STATE DEPARTMENT REMARKS ON MODERN SLAVERY

FROM:  U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Freedom Here & Now: Ending Modern Slavery
Remarks Luis Cde Baca
Ambassador-at-Large, Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in PersonsMinneapolis, MN
May 8, 2012
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you, Marilyn, for that generous introduction. I spend a lot of time working to bring more and more businesses into the anti-trafficking movement. And when I talk about what corporations can do to get involved, I invariably point to Marilyn not just as a leader, but essentially as the pioneer of private-sector involvement in this struggle. So thank you, Marilyn, for bringing this conference together and for all you do for this issue.

You can’t spend time with such a business leader as Marilyn Carlson-Nelson without thinking about amazing women. Amazing women like our co-sponsor Lee Roper-Batker and the folks at the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, who are launching the “Minnesota Girls Are Not for Sale” campaign. Amazing women like the one who has been so important for me and for our host, Humphrey School Dean Eric Schwartz, who with me shared the honor of working for Secretary Clinton until recently. Just think of it: seventeen years later, our fight against modern slavery continues to be propelled by the core truth (so obvious really that it speaks volumes that it had to be said) that that amazing woman stated from a podium in Beijing – that women’s rights and human rights are indistinguishable and inseparable.

Amazing women. Like my mother, Mary de Baca, who in the 1960s did some of the first studies in Latin America of rural women’s lives and was able to join us here today. Or my sister, Suzanna de Baca, who is now here in the Twin Cities with Ameriprise -- I hope that the Women’s Foundation and others can get her looped in so she can be as active as she was in Iowa.

Amazing women. And the men who support them. Like my brother-in-law who is also here today -- Ronnie Weatherman, who works in a shelter for women who have escaped abuse with their children. Like Dean Schwartz and his leadership on humanitarian issues. I think about what these amazing men and women can teach us, and I have to think about a woman who so many of us prayed for, who inspired so many of us, especially here in Minnesota with such a large Southeast Asian refugee population.

When I sat at the table two months ago with Aun Sun Suu Kyi in the house that she was held prisoner for so many years, I was impressed not just because of her formidable knowledge of and leadership in the fight against the traffickers, but left in awe of her compassion. She told me of her warden – the man from the secret police who was responsible for her in her captivity. He would print out articles on human trafficking from the internet and bring them to her house. They would talk about how they would work together against the traffickers once change came to Burma.

Democracy and the fight against modern slavery, intertwined. Women’s rights and human rights, inseparable. When she saw me, she asked that we work with her jailer – now a General and high up in the government. Her ability to love rather than hate, to be compassionate but not weak, should be a wake-up call for all of us.
But it isn’t just amazing women of today who inspire us and show us that this fight against trafficking is part of a broader human rights agenda. In preparing for this conference, I’ve also been thinking about Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Many have forgotten that the Seneca Falls Convention came about because those amazing women travelled to London – with their husbands, their partners in the abolitionist struggle – for the International Anti-Slavery Congress, and were turned away at the door. The women had to sit outside. We’ve come such along way in this fight.

But it is about interconnectedness. From their work – and their exclusion – in the anti-slavery movement, these amazing women pulled together the conference that is seen as the cradle of the American women’s movement. Their commitment to abolition was paid back – it was Frederick Douglass who stood up on the second day at Seneca Falls (the day the men were allowed into the room) and said, in effect, “if you are fighting so hard so that I can vote, why aren’t we including women’s sufferage in this list of principles?”
Women’s rights. Abolition. Civil Rights. Voting Rights. Inseparable at the beginning, inseparable now.

Conferences like this one tell us something about how far we’ve come since the days that women were relegated to the lobby. And every time I speak at a gathering like this one, I get more and more optimistic. Because, a dozen years ago, the only conferences about this issue were held in classrooms, not concert halls. And the attendees were typically people whose only focus was the work. The few advocates and activists and members of civil society who were engaged already, representing victims or advocating for change as a lone voice in the wilderness.

In those early years of the modern movement, much of what was published about human trafficking was mainly descriptive. We needed to move from a rigor-free zone to applied research, the kind that lets us know what practices are working best to find this crime, investigate cases, prosecute traffickers, and protect victims.

Marilyn Carlson-Nelson tells the story of protesting that a grade was not as high as she thought it should be, telling her professor how much the audience had loved her presentation. “Yes Marilyn,” he said, “but your facts must equal your passion.”
Just as with Marilyn Carlson the student, in this modern abolitionist movement (in which Marilyn Carlson-Nelson as a business leader has played such a role), we must make sure that we have both facts and passion on our side.

We have seen a shift from a small, internal conversation to such interest that gatherings once held in a conference room are now held in bigger venues, such as Attorney General Holder’s recent speech at the Clinton Library in Little Rock, or here today. And now, it’s more often the case now that I’m speaking to groups of lawyers or government contractors, or students or journalists, all of whom are working to incorporate this fight into their work.

