30 Years Ago: A Black-Jewish Alliance Took on Our Enemies and Won
A black-Jewish triumph three decades on
Three decades ago, a civil war erupted in Harlem when reports describing an ongoing Islamic trade in black slaves in Mauritania and Sudan broke into the black media.
Black, white, and Jewish Americans, as well as African refugees, led by the American Anti-Slavery Group, all banded together to expose this modern-day evil to public scrutiny.
Perhaps the movement’s brightest star, however, was the late journalist Sam Cotton (1947 – 2003), an unsung American hero, whose courage and passion brought this inconvenient truth to the black community.
His shocking articles in New York’s black press brought Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam out into the streets to oppose the cause of freeing black slaves from Muslims. This eventually exposed them to many as betrayers, not leaders, of black people.
Exactly 30 years ago, on May 26, 1995, Farrakhan’s main spokesman, Abdul Akbar Muhammad, went on the PBS show Tony Brown’s Journal to debate Sam and Sheikh Anwar McKeen, a black Sudanese Muslim who wanted to tell black Americans what the Arabs were doing to his people.
Muhammad used his time to warn that the information about slavery in Sudan was part of a “Jewish conspiracy,” and later blamed the ADL — of all organizations! — for helping to orchestrate this libel against “the religion of Islam” and the NOI’s friends in Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood government. “Special interest group[s],” “Jewish organizations,” and “especially the Zionists,” Akbar ranted, were “financing” this attack on the Sudan, the Nation of Islam, and the “movement of Islam in the world.”
Unsurprisingly, Sam’s well-reasoned arguments trounced Muhammad’s demented, conspiratorial ramblings. “I am discussing slavery in Mauritania and in Sudan,” Sam said. “Now, for you to drop the discussion to the level of Jewish and black relationships… that’s not the discussion at this particular point.”
When the cameras stopped, all a humiliated Akbar could do was whine that Tony Brown “set me up” and that he was not given “equal time” to spew the NOI’s version of the facts. He even tried (incompetently) to blackmail Sam and his editor, Andy Cooper, into no longer covering the slavery issue. Eventually, Tony Brown agreed to a solo interview, during which Akbar soundly demonstrated that the NOI had lost the argument.
This televised debate marked the beginning of our coalition’s victory in the battle for black public opinion, and the Nation of Islam’s inevitable fall. By going to war against concerned citizens of multiple colors and religions wanting only to end Arab slavery in Africa, Farrakhan revealed that he cared only about his financial connections to the Muslim world and not black slaves.
In the years after this extraordinary confrontation, our coalition would:
• Testify before Congress three times (in 1996, 1999, and 2000).
• Publish articles in The Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal.
• Be featured on national TV shows ranging from Dateline NBC to BET Talk.
• Raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy back Sudanese slaves’ freedom.
• Help push through the Sudan Peace Act of 2002, forcing the Sudanese government to begin negotiating a peace with the black, mostly Christian south and stop the slave raids.
• Promote the black south’s secession from the north, creating the nation of South Sudan in 2011.
A generation later, we have formed the African Jewish Alliance as the post-October 7 world’s resurrection of the American Anti-Slavery Group — bringing Jews, black Americans, Africans, and all concerned peoples together to confront jihadism and slavery.
In short, so much is owed to Sam Cotton, who secretly went to Mauritania seven months after the Tony Brown showdown to document how Arabs held black slaves. His resulting 1998 book, Silent Terror, is an underground classic and heart-wrenching masterpiece.
His untimely death at 56 on December 20, 2003, after a long battle with brain cancer robbed the modern-day abolitionist movement of its most charismatic leader. His gallant willingness to go into the darkest places to shine the light of truth remains as an example for noble souls everywhere.
