Objective: Develop the habit of close reading to recognize ...



Objective: Develop the habit of close reading to recognize the rhetorical moves an author makes to convey ideas so that you can both restate the author’s ideas in your own words and analyze the ideas to “make meaning” from them. [Note: In time, your response to the author’s ideas will be the essence of your reading skills; at present, your primary purpose is analyze the author’s argument and how s/he mounts it.]

Reading Plan:

|1. |Interpretation of |Your purpose for reading is to analyze the structure of a non-fiction text (cause-effect, comparison or |

| |Argument |contrast, problem-solution, definition, process [steps], or other text frame or combination of frames) and |

| | |explain how the author conveys main ideas and supporting details. Paraphrase in 15-25 words (“says”) and analyze|

| | |the logic of the argument and the reasoning in the evidence that supports it (“means”). |

|2. |Rhetorical Devices |Then you are to analyze how the text frame helps the author have an effect on the reader’s attitudes toward the |

| | |subject matter. What is the effect and how does s/he achieve it? Start by finding the argument. What is it? What|

| | |tone words (say, sarcastic, reportorial, dismissive, caustic, light-hearted or dozens of others) come to mind as|

| | |you read the argument? What diction (word choice, connotations, register), figurative language (metaphors and |

| | |similes), and imagery (appeals to five senses) does the author use? What do you notice about sentence variety |

| | |(length, complex v. compound, parallelism, rhetorical questions, or many others)? That is, how does the author |

| | |use his/her ethos and the appeals of pathos and logos within the text frame to support the argument in the text?|

| | | |

|3. |Says-Means-Matters |Connect the ideas in the argument to other arguments you have read about slavery across various time periods and|

| | |countries. What is the significance of this article (“matters”)? Your evaluation should consider these |

| | |questions: “Why should anyone bother reading it? or What does it have to do with the past, present, or future? |

| | |or “How does it spark thinking on a broader scope than treated in the article?” |

|Mimetic: Writers and |A text rests at the intersection of the cultures, ages, languages, experiences, knowledge, and beliefs of |

|audiences imitate what they |author, audience, and the worlds they know. |

|see and feel in their | |

|environment. | |

| | |

|Expressive: Writers convey a | |

|unique voice audiences accept| |

|or reject it. | |

| | |

|Rhetorical: | |

|Writers appeal to audiences; | |

|readers respond. | |

Elements of Thought Applied to Short Informational Text

As you read non-fiction texts (such as news reports and editorials, personal narratives, analytical essays, definitions, and explanations of processes) you have a responsibility to decide what the text says (your paraphrase of it), means (your analysis of it), and why it matters (its importance or application to other situations).

To test your comprehension of a text, answer the questions below as you read. An example of each is given in terms of Douglass’s Narrative in the Life of a Slave. You may consider the questions in any order. Use pages 8, 9, and 10 of your Survival Guide as an additional resource.

|Elements of Thought |Examples from Douglass |

|What problem, controversy, or question does the article address? Would someone who disagrees |Why does slavery exist? Why do slaveholders |

|strongly with the article define it as addressing a different matter? |and non-slaveholders enforce it? |

|What is the author’s purpose in raising this matter? What is your evidence from the text that |Douglass reached out to abolitionists and |

|this is the author’s purpose? What might the author’s opponents say is the purpose? |leaders to inspire them to take action against|

| |slavery. |

|What bias or perspective does the author bring to the topic? Does he or she support this |Douglass had been a slave for most of his life|

|perspective with reasons? Examples? If not, how have you inferred evidence of the author’s bias|even by the time he wrote the book after |

|from the text? |escaping. He knew that slavery was morally |

| |wrong. |

|What assumption(s) does the author appear to make about his/her audience? About the audience’s |Douglass believes that the power of his |

|attitude toward the author’s standing or credibility? |testimony from experience established his |

| |credibility with his audience. |

|What concept(s) does the author expect the reader to have at least a passing knowledge of? How |Douglass expects us to know that reading, |

|effectively does the author define or describe the concepts s/he rests the argument on? How |writing, and math are necessary skills with |

|much information does the author provide to help you recognize the central concepts in the |which people can hold on to freedom. His |

|text? |detailed narrative shows that slavery is |

| |unjust and that forced illiteracy maintains |

| |it. |

|What are the implications, consequences, and effects of the argument in the article about the |Douglass escaped and gained the skill to write|

|question or problem it raises? To what extent does the article state these, or to what extent |several books that influenced ordinary |

|do you have to infer them? |citizens and political leaders to oppose |

| |slavery. |

Text #1

9 Arrested in Chicago Sex Trafficking Investigation

By Jan Jeffcoat, FOX Chicago News

Updated: Thursday, 25 Aug 2011, 12:42 PM CDT Published: Wednesday, 24 Aug 2011, 3:33 PM CDT

Chicago - Investigators say Chicago gang members aren't just selling drugs anymore -- they're also selling young girls and teens for sex.

Now nine accused gang members are off the streets after a massive human trafficking investigation.

Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said this investigation was the first in the nation to use state wiretaps to track the offenders running the sex trade.

