Sam Cotton Body Slams Louis Farrakhan (March 13, 1996)

On the morning of March 13, 1996, Howard University held a forum organized by Barbara Ledeen of the Independent Women’s Forum on the ongoing enslavement of black Africans in Mauritania and Sudan. The panel, staged at the university’s Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center, was moderated by Prof. Julius E. Coles, formerly of the Bunche Center. In an immediate and disheartening act, Coles opened the panel by stating that, “On this subject [of slavery], there are many different views. Howard University does not take a position on any view that is expressed here today,” demonstrating that the “Black Harvard” was refusing to take a firm stand on the central issue of the black experience. The panel included:

• Dr. Charles Jacobs, then the research director of the American Anti-Slavery Group.

• Mohamed Nacir Athié, a black Mauritanian Fulani and former government official who had sought political asylum in the United States after receiving threatening phone calls in revenge for speaking out against the enslavement of his fellow blacks in his country.

• The late journalist Sam Cotton (1947 – 2003), who had returned from a clandestine human rights investigation in Mauritania not two months earlier, where he brought back hours of audio and video interviews with former, runaway, and even current slaves.

• Dr. Augustine Abulu Lado, formerly the chair of Pax Sudani, a black Southern Sudanese Christian, and expert on the enslavement of blacks by Arab Muslims during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 – 2005).

• Dr. Kevin H. Vigilante, a doctor and former professor of medicine at Brown University in Rhode Island who had undertaken his own undercover human rights investigation into slavery in the Sudan 13 months earlier.

• Sheikh Anwar McKeen, a black Sudanese Muslim and the direct descendant of the last Nubian king before Sudan was a solely Arab dominion.

Here, Cotton responds to a sympathetic black undergrad who wanted advice on how to counter the arguments of powerful black deniers like Louis Farrakhan (whose influence in the community had likely scared Howard into not endorsing any “view” of the issue). Cotton’s answer is simple: the truth.

To learn more, please visit https://www.iabolish.org.

See the entire video of the panel:    • Howard University Forum on Slavery in...  .