When Jews and Blacks united to fight apathy over modern African slavery 30 years ago

Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan delivers a speech at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., Nov. 16, 2017. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

By Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser

(JNS) — Three decades ago this week, a conflict erupted in Harlem, New York, when reports describing an ongoing Islamic trade in black slaves in Mauritania and Sudan hit the newsstands. While much of the black community was incensed, others—led by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam—denied the stories and attacked the activists who brought the news. As this intracommunal clash intensified, a movement evolved that liberated tens of thousands of African slaves and, for the first time since the 1960s, united blacks and Jews in the long march for justice.

A generation ago, I, Charles Jacobs, a Jewish management consultant, discovered that slavery still existed 125 years after America’s Civil War. In the winter of 1990, flipping through a copy of The Economist, I stumbled across the short editorial, “Slavery: By any other name.” It was way in the back on page 42. Its sixth paragraph took my breath away:

“In Sudan chattel slavery is spreading fast, as a consequence of the civil war between the black Christian and pagan southerners and the Arab, Muslim north. … In February 1988, a [black] child could be bought for $90; so many slaves are available [nearly two years later] that the price has now fallen to $15.” A child was cheaper than a pizza.

I—who at 19 had attended the March on Washington in 1963 spurred on by Martin Luther King Jr., and who spent my college years as a political activist—was horrified. After a few years of research, I co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Group in 1993 with a Mauritanian Muslim refugee named Mohamed Athié.

From the start, I thought that a campaign to liberate these slaves would be a natural extension of the previous decade’s anti-apartheid movement, when major human-rights organizations and black leaders passionately took on the issue of racial discrimination. I soon realized this was a mistake when the behemoths, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, decided to treat blacks enslaved by Arabs as a “sensitive” topic.

Athié and I broke the news of the modern-day trade in black flesh in The New York Times with an oped, “Bought and Sold,” which ran on July 13, 1994. Soon afterward, we were invited to appear on the only national news show with a predominantly black audience, Tony Brown’s Journal on PBS.

The editor of The City Sun—then the second-largest black paper in Harlem (now defunct)— saw the show and asked his part-time staff writer, Samuel Cotton, to investigate our claims. Cotton contacted me and I mailed him a package of documents that included chilling photographs of slaves. It changed his life.

Cotton spent months putting together a carefully documented series of articles describing the reality of Arab slavery in North Africa. His first piece hit the newsstands on Feb. 1, 1995. Its blaring front-page headline was “Arab Masters, Black Slaves.”

Immediately, agents of the Nation of Islam went to war against us, declaring that there were no slaves in Sudan while making no comments on Mauritania.

Farrakhan was enraged because these African truths undermined, perhaps as nothing else could, his central mission: to bring American blacks to Islam by portraying it as their true path to freedom. Reports that Arab Muslims were raiding African villages, shooting the men, and capturing women and girls as concubines hardly helped him paint Islam as “the black man’s religion.” For Farrakhan, the black Muslim, the case of Mauritania, where Arab-Berber Muslims owned black Muslims as chattel, was (and remains) even worse.

Meanwhile, the Sun and another black paper, The Daily Challenge, published story after story detailing black activists’ and African refugees’ contempt for the NOI’s denials. Farrakhan’s main spokesman, Abdul Akbar Muhammad, went on Brown’s show to debate Cotton, whose well-reasoned arguments trounced Muhammad’s ramblings. Unsurprisingly, Muhammad blamed me for this communal uproar: “Dr. Charles Jacobs is Jewish,” he reminded Cotton darkly, and the head of a Jewish “conspiracy” against “the religion of Islam.” A disgusted Cotton replied that Muhammad’s comments about Jews were “primitive and anti-black” because they assumed “that blacks can only be led around with rings in our noses” and never work as equals with Jews.

As the months went by, we learned that there were fistfights in prisons between black nationalists and Farrakhan followers. Eventually, one inmate wrote us and said that prison officials banned our newsletters from the jail to avoid the conflict the issue of black slavery unleashed.