The 35-page affidavit into the undercover operation called "Little Girl Lost" shows the scope of the crisis in our own backyard with girls from our area as young as 12 being sold into sex slavery.

"I've worked approximately 23 years in sheriff's department, the last 12 I've done child exploitation crimes and this is the worst with what we've seen, the beatings, the manipulation, the violence involved," said Cook County Sheriff's Dept. Vice Team Commander Mike Anton.

Investigators said that Katrina Zaia, 24, helped recruit the young women and girls, at least one of whom she met on a CTA train.

"In one case, we saw where a 13 year old girl was sold from one pimp to another for $100 and what we've noticed is gang members are loosely connected to each other and sell girls to each other," Alvarez said.

The girls were drugged, threatened and beaten. Many were branded with tattoos, endured face slashings, and even forced in the trunks of cars for long periods as a form of punishment.

"In a few instances we actually have recorded instances of girls being beaten and abused, which was difficult to investigate and listen to," Anton said.

Some of the girls were forced to find customers by what the pimps called "walking the track" or finding johns on the streets but many were prostituted off ads from the Internet using websites like Craigslist or Backpage.

According to police records, Zaia reserved hotel rooms for the girls and even took them to their sex appointments, all while gang members collected thousands of dollars.

"Cases like these are not easy for investigators," said Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy. "When young girls are involved, it pulls at your heart strings. I think this represent something greater in our own society and what it's about."

Text #2

Chicago Sex Trafficking Ring: Authorities Arrest Nine Accused Of Forcing Minors Into Prostitution

Chicago Huff Post 10/30/11

First Posted: 8/25/11 02:32 PM ET  Updated: 8/25/11 03:51 PM ET

Eight men and one woman were charged with involuntary sexual servitude of a minor and human trafficking Wednesday following an 18-month undercover investigation that broke open a sex trafficking ring in Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Authorities described the “major” human sex trafficking operation run by Vice Lords and other South and West side gang members at a news conference Wednesday, according to the Sun-Times. The investigation, called “Operation Little Girl Lost,” uncovered a prostitution ring led by “vicious predators” who recruited girls as young as 12 on CTA trains and at local grocery stores.

"I've worked approximately 23 years in sheriff's department, the last 12 I've done child exploitation crimes and this is the worst with what we've seen, the beatings, the manipulation, the violence involved," said Cook County Sheriff's Dept. Vice Team Commander Mike Anton at the news conference, according to FOX Chicago News.

The investigation was the first in the nation to use state wiretaps to track the offenders running the sex trade, thanks to the new legal provision of the Illinois State Children’s Act, that permitted thousands of cell and landline calls to be recorded, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said at the conference, FOX reports. The resulting 35 page affidavit “pulls at [investigators’] heart strings,” Chicago Police superintendent Garry McCarthy said, according to FOX.

The affidavit details physical abuse including beatings, branding and tattooing, death threats and instances where victims were locked in car trunks for extended periods of time as punishment.

Investigators suspect that these arrests provide a window into a larger-scale crime ring with ties to gangs across Chicago. Seven of the eight men arrested have gang ties from the West and South Sides of Chicago: Sahura “Hollywood Allen, 26, Jaymes Hart, 25, Travis Creekmore, 31, Jerrell Creekmore, 21, Arthur Deshazor, 29, Vincent “Snake” Davis, 39 and Norman Hicks, 37, the Sun-Times reports.

“What we've noticed is gang members are loosely connected to each other and sell girls to each other," Alvarez said, according to FOX. "In one case, we saw where a 13 year old girl was sold from one pimp to another for $100.”

Also arrested in connection with the prostitution ring were Lenaris “Lil Daddy” Brown, 25, and Katrina Zaia, 24, of Evergreen Park. Investigators believe Zaia, who was romantically linked to Travis Creekmore, helped recruit young women and girls and arranged exchanges for them on websites like Craigslist or Backpage, the Sun-Times reports. Prosecutors say the girls were also forced to work the “tracks”--walking the streets in search of clients. But Alvarez asserted during the news conference that the appearance of voluntary solicitation doesn’t mean the victims were working willfully. according to the Sun-Times.

“These offenders first prey on their vulnerabilities such as poverty, homelessness or addiction and then force them into a violent and demeaning cycle of violence,” Alvarez said, according to the Sun-Times. “I hardly think that there’s an 11 or 12-year-old girl out there who is prostituting herself. Obviously she is being put on the street and sold and someone’s making money off of this.”

Travis Creekmore’s former home at 4626 S. Lake Park is believed to have been central to the prostitution ring, where neighbors reportedly saw women constantly entering and leaving the building, according to the affidavit. The building’s maintenance man told the Sun-Times that he saw women sprawled out throughout the home, and that Creekmore often made “the girls sleep on the porch,” even during cold weather. The document also reports that Creekmore’s mother, who lived in the home, charged the trafficking women with children $50 per day to watch them while they were forced to work.