Academics and researchers from a range of disciplines have seen the way trafficking in persons intersects a wide range of issues, and are pursuing scholarship that sheds light on those connections and how they might inform the way we fight this crime. This effort has moved beyond the confines of just those who, quote unquote, “work in the movement.” And, honestly, that’s exactly what a movement needs in order to really take hold and start to deliver results. It needs new thinkers – those of you who are joining this fight for the first time – and grizzled veterans. We need that mix of wisdom and passion, experience and enthusiasm. We owe it to those who are still enslaved, wondering if anyone can or will help them.
But as many people as are enlisting in the fight against modern slavery, it’s still helpful, I think, to make perfectly clear what it is we’re talking about.

Because the Palermo Protocol, the U.N. instrument adopted in the year 2000, saddled us with a bit of an unusual term, “trafficking in persons.” Trafficking sounds like movement, when at its core, trafficking in persons is a crime of exploitation. The U.S. government uses it as an umbrella term for all of the conduct involved in obtaining a person for or maintaining that person in a state of compelled service for sex or labor. As Secretary Clinton would say, let’s just call it what it is: modern slavery, plain and simple.
“Trafficking in persons” is just the latest euphemism for a crime we’ve been euphemizing for hundreds of years. In Douglass’s time, it was called “the peculiar institution” and its victims “servants.” All so we didn’t have to confront the horror. Now, we call slavery “trafficking.” Just like we call rape “gender based violence” or assaults and murders by batterers “domestic abuse. Euphemisms can give us space to address an issue, but there are some crimes that we have to confront, no matter how disturbing.

And this is a crime, first and foremost—one that victimizes about 27 million men, women, and children around the world. In the United States, the 13th Amendment guarantees our freedom from slavery and involuntary servitude, whether you’re a citizen or an immigrant, whether you’re a man, woman or child, whether you’re being exploited for sex or labor. In the international context, we look to Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which mirrors our own Amendment nearly word for word.

When that right, the right to be free from slavery, is violated, governments have a responsibility to punish whoever violated that right, and to restore what was damaged. Only governments can do that. Only governments can arrest suspects, incarcerate traffickers, and provide legal status to their victims. That’s why it’s so important to emphasize that trafficking is a crime, and that governments are primarily responsible for fighting trafficking.

The second thing we need to do is acknowledge the fact that, even though fighting this crime is primarily government’s responsibility, government can’t do it alone. To mount a truly effective response, governments need to forge partnerships. That’s why this gathering, co-hosted by the University, the business community, and the foundation world, is so important.

Partnerships with the civil society groups who are developing new practices for finding and fighting this crime. Partnerships with faith groups and community organizations who can help to raise awareness and spur activism around this crime. With academic and policy leaders. Partnerships, critically, with the private sector. And a good place to launch partnerships between the government and the private sector is looking at the places where we’re already doing business together, and figuring out how that existing relationship may already be tainted by modern slavery.

As is so often the case, it helps to realize that this new struggle is but a chapter in delivering on the American promise of freedom, and the successes and failures of the past can inform our work, even in what appears to be a cutting-edge issue like business involvement and government procurement.

Just the other day I stumbled onto a story from 1906 about another amazing woman -- an attorney in New York named Mary Grace Quackenbos, who the New York Times dubbed, in the style of the era, “The Woman Lawyer of 3 Fifth Avenue.” She had found out about a group of men who had immigrated to this country and had become enslaved on the turpentine farms of Florida.

These 50 or so men were put to work, decimating the pine forests there to extract their sap. Every week, they had to borrow from the company store, so much for a loaf of bread, so much for a glass of water, so much for a bottle of rotgut wine. By the end of the week, their debt overwhelmed whatever they earned. It was the peonage system that plagued the American South in the years after the Civil War. It was slavery.

That turpentine—the pitch, the tar—that was derived from those trees, found its way from Florida to the ports and bases that were home to Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. That slave labor helped keep afloat the United States Navy. Hopefully it wasn’t deliberate on the part of the Navy. The procurement officer responsible for maintaining a ship’s store of supplies probably had no idea that those barrels were the product of slave labor. They just needed the supplies.

Fast forward 106 years. Think of the purchasing power of today’s U.S. Government. The largest hirer and buyer in the country. With not only goods and services of incredible scope, but maintaining third country nationals as part of our logistics train and support in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Governments, like businesses, need to be aware of our own “slavery footprint.”

Now there are a few ways to look at this problem, and a few realities about modern slavery that can help guide the way governments and businesses work together to meet this challenge.

