Slavery in Sudan
The American Anti-Slavery Group here presents a wide range of video material concerning slavery in Sudan. All archival material has been painstakingly transferred and remastered in the highest definition possible from our rare and extensive tape collection over the course of a year. (Due to the age and condition of much of the material, VHS tapes in particular, picture and sound quality vary significantly.)
The most important and shareable clips on this subject from our growing YouTube channel are available below, organized by category and in chronological order.
Watch rare footage from a 1995 human rights investigation in Sudan carried out by former Brown University professor of medicine Dr. Kevin Vigilante. In the video, Dr. Vigilante documents the horrors of the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 – 2005) but, most importantly, the enslavement of black Christian children by Arab Muslim militia gangs.
Watch the first segment of a two-part series produced by CBS Evening News with Dan Rather on the slave trade in the Sudan. This program, depicting the efforts of Dr. John Eibner of Christian Solidarity International to free black Sudanese slaves, aired February 1, 1999.
Watch the second segment of CBS Evening News with Dan Rather’s two-part series on slavery in the Sudan. This piece, broadcast on February 2, 1999, celebrates the inspiring efforts of an Aurora, Colorado, elementary school teacher and her fourth-grade class to raise money for Christian Solidarity International’s slave buyback campaign.
Watch a CBS 2 New York segment from October 4, 1999, detailing the American Anti-Slavery Group’s lobbying effort to convince the city of New York to no longer invest public employee pensions in the now-defunct Canadian oil company Talisman Energy, which had interests in Sudan. As a direct result of the public outcry from organizations like the AASG, Talisman finally sold all of its shares in Sudanese oil in 2003 before folding in 2015.
Watch the American Anti-Slavery Group’s co-founder and president, Dr. Charles Jacobs, give his acceptance speech for the Boston Freedom Award, an honor he was given on September 18, 2000, by Boston’s late mayor Thomas Menino and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s widow Coretta Scott King for helping to liberate tens of thousands of black Sudanese slaves.
Watch this September 24, 2000, WBZ 4 News Conference segment of the AASG’s Dr. Charles Jacobs bringing awareness to the plight of Sudanese slaves in the wake of receiving the Boston Freedom Award from Coretta Scott King the previous week.
Watch Dr. Charles Jacobs testify before a special hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 28, 2000, to convince the lame duck Clinton administration to take the Sudanese slavery crisis seriously.
Watch Francis Buk, an escaped Sudanese Christian slave, tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee his heartbreaking story of childhood abduction, orphaning, enslavement, beatings, and racial abuse at the hands of his Arab master. Francis was the first actual former Sudanese slave to tell his story in English before a government body. It was his testimony and activism, among that of many others, which eventually caught the ear of the new Bush administration, and finally on October 21, 2002, President Bush signed the Sudan Peace Act, a law which gave U.S. approval for the black Christian southern Sudanese to have a referendum on whether they should remain within Muslim Sudan. On January 7, 2011 — almost exact six years after the end of Khartoum’s jihad against the south — the referendum began, and on July 9, black South Sudan officially became the newest country on earth.
Watch highlights from a protest the American Anti-Slavery Group helped stage outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2004. Black radio host Joe Madison, civil rights leader Walter Fauntroy (organizer of the 1963 March on Washington), the AASG’s Dr. Charles Jacobs, and many others, decried the Sudanese government’s infamous track record of slavery and the intensifying genocide in Darfur. Dr. Jacobs called for the unequivocal eviction of Sudan from the United Nations before Madison and Fauntroy allowed themselves to be arrested for blocking the entrance to the embassy.
Watch an extraordinary convergence of circumstance and faith, in which the AASG’s president, Dr. Charles Jacobs, was present to witness the liberation of 175 black Sudanese slaves by Christian Solidarity International on Passover, the Jewish festival of liberty, on March 23, 2011.