The wiretaps were a key information source in the investigation, in conjunction with information from victims and tips, and included conversations discussing violence and threats directed at the victims. During a conversation with Creekmore, Hart allegedly said that any girl who reported him to the police would be “kidnapped, murdered and her body dumped in the river.” During another conversation, Hart allegedly said “You gotta beat on them hos man... Just f---- em all up and they gonna stay in love.”

Gang members involved in the ring are believed to have made thousands of dollars, working many women for up to 24 hours a day and pocketing all of their profits, FOX reports.

Since the investigation began, many of the victims have received counseling and changed their lives, assistant state’s attorney Lou Longhitano told the Sun-Times. Already he says there are “success stories,” and some teenagers freed from the crime ring have graduated high school.

Text #3

New Aid for Sex Victims

By Kristi Oloffson, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

An unmarked building in Queens will open its doors next month to a handful of women ensnared in the global sex trade, becoming New York City's first safehouse dedicated to victims of international sex trafficking.

The victims are part of the city's population of undocumented immigrants, often lured to the country with the promise of jobs and then coerced into prostitution by their smugglers.

The safehouse, which would give victims a stable place to live after they leave prostitution, comes on the heels of other local efforts this year to combat sex trafficking. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently launched an anti-trafficking task force, and Gov. David Paterson signed a law allowing sex-trafficking victims to clear convictions from their criminal records, which eases the path to employment and permanent residency.

New York is believed to be a major U.S. entry point for human smugglers, although recent statistics aren't available. A 2004 State Department report on sex trafficking estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 people are smuggled into the U.S. each year. And as far back as 1999, a Central Intelligence Agency report identified Kennedy International Airport as a gateway for human trafficking.

"[Sexual] slavery today is at a point that we have never seen," said Faith Huckel, the founder and executive director of Restore NYC, the group opening the safehouse and currently offering counseling, medical advocacy and legal assistance to sex-trafficking victims in the city.

The safehouse will host women at no cost for up to two years. The precise location of Restore NYC's safehouse, which opens Nov. 1, will be disclosed only to clients, volunteers, employees and organizations approved to work with the victims. An electronic-security system will be used to monitor the premises.

Restore NYC has four full-time employees, including two social workers who speak Korean and Mandarin, a reflection of the source countries of many women smuggled into New York City. Two additional volunteers with Mandarin- and Korean-language skills will live in the house with the women. The nonprofit organization has raised about $645,000 since 2007, according to Ms. Huckel.

The group's goal is to help its safehouse clients live independently and gain legal status in the U.S.

Since February 2009, Restore NYC says it has worked with some 100 sex-trafficking victims in the city. Its clients' current living situations are transient and unknown even to case workers, Ms. Huckel said, and women who lack a safe and affordable place to live risk falling back into prostitution. Many sex-trafficking victims stay in shelters, with friends or even in brothels, she said.

"There are very little options in general for these women," Ms. Huckel said. "When someone is escaping a brothel or coming out of that type of enslavement, they really do need a safe place to go. And then from there, you can sort of start to piece together all the things that they need. But you can't really do that necessarily if they can't feel safe."

Sex trafficking was added to New York City's penal code in 2008. Since that time the New York Police Department has recorded 32 arrests for the crime, according to Det. Cheryl Crispin. Before the charge was added, suspected traffickers were often charged with promoting prostitution, forcible kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, rape, or solicitation.

The most recent Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, released by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime last year, counts just 172 people convicted for sex trafficking in the U.S. between 2005 and 2007. Data on victims remains hard to reach because "the responsibility for identifying victims is spread among multiple agencies," according to the report.

The New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has recorded 29 arrests for sex trafficking in the state from January 2008 through September 2010. Of those, 25 of the arrests have been in New York City.

One of Restore NYC's clients is a 43-year-old woman from China. In an interview, she described being offered the chance to move to New York City for a job at a restaurant. Upon arrival, however, she said the men who smuggled her into the U.S. demanded $50,000 plus interest, and forced her into prostitution to repay the debt. Her account couldn't be independently verified.

"I had no idea that I was a victim. If I knew, then I could have found the courage to do something about it," the woman said through a translator. "I didn't know any English. I didn't know the law."

The woman said she worked as a prostitute for three years. Court records show she was arrested twice, first in July 2006 and again in November 2009?and charged both times with prostitution, a misdemeanor. After her second arrest, she was referred to Restore NYC through a judge at Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens. The nonprofit provided counseling required by the Queens district attorney's office and helped her find an immigration attorney, according to a document submitted to the court by Restore NYC.

Restore NYC said the woman is now working to obtain a visa recognizing her status as a victim of trafficking. According to Restore NYC, the visa would allow her to stay in the U.S. legally and expand her employment options.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Text #4

Testimony of Faith Huckel Before the City Council

Published by Restore, the blog of Restore NYC on June 28th, 2011

Retrieved 10/30/11

June 27, 2011
“Combating Sexual Exploitation in NYC: Examining Available Social Services”

On behalf of Restore NYC, I would like to thank the Women’s Issues Committee and the General Welfare Committee for holding this hearing. My name is Faith Huckel and I am the Co-founder and Executive Director of Restore NYC.