For the federal government, the imperative for rooting this out of our procurement and contracting practices is clear and simple: if we are going to go around saying that eliminating modern slavery is a priority, we had first better clean our own house. That’s why we now include the United States in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, why we are harnessing the interagency process to look at our own policies and procedures.
That leaves the question of why the private sector should get involved in this struggle.

First principles (as I learned as Alan Page’s legal intern in Attorney General Skip Humphrey’s office in Saint Paul during law school): there’s the letter of the law to think about. These days, it isn’t enough anymore just to say, “I don’t know where that product came from and I don’t care.” The most recent reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, our modern anti-trafficking law here in the United States, anyone who knowingly engages in business dependent upon slave labor, or who does so with reckless disregard, can be held criminally and civilly liable. Not to mention debarment from any future work with the government.

But it’s not just about the law. As Justice Page taught me, it’s also about morality and values. It’s about what kind of company you want to be. Just as the Carlsons know what their family name should stand for when someone walks into their hotels or sits down at one of the restaurants, or books a flight through the travel agency.

And, frankly, it is also good business. Everything we know about private sector anti-trafficking work is that -- as Manpower Group’s David Arkless says -- it isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also the smart thing to do.

Modern slavery is tainting the corporate supply chain on an alarming range of products. The traffickers are profiting through their exploitation of others. But, for lack of a better term, the cost savings associated with that exploitation isn’t being passed up the supply chain to the retailer or the buyer. But the risk certainly is, whether through the aspects of the law I just described or from the potential public outcry that would follow the revelation that a given company is dependent, even in part, on exploited labor.
Simply put, there is no amount of profits from cheap garments, of bulk seafood, of advertising revenue from a website, that can outweigh the real and lasting damage to a brand once the public associates it with human trafficking.

And that’s just on the supply side. We also know that there’s a movement underway on the demand side. It’s beginning to hit home to a much broader audience that this crime touches us all. It’s in the coffee we drink. It’s the cotton that we wear every day. It’s in the technology that makes our smartphones work. It’s in the “sex industry” that is tolerated as just men blowing off steam. This is all of our problem. We all need to be part of the solution.

People coming to that conclusion in droves, and this isn’t just anecdotal. A year ago, my office provided seed money to an NGO to launch Slavery Footprint. It’s an online tool that allows individuals to see in startling detail the way this crime touches their lives. You take a ten-minute survey about your consumption habits, and the app shows you how many slaves it takes, per week, to sustain your lifestyle.

When we launched this app at the Clinton Global Initiative last fall, we hoped that a year in, 150,000 people would visit Slavery Footprint and take the survey. Within a few months, we had passed the two million user mark.

People are paying attention to this issue. They don’t want their lifestyles tainted by exploitation. They’re the reason a new law in California is going to make such a difference: the California Supply Chain Transparency Act. It went into effect in January. It says that any company that wants to do a lot of business in California—that means $100,000,000 a year—needs to disclose to the public what policies they have in effect to combat modern slavery. The policy could be: “Nothing.” So long as the company reports that and posts it on the Internet, it’s in compliance with the law. But compliance and effect are two different things. Once posted, that information cannot be taken back. Consumers, academics, governments, and yes, even plaintiffs’ lawyers will be looking at these filings.
Two million visitors to Slavery Footprint in just a few months. On the other hand, corporate policies that say “We don’t do anything about human trafficking.” I think you can see where this is going…

So what does a responsible company look like in practice?
Supply chain monitoring. Taking the necessary steps to know exactly where the raw materials for products are grown, gathered, mined, processed, manufactured. Responsible labor recruitment. Ensuring that the manpower fueling an enterprise is sourced fairly, and that workers aren’t charged exorbitant up-front frees that they’ll never be able to repay. Training for employees to recognize this crime and know how to take action if they see it. Codes of conduct that ensure these rules will be followed.

Just as an effective government response to trafficking is a victim-centered approach, corporations can have a victim-centered focus as well. Policies that aim to prevent this crime through supply chains and recruiting are critical, but there are 27 million people already victimized by this crime. The goal of a victim-centered government approach is to help these people restore their lives in the way they choose for themselves. They’re going to need jobs. They’re going to need training and education. They’re going to need an employment market that doesn’t discriminate against them or treat them differently because of their prior experiences or what they had to do to survive – a prostitution arrest on their record or having entered illegally. Government can only go so far.
And this isn’t just about labor trafficking, either. Policies that adopt a zero-tolerance approach to purchasing sex on company time or on the company dime help to curb the demand that fuels sex trafficking. Moral leadership in corporate boardrooms and on company floors will help accelerate the cultural shift that we need that say the days of “boys will be boys” are over. To say, when you’re on travel on our company’s behalf, you represent us, and you won’t be buying commercial sex. Not on our dime.

