 1865, and the 1927 Slavery Convention and the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights made it illegal to hold or trade slaves anywhere in the world. We thought we had this one pretty well fixed. But this is a problem that is so far from being behind us that it will blow your mind as it has blown mine. Human slavery is thriving….For Unitarian Universalists…the continued existence of slavery around the world in the 21st century poses a challenge that most of us have thus far not addressed.”

Sinkford clarified that the current forms of slavery - debt bondage, chattel slavery, sexual servitude and forced labor - often do not resemble the type that flourished in the United States. He cited the afternoon presentation’s first speaker, Dr. Charles Jacobs, founder and president of the American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston, as someone who is awakening peoples’ consciousness to the issue of modern slavery.

Dr. Charles Jacobs

Jacobs presented some astounding statistics: There are 27 million slaves today, more than in any other time of human history. That is approximately the population of Canada. And according to the C.I.A., about 50,000 people are brought into the United States every year to be slaves. “Slavery,” he said, “is the stepchild of the Human Rights Movement….Mostly, the civilized world sits by. No major human rights organization has placed on its mandate the freeing of today’s slaves. Our support has come from the grassroots. And here our experience tells us that three groups have been our biggest supporters. We jocularly refer to this abolitionist trio as ‘blacks, Jews and U.U.s’.”

Jacobs called Unitarian Universalism “the Abolitionist church.” He pointed out that U.U. history is one of dedication to abolitionism. He recounted an incident when The Rev. Theodore Parker took a stand against Southern slave-catchers when they came to Boston: “He took a group of Universalist men to the hotel where the slave-catchers were lodging, and he surrounded them, and he jostled them, and he intimidated them, and he told them that they had better for their own safety go back and leave these slaves free. And the slavers looked into Parker’s eyes and looked at the men with him, and they went back home.”

	Jacobs’ presentation included photographs showing examples of modern slavery. This one, of girls in an Indian brothel, was taken with a hidden camera. Credit: IJM Archives.

Jacobs defined slaves as “people who are forced to work under the threat of violence for little or no pay.” Some examples of modern slaves are the rug-weaving children in Pakistan, India and Nepal; the virgin girls in Ghana who are given by their fathers to village shamen as sex slaves in order to cleanse their fathers’ sins; the sex traffic of girls and boys in India and other Asian countries; Bangladeshi boys sold to racing camel owners in the Persian Gulf to become camel jockeys. According to Jacobs, today’s slaves might be born into debt bondage, sold by a parent to earn money to feed the rest of the family, or lured by the promise of better work, or inherited or traded.

To better understand slavery, said Jacobs, “Do not look at the identity of the victim; look at the identity of the oppressor.”

Francis Bok

He introduced to the audience Francis Bok, whom he called “a modern-day Frederick Douglass.” (http://www.iabolish.com/news/press-kit/bio/francis.htm Since his escape from slavery in the Sudan, Bok has been speaking to groups in the United States about the conditions of slavery and the imperative to end it.

Bok, whose autobiography (“Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America”) will be published later this year, summarized his experiences of a decade of brutality and the determination to be free that kept him alive. “I told myself I would escape someday,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘I am not an animal’.”

He told a harrowing tale of sudden capture and ultimate escape, and appealed to the audience to act on behalf of others who are still enslaved. “I came as a representative of millions of people…,” he said. “I came to ask you to join the new Abolitionist movement that is in your blood, that is in your history, and that I know is in your heart.”

Jacobs returned to the podium to address the question of what U.U.s can do to abolish slavery. He insisted that we must get past our reluctance to talk about slavery and to take action to end it, that we must get over the perception that we seem hypocritical when we do, given our own past with slavery. “Universalism can only have one meaning: That every man, woman and child on this earth is fashioned in the image of God….”

On behalf of his organization, Jacobs offered the following as ways to get involved with the abolition of modern slavery:

• Educate yourself
• Join the Freedom Action Network
• Download our free curriculum
• Book a speaker
• Donate

	Vivek Pandit

Pandit told his story of a journey that began with an unawareness of the existence of bonded laborers in his country, through his struggles to help those laborers, and finally, to a place of greater success. In his early years of dissent he and his family were beaten by owners of laborers, including his own uncle. “There are no shortcuts to freeing slaves…,” Pandit said. “The only answer to (freeing) bonded slaves is to organize them….Buying their freedom is not the answer, because it encourages masters to keep more.”

Participants appeared to be greatly moved by the afternoon’s speakers, giving each a standing ovation after their presentation. Sinkford closed the program by saying “This afternoon, here, we have been in the presence of heroes.”

Reported and photographed for the web by Jeanette Leardi; Web Design by Julie Albanese

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