Restore NYC is a non-profit organization that restores freedom, safety and hope to foreign-born survivors of sex trafficking by providing long-term, holistic aftercare services. We partner with local and federal officials and other organizations to empower survivors, and facilitate the prosecution of traffickers.

Sex trafficking is rampant in NYC. Women are forced to work in brothels and massage parlors in various locations throughout the city, such as, Flushing, Jackson Heights, and Jamaica Queens, Midtown Manhattan, and Chinatown. The victims come to New York with promises of legitimate jobs that will help provide for them and their family. Upon arrival to the US, their trafficker will claim ownership of the victim and will force the women to work in prostitution using a variety of tactics of manipulation, violence, abuse of power, debt bondage, forced marriage, fraud and coercion.

Commoditized, oppressed, and abused, trafficked victims are caught up in a repeating cycle of slavery. When a brothel is raided by police, victims are processed through the court. Without support or alternatives, victims often find no other option but to return to the brothels or some other form of commercial sexual exploitation. In addition, due to the multiple issues that clients face – post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, suicidality, fear, lack of trust, immigration issues, physical injuries, homelessness and poverty, healing can take years, often decades.

Restore NYC works to end the cycle of sexual slavery by providing long-term solutions that help prevent victims from being re-trafficked and assist law enforcement in prosecuting traffickers. In the long and difficult journey to recovery, Restore provides individually tailored aftercare services that holistically address the needs of the trafficked survivor. We provide case management, counseling, ESL, job training, court advocacy, financial assistance, movement therapy, and very importantly, long-term safe housing.

93% of our clients are referred to us through Queens Criminal Court. 7% are referrals through other local courts, The Department of Homeland Security and other social services providers, such as Sanctuary for Families. In 2010, Restore NYC served over 100 clients: 73% are undocumented and ages range from 18-43 years of age with an average age of 34. Our clients were trafficked from abroad, specifically Korea, China, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, and Mexico. They all came from low socio-economic backgrounds, with a majority having an education level of high school or lower.

In October 2010, Restore opened the first long-term safe house in the Northeast dedicated to foreign born sex trafficking victims. The safe house is more than a place for survivors to rest their heads for the night. We have weekly programs and volunteers coming to the house consistently to help the women improve their English skills, equip them to find jobs and be self-sufficient, arts and crafts, and mentoring support. It is a place where meals are cooked and shared, where television shows are laughed over together, where tears are shed and encouragement is given. It is a place of peace, love, and rest, of community and safety. It is truly a home.

In less than 6 months of opening the safe house, it was completely full. Safe housing remains the number one need for survivors of sex trafficking in New York City.

In the coming year, the needs for both our residential and non-residential programs are forecasted to continually increase. To meet this critical and growing need, we are expanding our programs and plan to add additional staff and another safe house in 2012.

Again, thank you to the Committees for hosting today’s hearing, and I would like to urge City Council to recognize the need for long-term and holistic services for survivors of sex trafficking in our city, particularly safe housing, and to assist in providing the necessary resources and support to this greatly underserved population. Thank you.

Text #5

The New York Times

November 27, 2010

A Woman. A Prostitute. A Slave.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who says she spent three years terrorized by pimps in a brothel in Midtown Manhattan.

Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary — and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story. The men buying her services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition, she says.

Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After university, she became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned to go abroad.

So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and take up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.

Yumi set off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New York, however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.

“When they first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told me. “I was thinking, ‘how can this happen to someone like me who is college-educated?’ ” Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”

She says that the four men who ran the smuggling operation — all Chinese or South Koreans — took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan. They beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.

If she continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the video would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives would be told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their homes as well.

Yumi caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the money.

Yumi played her role robotically. On one occasion, Yumi was arrested for prostitution, and she says the police asked her if she had been trafficked.

“I said no,” she recalled. “I was really afraid that if I hinted that I was a victim, the gang would send the video to my family.”

Then one day Yumi’s closest friend in the brothel was handcuffed by a customer, abused and strangled almost to death. Yumi rescued her and took her to the hospital. She said that in her rage, she then confronted the pimps and threatened to go public.

At that point, the gang hurriedly moved offices and changed phone numbers. The pimps never mailed the video or claimed the homes in China; those may have been bluffs all along. As for Yumi and her friend, they found help with Restore NYC, a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims in the city.

I can’t be sure of elements of Yumi’s story, but it mostly rings true to me and to the social workers who have worked with her. There’s no doubt that while some women come to the United States voluntarily to seek their fortunes in the sex trade, many others are coerced — and still others start out forced but eventually continue voluntarily. And it’s not just foreign women. The worst cases of forced prostitution, especially of children, often involve home-grown teenage runaways.

No one has a clear idea of the scale of the problem, and estimates vary hugely. Some think the problem is getting worse; others believe that Internet services reduce the role of pimps and lead to commercial sex that is more consensual. What is clear is that forced prostitution should be a national scandal. Just this month, authorities indicted 29 people, mostly people of Somali origin from the Minneapolis area, on charges of running a human trafficking ring that allegedly sold many girls into prostitution — one at the age of 12.

