Video
The American Anti-Slavery Group proudly offers an expanding library of video resources from both the organization’s past and present. 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 from our growing YouTube channel are available below, organized by category and in chronological order.
Lastest Videos
Here you can watch the AASG’s latest original content. This section will be updated as more content is produced.
Watch AASG president Dr. Charles Jacobs explain why Mauritania being admitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council is an atrocity typical of the “human rights community.”
Watch the American Anti-Slavery Group’s research director, Ben Poser, speak at the Massachusetts State House on the persecution and enslavement of Christians in Africa.
Watch our video about how Louis Farrakhan influenced Howard University to go out of its way to “not take a position” on whether slavery existed in Africa.
Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan is one of America’s most influential black leaders. Yet, as the evidence of modern-day slavery in Africa became public in the 1990s, he and the Nation of Islam attempted to cripple the burgeoning abolitionist movement at every turn — actually denying that there was an active Arab slave trade in black Christians in the Sudan. The reason why was later discovered to be Farrakhan’s substantial financial dealings with Arab countries where blacks were enslaved.
The famously vengeful Farrakhan’s hold on the black community, and its subsequent fear of offending him and his militant followers, shamefully restrained many black leaders and institutions from joining the fight against slavery.
Watch Prof. Julius Coles, former director of Howard University’s Ralph J. Bunche International Center, go out of his way to “not take a position” on whether black slavery existed in Africa. The occasion in question was a March 13, 1996, forum discussion at the Bunche Center about modern-day slavery in Mauritania and Sudan featuring members of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
Watch the heroic late journalist and anti-slavery crusader Sam Cotton (1947 – 2003) respond to a sympathetic black student asking how black Americans should respond to fellow blacks who believe Farrakhan’s denials of slavery. From the American Anti-Slavery Group’s March 13, 1996, forum at Howard University.
Watch Dr. Augustine Abulu Lado, a black Sudanese academic and Professor of Consumer and Organizational Studies at Clarkson University, respond to Farrakhan’s denial of slavery in Sudan. From the American Anti-Slavery Group’s March 13, 1996, forum at Howard University.
Watch black Mauritanian Muslim Mohamed Nacir Athié respond to Farrakhan’s cowardly denial of slavery. From the American Anti-Slavery Group’s March 13, 1996, forum at Howard University.
Watch Sam Cotton take on an Arab Muslim Sudanese graduate student who was still not convinced that his fellow Arabs own black slaves in Sudan. Cotton’s response amazingly morphed into a prescient condemnation of cowardly black American leadership for tacitly joining Louis Farrakhan in denying or ignoring the issue of slavery — allowing for Arab deniers like the student to rarely be challenged. From the American Anti-Slavery Group’s March 13, 1996, forum at Howard University.
The following day, March 14, 1996, at a Newsmaker of the Year awards ceremony from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Farrakhan publicly denied, on camera, that slavery existed in the Sudan.
Watch this exclusive footage, obtained from an off-air VHS home recording of a December 10, 1996, Dateline NBC investigation into the Sudanese slave trade.
About 13 months after Farrakhan’s rage-filled denial of slavery, on April 9, 1997, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) program The 700 Club aired a segment on small-scale efforts to buy back Christian slaves in Sudan. Watch CBN reporter Lee Webb tell the nation how Farrakhan callously abandoned his enslaved black brethren.
Watch Pastor Pat Robertson, the host of The 700 Club, in the same segment, expose the moral hypocrisy of Farrakhan’s mission — to convince black Americans that Islam is their path to freedom — and condemn him as a “charlatan” and shill for Arab money.
Slavery in Mauritania
Watch the very first of only a handful of segments TV media has done on slavery in Mauritania. Here, Sam Cotton is interviewed by the defunct New York local news station UPN 9 News about his undercover mission to document Mauritanian slavery. Cotton returned to New York in January of 1996, and this well-produced, un-dated segment aired later that month in two parts over two consecutive evenings.
Watch Sam Cotton’s opening testimony on slavery in Mauritania before a hearing of the House Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee for Africa. Cotton spoke at the American Anti-Slavery Group’s first of several appearances on Capitol Hill on March 13, 1996 (just hours after the Howard forum).
Watch a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and House Africa Subcommittee, the late Democratic California congressman Mervyn Dymally (1926 – 2012), deny that slavery still exists in Mauritania. Dymally was a paid “legislative advocate” (lobbyist) for the Mauritanian government, bought with a yearly $120,000 salary. His testimony sought to refute that of Cotton and the American Anti-Slavery Group at the same March 13, 1996, House hearing.
Slavery in Sudan
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.
Fore more videos, subscribe to the American Anti-Slavery Group’s new YouTube channel.