Black History and Dr. Samuel Cotton

In respect to Black History Month, this column is a reprise and an update of the letter to the editor of The Mooresville Tribune which began this series of columns back in 2004. It was to have been an update on the work of CASMAS, the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, begun by Dr. Cotton.

Unhappily, I could find no online indication that CASMAS still exists. Calls to Columbia University, where Dr. Cotton’s colleagues created a fund to continue has work, yielded no trace of remembrance.

So let this reprint of the 2004 letter serve as a memorial to Dr. Cotton’s physical heroism and the compassion that impelled him to risk his life in order that contemporary African slaves might become free.

The account of his undercover investigations in Africa, and the subsequent strange reception of his findings back in the United States, appears in his book, Silent Terror, copies of which can still be purchased from several sources online.

Here is the text of my 2004 letter to The Tribune honoring Dr. Samuel Cotton:

“It is altogether fitting and proper that now, during Black History Month, a small town Southern Republican Euro-American should honor the memory of a New York African-American lecturer on social studies at Columbia University.

Dr. Samuel Cotton died of a brain tumor last December [2003]. The world may little note nor long remember what he said there ... and it’s a shame.

Dr. Cotton was an abolitionist in the best tradition of William Wilberforce and Frederick Douglass. That his passing made so few and fleeting ripples in the rushing stream of public awareness is a sad commentary on the depth of our awareness of human bondage as it exists today--especially in Africa, where Cotton focused his energy and repeatedly risked his life that others might someday be free.

Sam Cotton devoted his later life to calling the world’s attention to the hideous fate of the thousands of chattel slaves in Mauritania and Sudan. His research “on the ground” in those dangerous places often put his life in danger as he conducted clandestine interviews with slaves, documenting their living conditions and personal histories. He wanted that ugly reality to become very real to us here ... where being voting off an island is deemed “reality” and a misfortune worth the attention of millions.

Dr. Cotton brought his findings back to black leaders in America and asked their support in bringing pressure to bear on the African governments which covertly condone chattel slavery. He was all but ignored by both African American leaders and ordinary citizens when he took his message on a speaking tour.

Surf the Web and you’ll find few references to his life or death. He established Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania And Sudan (CASMAS). His admirers at Columbia and elsewhere established a memorial fund to continue his dream of freeing others. Dr. Cotton focused his efforts on but two of the worst oppressors, Sudan and Mauritania. If he had entirely succeeded within his lifetime, he would have knocked only a chip from the monolith of modern slavery.

Writing in The Scientific American in April 2002, Pulitzer Prize nominee Kevin Bales estimated that there were “... perhaps 27 million (slaves) around the world.” That’s about 2.4 times as many slaves as the total (11.3 million) shipped from Africa to the New World in all the 400-plus years from Columbus until abolition came to both Americas.

Per British historian and slavery scholar Sir Hugh Thomas, about half a million or 4.5 percent of those 11.3 million slaves came to British America – the colonies, later the United States and Canada.

The recent [in 2004] brouhaha over “the Confederate flag” [at the South Carolina State House building] and the persistent agitation for “reparations” appear--when viewed against the backdrop of Samuel Cotton’s life and enormous number of slaves remaining in Africa today --as astonishingly trivial pursuits.” (end of letter)

In 2011, the new nation of South Sudan was carved out of Sudan after years of news rape and genocidal attacks on the ethnicities which, presumably, served as the feedstock for the Sudanese slave trade in Cotton’s day. Where the terror that Cotton risked all to report was silent, the decimation of villages by curiously named “technicals” was anything but that. Ruthless raiders in pick-up trucks fitted with heavy weapons marauding settlements were unflinchingly documented for months on the world’s evening news.

If Dr. Cotton had lived he might have piqued our consciences by pointing to the technicals’ atrocities as a predictable consequence of slavery left unchallenged.

Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to keep silent!" Dr. Cotton’s voice shattered the evil silence that masks contemporary slavery.

Mooresville’s Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for AT&T. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com.