There are no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and prosecutors to focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on pimps. Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while pimping is a far harder crime to prosecute. That’s one reason thugs become pimps: It’s hugely profitable and carries less risk than selling drugs or stealing cars. But that can change as state and federal authorities target traffickers rather than their victims.

Nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the remnants of slavery in this country.

Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company

Retrieved 10/30/2011

Text #6

Freedom's just another word

Contemporary slavery in Mauritania

Last Updated February 29, 2008

By David Gutnick, The Sunday Edition

The night of Aug. 8, 2007, seemed like a night for celebration in Mauritania, a vast desert country on Africa's northwest coast.

Radio, television and newspapers all proclaimed the end of slavery. Slave-owning was criminalized, and overnight, half a million people — a fifth of the country's population — were officially freed from bondage.

But there was a problem. Those half-million newly free people didn't own radios. They didn't own televisions. They can't read either. And the news — if they heard it — meant little anyway.

In Mauritania, despite good intentions and high-minded words, slavery is still thriving, as it has for 800 years. It is just taking new forms.

Dark-skinned men, women and children known as Haratine carry out orders under the threat of being beaten. They work as labourers and shepherds, as servants and cooks, as nursemaids and security guards. They are penniless and uneducated. Their masters are pale-skinned, Arab-speaking Moors.

The relationship is ancient, confusing and deeply entrenched, and it defines much of what goes on in this iron-rich, sandy country. Even the most modern and sophisticated of Mauritanians is caught in the tangled web.

My guide and interpreter, Mohamed-Sidi-Ali-François, is a computer teacher at an elite, American, private school in the capital city of Nouakchott. He is a tall, thin Moor in his mid-40s who studied at universities in Scotland and the United States. He's full of energy on the morning in late November 2007 when we meet.

A visit to a Haratine slum

As we drive through the sandy streets of Nouakchott, Mohamed points out the Tiviski dairy, which bottles milk collected from nomadic camel herders. We pass by the high walls surrounding the central military barracks; generals ruled Mauritania until last year. Our destination is Sebra, one of Nouakchott's poorest neighbourhoods.

Excited crowds of children meet us. Mohamed scans the golden sand, frowns and points to my shoes.

"Be careful as you walk," he says, "because people here don't have toilets, so they usually go to the bathroom in the street. So, you have to watch your steps every time."

Mohamed is leading me through a labyrinth of shoulder-wide alleyways. The rows of one-room shacks are built from wood scraps and corrugated metal and arranged so that they block out the desert winds.

Mohamed's ankle-length shirt, called a bou-bou, billows out like a sheet, a brilliant patch of blue against the sand-scarred walls.

Mohamed drives his SUV by Sebra often — it is near the airport — but he rarely visits. In Mauritania, everyone knows his or her place.

From the time they are born, Mauritanians learn to whom they can talk and to whom they can't, whom they can marry and who's off limits.

The donkey-cart drivers, the street sweepers, the construction labourers are dark-skinned Haratine.

The bank managers, the lawyers and the private-school teachers, like Mohamed, are Moors, and their skin is close to white.

The social codes in Mauritania aren't subtle. You read them instantly in Mohamed's proud posture and the dutiful way the Haratine here in Sebra avert their eyes and step out of his path unless he gestures that it's OK.

A reality check

To Mohamed's face, the Sebra residents won't readily admit they used to be slaves. They are still afraid their former masters will come looking for them.

A man named Hussein tries to set the record straight.

"If you go outside in the countryside, you will see that slaves and freed slaves are doing all the work in the fields," he says, "and the land doesn't belong to them. It belongs to the master."

"They keep saying we are not their slaves, but it is the masters who are making them work and who decide how much to pay them. [The Haratine] still believe because the government says, you are not slaves, but in practice they are still slaves," says Hussein.

Last August when the Mauritanian National Assembly voted to criminalize slavery, masters were ordered to free their Haratine slaves or face 10 years in jail.

Anti-slavery organizations called it a giant step forward, and on paper it was.

But the free Haratine are landless, own nothing and almost all are illiterate. The law cannot change the colour of their skin.

So far, the end of slavery has been a mixed blessing, Hussein tells me. Freed slaves who were fed by their masters are now going hungry.

"Some of them who are freed now really like to stay with the master because now the relationship is so good they just don't want to say anything," he says. "White people, now, they say they are related to you, but they treat us as slaves. So, why do Haratine keep denying the fact?"

Mauritania is an Islamic republic governed by Shariah law. Imams preached for centuries that the Prophet Mohamed justified the comfort of the Moors and the suffering of the Haratine.

Hussein is among the lucky ones; he managed to become a teacher. He knows that it takes more than a law to break the shackles of slavery.

"There is a contradiction here," he says. "The religion of the country allows it whereas the government is trying to put an end to it. So should we follow the religion, or what the government says?"

