The American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) was founded in 1993 with a mission to abolish modern-day slavery, and a focus primarily on widespread chattel slavery in North Africa and the Middle East.

In 1994, we broke the story of the modern-day enslavement in North Africa in The New York Times. The overwhelmingly positive response to that article propelled us to create an anti-slavery movement.

Throughout the 1990s, the AASG’s bi-partisan coalition of concerned citizens — black, white, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — worked to inform the American public of these atrocities and force the U.S. State Department to demand their cessation. By 2000, AASG activists had testified before Congress three times, garnered enthusiastic grass-roots support within the black community, published articles in The Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, been featured on national TV shows ranging from Dateline NBC to BET Talk, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy back Sudanese slaves’ freedom. In 2002, AASG activism helped push through the Sudan Peace Act, which forced the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled government of Sudan to begin negotiating a peace with the black, mostly Christian south and stop the slave raids. By 2005, a peace treaty was signed, and, in 2011, South Sudan voted to secede from the north and become the world’s newest nation.

Our movement:

1. Raised international awareness about the need for the elimination of modern-day slavery — a subject of advocacy now widely accepted by human rights activists, who have created broad and varied movements to address all forms of slavery.

2. Helped redeem tens of thousands of black slaves in Sudan, and, through its campaigns, successfully helped the south secede from the north.