Cotton, obsessed with the idea that black people were actually slaves—and black leaders were being quiet about it—embarked on a mission to Mauritania facilitated by an underground Mauritanian abolitionist group to see for himself. He spent two weeks there interviewing former slaves, runaway slaves and even current slaves. His resulting book, “Silent Terror,” published in 1998, is a heart-wrenching masterpiece.

On March 13, 1996, Cotton, Athié, myself and some South Sudanese living in America were invited to appear as part of a panel discussion at Howard University. Farrakhan’s influence at Howard was apparent immediately: the moderator, opening the program, announced that “there are many different views” concerning slavery in Africa and that Howard University “does not take a position on any view.” One of the students who came asked about what could be done about the issue in the black community given that Farrakhan denied it was true. Cotton answered perfectly. In what seems a spectacular irony, that student, contemporary footage confirms, was the young Ta-Nehisi Coates, today one of this country’s most influential black antisemites.

Later that same day, we testified before a special House hearing chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.). Cotton presented the findings from his recent trip, and humiliated former Congressional Black Caucus chair Mervyn Dymally, a Nation of Islam ally and lobbyist for Mauritania, paid to deny that slavery existed there.

The next day, Farrakhan, also in D.C., received an award from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which had mostly ignored our press releases three years earlier. A journalist, likely aware of our congressional hearing, asked him about African slavery. As The New York Times reported, Farrakhan bellowed at his questioner: “If slavery exists, why don’t you go, as a member of the press, and you look inside of the Sudan, and if you find it, then you come back and tell the American people what you have found!” The Baltimore Sun took him up on his challenge, and, that June, published a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series documenting the redemption of enslaved African children. After the Sun series, Farrakhan retreated and has not had much to say about his co-religionists enslaving his black “brethren.”

Later that summer, the Clinton administration blocked Farrakhan from receiving a gift of more than $1 billion from his “brother” Muammar Qaddafi. In Qaddafi’s Libya, sub-Saharan Africans, including black Sudanese, were enslaved regularly. In 2017, CNN obtained a video of an auction in Libya where two black men were sold for $400 each.

By the second half of the 1990s, the American Anti-Slavery Group was working with the Zürich-based NGO Christian Solidarity International, helping them raise money to buy back Sudanese slaves’ freedom. This interested the mainstream media. CSI’s John Eibner, an unsung hero, eventually helped free more than 100,000 slaves. The American Anti-Slavery Group raised money and garnered broad American support for our modern-day abolitionist cause.

I flew with Eibner illegally into southern Sudan twice, the second time on Passover with Rabbi Joseph Polak, then the beloved head of Boston University’s Hillel. The rabbi distributed matzah to the freed slaves and taught their Dinka tribal leaders the Jewish way of never forgetting one’s enslavement.

The jihad in Sudan, declared by its Muslim Brotherhood junta, ended in 2005, defeated by brave Dinka soldiers who pushed the government’s armies back. President George W. Bush, who had learned about the Sudan campaign, forced Khartoum to allow the Christian south to decide its fate. In 2011, 98.83 percent of the southerners voted to secede and form South Sudan, the world’s newest nation. These were victories Cotton, my friend and a true hero, never saw. He died of brain cancer at the age of 56 on Dec. 20, 2003.

Cotton traveled to Mauritania, but never to Sudan. On my second (Passover) trip in 2011, I recalled him describing in his book a childhood fantasy of freeing his ancestors from a slave ship’s stinking hold, and, as he wrote in “Silent Terror,” having “a big celebration when we landed back home on the shores of the motherland we thought we would never see again.” In Sudan, I felt that we were helping that dream come true.

Were Cotton alive today, he—the man who helped start a movement that freed tens of thousands—would be standing alongside us in our rekindled movement, the African Jewish Alliance. The jihad in Africa has only gotten worse: Black Africans in more than 10 countries are being subjected to rape, slavery and murder. Sam Cotton would have been right at the front, showing that we, blacks and Jews united, can challenge and win against outrageous evil.

Charles Jacobs is president of the African Jewish Alliance and recipient of the Boston Freedom Award from Coretta Scott King for helping to liberate black jihad slaves in Sudan. Ben Poser is executive editor of White Rose Magazine and research director for the African Jewish Alliance.