A visit to a Muslim scholar

Ever since we left the slums of Sebra, Mohamed's been telling me about Mohameden Ould Tah. He's a religious star in Mauritania, a regular guest on state television and radio. Street vendors hawk piles of his books and cassettes. I tell him I would like to meet with him. Mohamed makes a phone call and tells me he can't believe we got an appointment. He says imams line up to get into his white-walled mansion.

We are met at the door by a Haratine and led through a flower-filled courtyard, through another set of doors and down a long, tiled hallway.

Mohameden Ould Tah is waiting in his palatial book-lined study. He's got a head of thick white hair, delicate pale skin and a gracious smile. He looks gentle, though Mohamed has warned me of his reputation as a fierce and tenacious debater.

A Haratine servant hands us small cups of sweet green tea. Mohameden Ould Tah waves him off with the flick of his wrist, and says he finds my interest in slavery puzzling.

"Nothing in Islam encourages slavery," he says. "If Muslims had applied the verses of the Qur'an that said that, there wouldn't have been any problem"

I say I cannot believe that because the Haratine I have seen in his own home open the doors, clean the floors and make the tea, so if there are no more slaves in Mauritania, who are these people taking care of him?

He says that I do not understand: he used to have slaves, but now they are free to come and go. They are, he says, just like his own children and even his own mother, "because when I was young, my mother didn't have enough milk so slaves gave me their milk."

"When some countries are not happy with Mauritania, they try to find something wrong," he says.

"There is no more problem with slavery. We should not be talking about this subject at all, because it's gone, finished," he says.

I ask whether it is true what the Haratine in Sebra told me — that their imams preached that God made their ancestors slaves and that they shouldn't desire freedom.

Mohameden Ould Tah raises his hand to stop my question; he's clearly exasperated.

"The prophet Mohammed said never say 'slave,' say 'my son' or 'my daughter.' Islam shut the doors of slavery and opened other doors to free slaves. If you commit a sin and you free one slave, half of your sins are forgiven. There is a deed called Zakahat, [meaning] if you are rich, you will take part of your wealth to give to the poor people."

A visit to the countryside

Mohamed and I have a day-long drive across the Sahara ahead of us. I want to meet with Haratine in the market city of Atar in the north of the country. We're listening to Mohamed's favorite singer, Malouma, a light-skinned Moor who champions the rights of the Haratine and the rights of women.

When we spoke with our eyes, it was heavenly

All smiles and reverent beginnings

We tried love, and it failed

Yet whatever we do, love catches up with us

A few years ago, Malouma's music was banned; now, she's an elected senator. But her struggle against injustice still has a long way to go because hundreds of thousands of Haratine live in communities scattered across the vast Sahara dessert that's flying by our window.

We arrive just after sundown. The air is already cool. Our SUV crawls through the dark, narrow streets on the edge of town and pulls up beside a clay wall.

Mohamed says this is the first time he's been in this neighbourhood. Here, the homes are made of pressed sand that's covered with clay. When it rains, Mohamed says, the clay washes off, and residents worry about their homes falling apart.

The only light is the full moon.

Mistrust and skepticism

We stumble through a door into a courtyard. I hear a dozen voices, but I can't make out any faces until my eyes adjust to the candlelight.

Mohamed's arranged for a representative of S.O.S. Slavery to be present, along with men and women who have recently been freed from their masters.

A young man takes me by the arm and leads me over to a group of women and children.

On old woman named Mohammeda — this is the only name she goes by — is sitting on a carpet. She smiles and takes my hand. Her eyes are clouded over. She's almost blind.

From the time she was a little girl, Mohammeda rose before sunrise to work. She lit the fire, milked the camels and prepared food. She spent her days carrying water, gathering firewood and caring for the master's children. Her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother served the same family.

When Mohammeda's eyes and knees began to fail, the master expelled her from the only home she had ever known. He said he was following the law, setting her free.

Mohammeda left on foot with nothing but the clothes on her back: a yellow and pink cloak called a malaffa that protects her from the heat and sting of sandstorms.

"My children are still enslaved," she says, "and the master regularly beats my daughter. She is not given enough clothes."

Mohammeda said she knows about the new law that criminalized slavery, but she doesn't trust the government to help free her daughter. She begins to laugh when I ask whether slavery can ever end. No, she says. She wants to know whether I can help free her daughter.

A visit to Mohamed's home

It's my last day in Mauritania, and Mohamed and I are back in Nouakchott.

We're driving around in his SUV, music blasting through the open windows and across the dunes, two guys on a hot afternoon with time to kill.

Mohamed is excited about the foreign oil and mining money now flooding into Mauritania. Much of it is Canadian. Mohamed says he used to dream about moving to the United States because Mauritania was caught in a time warp. But he's changed his mind, he says, because the country is catching up with the rest of the world.

He wants to show me the new home he's building in an upscale neighbourhood near the beach.

Mohamed and I have only been together for a couple of days, but I feel I'm getting to know him. I've pegged him as a progressive guy, a member of the educated elite who will help end the caste system that goes back to the dark ages. I'm looking forward to finally getting a peek into his day-to-day life.

Mohamed points to a two-story high cement walled house. There's a balcony and two-car garage. So far, he's spent $60,000 on it. There are two bathrooms, imported tiles and a computer room.

