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Harvard Prof. Tries to Make By
J. Edward Pawlick A professor at Harvard Law School is leading a group of high-powered trial lawyers who are seeking to make even more riches for themselves, off the suffering of blacks. Prof. Charles Ogletree, himself black, is leading a group called Reparations Assessment Group. It seeks to obtain compensation for blacks in America because of the slavery that occurred in this country 130 years ago. The professor isn’t concerned that there are more people in the world today who are slaves than ever before in history. There are twenty-seven million slaves, including many thousands of blacks in Africa. Ogletree and his rich lawyer friends are not at all concerned about those who are still suffering in Africa. These lawyers can’t make any money off of them. Those in his group include Richard Scruggs, who won the $368.5 billion settlement against tobacco companies, Dennis C. Sweet III who won a $400 million settlement in the “phen-fen” diet drug case, Willie E. Gary, who obtained a $500 million judgment against the world’s largest funeral home operators, the famed Johnny Cochran and others. Do you believe these lawyers are really interested in helping some American black person whose great, great, great grandfather suffered over a hundred years ago? Or are they interested in the money or the power they can get out of it? Not
So Simple - After Clinton apologized for slavery while he was in Uganda in 1998, its black President replied: “African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs.” - The leader of Uganda noted that the sailors from the slave ships didn’t go through the jungles chasing people. Black leaders were profiting off their own people when they sold some of their excess slaves to the ships in the 1600s. - Slavery
is an age-old problem that has existed everywhere. It was even mentioned
in the Bible with laws for the Jews as to how they should treat slaves.
It has been Western civilization which has worked to end the practice.
But apparently Prof. Ogletree is not interested in helping this ongoing
problem. - It wasn’t only white people who owned slaves in the South before the Civil War. A little known fact is that thousands of blacks were slave owners in America. Some had hundreds of slaves. Who’s going to trace all those black slave owners and their many thousands of descendants to be sure they do not profit from the suffering inflicted on others by their ancestors? - Who’s going to determine whether or not a person is black and deserves compensation? Will we regress to the rules used by the Nazis to determine who was a Jew? Is that what we want? - But it won’t be difficult to decide which lawyer gets a fee, will it? What’s
Happening to Slaves Today? Only a mile or so from Ogletree’s office, the American Anti-Slavery Group is working to educate an apathetic public about slavery in Africa today. Why is Ogletree so indifferent to the suffering of his own people that is occurring now. The absurdity of it is explained by Prof. Walter Williams, also a black man, in one of his recent columns: “Black slaves are still available -- just not in the United States. To make a purchase, you'd have to travel to the Sudan as Gerald Williams, Harvard University pre-med student, did in October 2000. “Slavery in the Sudan is in part a result of a 15-year war by the Muslim north against the black Christian and animist south. Arab militias, armed by the Khartoum government, raid villages, mostly those of the Dinka tribe. They shoot the men and enslave the women and children. Women and children are kept as personal property or they're taken north and auctioned off. “In Sudanese slave markets, a woman or child can be purchased for $90. An Anti-Slavery International investigator interviewed Abuk Thuc Akwar, a 13-year-old girl who, along with 24 other children, was captured by the militia, marched north and given to a farmer. The investigator reported, ‘Throughout the day she worked in his sorghum fields and at night in his bed. During the march, she was raped and called a black donkey.’ The girl managed to escape with the help of the master's jealous wife. “Williams visited the Sudan as part of an eight-person delegation sponsored by Christian Solidarity International (CSI). CSI, as well as the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), have a stopgap mission of buying, at a cost of $85 each, Christian African women and children whom Muslims capture and enslave. AASG's purchase emancipates them. “Williams' tales of Muslim atrocities are horrific. Six-year-old Mawien Ahir Bol failed to clean a goat pen to his master's satisfaction. The penalty: His index finger was cut off. Yak Kenyang Adieu's punishment for being too sick to tend to his master's goats was the loss of all fingers on his right hand. Williams' trip freed, through purchase, these two boys and 20 other slaves. Should you be interested in learning more about slavery, the American Anti-Slavery Group's web site is: www.anti-slavery.com. “Chattel slavery also exists in the former French colony of Mauritania, where it was officially outlawed in 1980. The U.S. State Department estimated that as of 1994 there were 90,000 blacks living as property of Berbers. The Berbers use their slaves for labor, sex and breeding. They're also exchanged for camels, trucks, guns or money. Slave offspring become the property of the master. According to a 1990 Human Rights Watch report, routine Mauritanian slave punishments include beatings, denial of food and prolonged exposure to the sun, with hands and feet tied together. Serious infringement of the master's rule can mean prolonged horrible tortures such as the "insect treatment" --where the slave is bound head and foot, and insects placed in his ears and other body orifices -- and "burning coals," where the slave is bound and buried with hot coals placed on parts of his body. “American
Anti-Slavery Group says, "Most distressing is the silence of the
American media whose reports counted for so much in the battle to end
apartheid in South Africa." Only recently, and thankfully so, have
mainstream black organizations such as the Congressional Black Caucus
and the NAACP taken a stand against chattel slavery in Mauritania and
Sudan. At one time Minister Louis Farakhan simply denied that his “Slavery is not the only African injustice that goes practically ignored. “There's the frequent outbreaks of genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia and the Congo. In fact, it's fairly safe to say that most of today's most flagrant human rights abuses occur in Africa. But unfortunately they get little attention -- maybe it's because Africans instead of Europeans are the perpetrators; Europeans are held accountable to civilized standards of behavior, while Africans aren't.” The Anti-Slavery Group reports that “the world’s worst human rights violations” are suffered by thousands of blacks in the Sudan and Mauritania. The punishments given to ‘uppity’ slaves include “tortures of medieval proportions, all too graphic to describe,” it says. Sidebar:
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