Copyright © 1999 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Slaves for sale

A Boston ad agency teams up with an anti-slavery organization for some compelling, and disturbing, advocacy

By Dan Kennedy

The advertisements look like a half-forgotten nightmare from a shameful chapter in our collective past. SLAVES FOR SALE reads one. SHIPMENTS OF SLAVES proclaims another. But don't let the antebellum-era message fool you. These are new ads, aimed at fighting a real, and very current, problem.

Sometime next month the Boston ad agency of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos will launch a campaign on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Group, a six-year-old Boston-based organization that draws attention to -- and crusades against -- slavery in Africa, South Asia, and the Persian Gulf. The ads, designed by senior vice-president Todd Riddle and written by senior vice-president Jonathan Plazonja, are aimed at grabbing readers with a provocative, even offensive, approach -- and then educating them about the horrors of Third World slavery. Riddle's goal: to place the ads in national newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and in smaller regional and local publications as well.

"It puts a spin on the old slave auctions," says Riddle. "But we're not trying to be controversial for advertising's sake. The advertising shouldn't be the controversy. The subject should be the controversy."

Riddle volunteered his services after hearing Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, on The David Brudnoy Show one evening. Jacobs is excited about the ads. "We think we should shock, because this is shocking," he says. "We just got finished with Black History Month. But black slavery is not history."

Jacobs's organization is most heavily involved in Sudan, where tens of thousands of people have reportedly been taken into slavery, and Mauritania, where the number ranges from 300,000 to one million. He hopes the ads will raise money for a project that has drawn both praise and criticism: buying the freedom of slaves, especially in Sudan.

An impoverished, famine-plagued country south of Egypt, Sudan has been ravaged by a decades-long civil war between the Arab Muslim north and the black Christian south. Muslim forces raid Christian villages, taking livestock, property, and people, often women and children. Once in captivity, the slaves are forced to convert to Islam; women designated as sexual concubines undergo genital mutilation as well.

These practices were ignored, even denied, until recent years, when, largely through the work of organizations such as Jacobs's, the existence of slavery was documented and disseminated. Among the first Western journalists to witness and confirm Sudanese slavery was then-Boston Phoenix staff writer Tim Sandler, who traveled to Sudan in 1995 and reported on the thriving slave trade (see "Africa's Invisible Slaves," News, June 30, 1995). Sandler is now a producer with NBC's Dateline.

The only comprehensive solution to Sudanese slavery is an end to the war. But Jacobs, working mainly with Christian relief organizations, has come up with an ingenious stopgap: buying individual slaves and returning them to their villages. Jacobs hopes the ads will raise money for this effort. Freedom in Sudan comes shockingly cheap. Just $100 -- half to the slave owner, the other half to pay a for volunteer's expenses and the food and medicine she or he brings to the country -- is all it takes to buy one person out of slavery.

Surprisingly, this effort has not met with universal approbation. In early February, a spokeswoman for UNICEF, the international children's-relief agency, deemed the slave-redemption program "intolerable." Reed Brody, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, doesn't go that far, but he voices some real concerns about possible unintended consequences.

"Certainly in the individual cases it's very good that people are taken out of slavery," says Brody. "But the knowledge that there are foreigners with deep pockets willing to pay to redeem slaves can only spur on this kind of practice."

To be sure, there's a certain logic to Brody's critique. But Jacobs and his supporters believe that the moral imperative behind their work overrides any theoretical concerns voiced by their critics. Besides, Jacobs notes, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Christian Solidarity International, and similar organizations are actually getting people out of slavery. What, exactly, is UNICEF doing?

"They can't get away with saying the war has to end before things can get better," Jacobs says. "That's exactly what the West told the Jews. Is the world going to abandon black Christians until they can get the parties to come to the peace table? That's morally obtuse."

Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA, whose organization pioneered the one-person-at-a-time approach, says this of the slave-redemption programs: "I think it's fantastic what they're doing. Whenever a slave or a prisoner of conscience is released, it's a moment for celebration."

Jacobs got his start as a human-rights activist in the 1960s. He was in Washington for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and was an anti-war and SDS activist in Boston. A business consultant before becoming a full-time anti-slavery crusader, he talks in an enthusiastic rush about his work, which is supported across the political and social spectrums -- by Barney Frank and Pat Robertson, by schoolchildren and prison inmates.

As for Hill, Holliday's role, Riddle says the public-service ads may be just the beginning. Next up: a series of posters, to be illustrated with images donated by the noted photographer Nadav Kander. A TV and radio campaign may be in the offing as well.

"Slavery is kind of a forgotten cause, unfortunately," says Todd Riddle. "It's hard to imagine a worse human-rights problem than slavery. This is just a starting point for us."

The American Anti-Slavery Group welcomes interns. To learn more about the fight to end slavery, visit the group's Web site at www.anti-slavery.org, or call (800) 844-0719.