Just metres away, a tent covered with old bags and bits of plastic leans into the wind. A dozen children run in and out. A handicapped boy sits on the sand next to a goat and a pile of garbage. Inside the tent, a woman nurses a five-day-old baby. There are a few cooking pots, some plastic water containers and a pile of clothes. A pot of tea steams away on an open fire.

Mohamed tells me that these are his guards. They are Haratine. He pays them 15,000 ouguiya — $50 — a month. For that, Mohammed gets round-the-clock service. The father, a man in his 40s named Jeva, makes sure no one steals construction materials.

When I ask whether the family are his slaves, Mohamed says no. Because he pays them, they are simple employees. Slavery is over, he says. They will be free to go when his house is finished and he no longer needs them.

"You never told me about these people," I tell him.

"This is a surprise for you," he says. "I just want to show you that sometimes those that work for you are not really slaves. We pay them a little salary, but that is all we can afford."

Mohamed makes $3,000 a month teaching at the American school. That's 30 times the average salary in Mauritania.

"You know," he says, "life is unfair."

, Retrieved October 31, 2011

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Text #7

Excerpt from Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name. New York: Random House. 2008.

Across the South, despite claimed reforms in many states, more prisoners than ever before were pressed into compelled labor for private contractors—but now almost entirely through local customs and informal arrangements in city and county courts. The state of Alabama was no longer selling slaves to coal mines, but thousands of men continued to work on a chain gang or under lease to a local owner. The total number of men arrested on misdemeanor charges and subject to sale by county sheriffs in 1927 grew to 37,701. One out of every nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama was captured in some form of involuntary servitude.

The triviality of the charges used to justify the massive numbers of people forced into labor never diminished. More than 12,500 people were arrested in Alabama in 1928 for possessing or selling alcohol; 2,735 were charged with vagrancy; 2,014 with gaming; 458 for leaving the farm of an employer without permission; 154 with the age-old vehicle for stopping intimate relations between blacks and whites: adultery.7

Roughly half of all African Americans—or 4.8 million—lived in the Black Belt region of the South in 1930, the great majority of whom were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor like that described in [John] Spivak’s chilling account [a Connecticut journalist’s 1932 fictionalized account of his investigation of 20th century slavery].

Two Mississippi sheriffs reported making between $20,000 and $30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring black laborers and selling them to local planters. After a plea for more cotton pickers in August 1932, police in Macon, Georgia, scoured the town’s streets, arresting sicty black men on “vagrancy” charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a similar roundup in the cotton town of Helena, Arkansas.8

Otto B. Willis, a forty-six-year-old white farmer living near Evergreen, Alabam, deep in the Black Belt, wrote the Department of Justice in 1933, describing the desperate system under which black families were held as de facto serfs on the land of the county’s white landowners. Why Willis—an Alabama-born farmer with a wife and six children, living on land they owned—would be moved to defend the plight of the tens of thousands of black laborers who shared rural Hale Country with him is a mystery. But in an elegant longhand, he described point by damning point how black men and their wives and children were compelled to remain at work for years upon years to retire so-called debts for their seed, tools, food, clothing, and mules that could never be extinguished, regardless of how much cotton they grew in any year. Little had changed since Klansmen in Hale County shipped R. H. Skinner to the Alabama slave mines in 1876.

“The negro is worse than broke . . . .His family goes ragged and without medical attention and the women are attended by ignorant colored midwives at childbirth and many die from blood poison,” Willis wrote. “The negro is half starved and half clothed, yet he sees no hope of ever being out of debt, cause many landowners tell them if they move off his land he will have them put in jail or threatened bodily harm. Colored people have little standing in court here. So he is afraid to move. So they are forced to remain on start another crop for the landlord . . . . These are the facts . . . . Is that right?”9

Whatever motivation Willis had in penning his detailed litany of the mechanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal official weary of the issue had little interest. Writing on behalf of the attorney general, Joseph B. Keenan replied with the timeworn explanation for why slavery was not a matter of meriting the attention of the Department of Justice—that only narrowly defined debt slavery would be examined by federal agents.

“Peonage is a condition of compulsory service based upon the indebtedness of the peon to the master; the basal fact being indebtedness,” Keenan wrote, in bored, boilerplate language. Ignoring that Willis’s letter explicitly described a system of holding laborers against their will until claimed debts were paid off, the Justice Department official dismissed Willis with a patronizing bureaucratic directive. “If you have any specific facts showing that the matter falls within the above definition, it is suggested that you report the same.” The case was closed. 10

By the middle of the decade before World War II, federal investigations into peonage all but stopped except in the most egregious cases. Even those resulted in the rarest convictions. Even more rare was meaningful punishment. On October 13, 1941, Charles E. Bledsoe pleaded guilty in federal court in Mobile, Alabama, to a charge of peonage for holding a black man named Martin Thompson against his will. Bledsoe didn’t resist the charge and trusted that federal official and the U.S. District Court judge would not deal harshly with a white man holding slaves. He was correct. Bledsoe’s punishment was a fine of $100 and six months of probation. The status of new black slavery appeared complete. The futility of combating it was clear.

