15 February 2003

Francis Bok: Escaped Sudanese Slave

Last week Thursday, Peace Through Knowledge, my student organization brought in Francis Bok, an escaped Sudanese Slave. It was amazing.

I've been working on and off more than 3 weeks on bringing him into Wayne State. I had other student groups on this also, which was also great. Association of Black Business students, Political Science Department, Hillel of Metro Detroit, and the Grosberg Religious Center. I'm so thrilled that it worked out in the end.

We had something like 80-100 people attend. It was a mixed crowd, black and white. It was a real opportunity to work together. Hopefully this was only the first time that we'll work with the Assoc. of Black Business Students. They were great.

The Muslims were upset and accused Hillel of being racist and using the ABBS to cover themselves. Whatever. It was my group that brought Bok in and had asked Hillel to sign their name on. They're welcome to get upset if they want. They were'nt happy that we said on the flier that it was Arabs who enslaved Bok. Besides the fact that I made the flier straight off his bio on his website, it's too bad they can't deal with reality. It was Muslims who enslaved him.

All in all, the point wasn't to point the finger at them, the point was that I thought this was a great opportunity to pull many different groups together behind something we could all stand behind as far as a humanitarian position - being against slavery. I thought everything went amazingly well.

The website to check out is: www.iabolish.com


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