7 Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending September 30, 1928 (Birmingham: Birmingham Printing, 1928), in an author’s collection.

8 Walter Wilson, Forced Labor in the United States (New York International Publishers, 1933, pp. 92-94.

9 O.B. Willis to Department of Justice, November 20, 1933; Joseph B. Keenan to O. B. Willis, December 8, 1933, 50-1-0, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

10 Ibid.

Text #8

Douglas A. Blackmon, continued

Less than two months after the slap on the wrist of Charles Bledsoe, the naval forces of imperial Japan launched their attack on Pearl Harbor. Caught flat-footed and unprepared for war, U. S. officials frantically planned for a massive national mobilization. President Franklin D. Roosevelt instinctively knew the second-class citizenship and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited by the enemies of the United States. Attorney General Francis Biddle called together his top assistants and shared the president’s concern. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to cede virtually all allegations of slavery to local jurisdiction—effectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Biddle—favorite son of an elite Northern family in Philadelphia—was shocked. He could not comprehend that forced labor continued in America on more than “a few plantations.”11

Nonetheless, Biddle knew that an all-out war, in which millions of African Americans would be called upon to sacrifice in struggle to protect freedom and liberty in Europe and Asia, the U.S. government had to make clear that anyone who continued to practice slavery, in violation of 186’s Thirteen amendment, would be prosecuted as a criminal.

Five days after the Japanese attack, on December 12, 1941, Biddle issued a directive—Circular No. 3591—to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the long history of the unwritten federal law enforcement policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude. “A survey of the Department files on alleged peonage violations discloses numerous instances of ‘prosecution declined,’ ” he wrote. “ It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the attention of the United States Attorneys to the possibilities of successful prosecutions stemming from alleged peonage complaints which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke federal prosecution.” Biddle proceeded to lay out a series of federal criminal statutes that could be used to prosecute slavery—all of which had long been available to federal officials.

He ordered that instead of relying on the quirks of the old anti-peonage statute as an excuse for not attacking instances of forced labor, prosecutors and investigators should embrace “building the cases around the issue of involuntary servitude and slavery.”12

Biddle descended from extensive antebellum Virginia slaveholders in his mother’s family and from the most pedigreed line of lawyers in the country on his father’s. His great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Biddle, had served as president of the Bank of the United States under President James Monroe. Like virtually every white American who considered themselves racially moderate in 1941, Biddle was more than a petty racist as well. In his memoirs, Biddle chucked at the speech of a “colored boy” testifying in a trial early in his legal career. His “vocabulary, from a generous estimate, could not have contained more than a few hundred words.” He described black babies born in a clinic for unwed mothers as “exhibiting, like Indians, the glowing beauty of primitive children.” His “colored man, Benjamin . . . polished brass with the ardor with which his race always approaches brass, and with a grave friendly dignity helped our guests with their coats and hats after a dinner party.”13

Yet Biddle—especially when faced with the harsh but truthful depiction of black life as it would be suddenly projected throughout propaganda of Japan and Germany—fundamentally grasped that African Americans, no matter how condescendingly he viewed them, had been denied the compact of freedom forged in the Civil War. “One response of this country to the challenge of the ideals of democracy made by the new ideologies of Fascism and Communism has been a deepened realization of the values of a government based on a belief in the dignity and rights of man, “Biddle said in one major wartime speech.14 He mounted the first modest legal attack on the southern states’ successful expulsion of blacks from political participation. Unlike any prior U.S. attorney general, he recognized the federal government’s duty to admit that African Americans were not free and to assertively enforce the statutes written to protect them. “We determined to breathe new life” into the dormant civil rights law, Biddle later wrote.”15

The Justice Department’s recently formed Civil Rights Section, created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized labor cases, began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse.

Less than a week into the ravages of World War II, Biddle explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas Jones in the 1903 trials that had unwittingly facilitated so much slavery across the South in the intervening half century.

“In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave—the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. Men will sometimes sell themselves for a meal of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his bond to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail. Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates the statutes,” argued Biddle in his memo. Henceforth, he ordered all Department of Justice investigators to entirely drop references to peonage in their written reports. They were to instead label every file as related to what it truly was—what it had been for the past seven decades “Involuntary Servitude and Slavery.”16

11 Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 155.

12 Francis Biddle to all United State Attorneys, Dec. 12, 1941, “Circular No. 3591, Re: Involuntary Servitude, Slavery, and Peonage,” File 50-821, RG60, NA.

13 Francis Biddle, A Casual Past: The Remembrances of a Former Attorney general of the United States (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 339, 374, 376-77.

14 Biddle, “Civil Rights and the Federal Law,” Speech at Cornell University (Oct. 4, 1944) (on file with the Duke Law Journal), cited in Risa L. Goluboff, “The Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights,” Duke Law Journal 50, no.6 (2001): 1609.

15 Biddle, Brief Authority, pp. 154-60.

16 Biddle to All U.S. Attorneys.

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