When we think about how the business community can incorporate survivors into their organizations, it is helpful to think about why victims fall prey to this: they are looking for a better life, good jobs, even the love or glamour that a pimp offers them. These aren’t weak victims, but were the people with enough gumption to try for a better life. TIP survivors can be great leaders, not just on public awareness and anti-trafficking work if they so choose, but as employees that stand out for their drive, their commitment to succeed. Time and again, I hear from employers of people who were victims in cases that I prosecuted, and time and again they tell me that these survivors are their best employees.
And finally, we need to think about why we do this.

150 years ago this September, a promise was made. A promise that slavery would no longer be legal. No longer be approved. The Emancipation Proclamation was not just words on paper. Those who heard it read out loud by the U.S. Cavalrymen who rode from plantation to plantation didn’t wait for the Proclamation to kick in on January 1st, or for the 13thAmendment to be promulgated two years later – they heard the promise, and took their freedom. Much as Frederick Douglass said “I prayed for my freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” Like today’s victims of this crime, they were quick to take their own freedom once they knew it was possible. Once they knew that the promise of freedom had been made.

A generation later, when attorney Mary Grace Quackenbos went from Manhattan down to Florida to represent a group of workers that nobody else cared about, she wasn’t doing it to line her own pockets or make a name for herself. She was doing it because 41 years earlier a promise had been made.

A promise. That neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist. Not in 1865. Not then, in 1906. Not now, not ever.

Those words represent more than a moment in our history. They represent a sacred promise. Written in the blood of all who fought and died so that others may be free. Of all who lived and died in bondage.

We honor them by fighting to ensure the safety of our children. By bringing pimps and cruel bosses to justice. And when the Women’s Foundation brings us together to say that Minnesota girls – and boys and men and women – are not for sale, this is particularly appropriate. Because the promise that we must fulfill only became a reality because of what started here on another beautiful May day in the Twin Cities.

On May 10, 1861, over at Fort Snelling, the First Minnesota Regiment signed up for three years’ service. Two years later, 262 Minnesotans went out on the second day at Gettysburg. By the end of the day, only 47 stood. 83% casualties – the most in any US military unit in our history.

And the next day, the 47 survivors went out again. At the center of the line, they stopped Pickett’s charge. They prevented the breakthrough that would have won the war for the South and made President Lincoln’s promise just a historic footnote. And that day, almost half of the remaining men fell.

We owe a debt of remembrance to the 30 Minnesotans who walked away from that battle, and those who hallowed that ground and never came home. We owe them our commitment to end human trafficking today, in Minnesota, in the US, and around the world. Because, at our best, fighting slavery is who we are as a country.
As we near the 150th anniversary of Emancipation, we must remain as diligent as ever in our work. We must fulfill the promise for which those Minnesotans died. Because we all deserve to live in a world free from slavery.
Join us. Take up that terrible swift sword once again.
Let us live to make men free.
Thank you.

STATE DEPARTMENT SPEECH AT LINCOLN'S CABIN ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING

The following excerpt is from the U.S. State Department website:

Remarks at President Lincoln's Cottage
RemarksLuis CdeBaca
Ambassador-at-Large, Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in PersonsWashington, DC
February 23, 2012
As prepared for delivery
“Thank you all very much. And thank you, Brad Myles. The Polaris Project is on the front lines of the fight against modern slavery. A few years ago, a hotline was set up to report suspected cases of trafficking in persons. It’s a phone number that teachers and neighbors and concerned individuals can call when something looks suspicious. It’s a phone number the U.S. Government gives out to immigrants entering the country along with information about their rights and the potential warning signs of trafficking in persons. It has resulted in the investigation and prosecution of traffickers.
When those phones ring, they ring in the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, which the Polaris Project operates. And thanks to Brad’s intrepid leadership, the Resource Center is growing busier all the time.

And I’d like to thank Erin Carlson Mast and all the staff here at President Lincoln’s Cottage, both for working to make this new exhibit a reality and for all they do in their work for the National Trust. The National Trust for Historic Preservation does more than just maintain important sites across our country–they preserve our history and our heritage.

They preserve for posterity parts of our history such as this house, where Lincoln put pen to paper and took the first steps toward a policy of Emancipation. The Trust also preserves sites such as the Belle Grove Plantation, about 80 miles west of here, where for more than a century, hundreds of slaves labored on thousands of acres. Where in 1864 blood was spilled and lives lost as General Philip Sheridan rallied his men against a surprise attack, putting an end to the Confederate invasion of the North.

These are the places where our country was made, where our history—good and bad—was written. Places that allow us to hear, if we only listen, the voices reminding us who we are, and what we must become.
And sometimes the men and women who work at the Trust have brought voices that we don’t always recognize. Not just Lincoln or Sheridan or Douglass, but like the people whose voices are heard once again because of the Trust’s Vice President for Historic Sites, my friend and classmate Estevan Rael-Gálvez. Because of Estevan, we know about Rosario Romero, a Navajo woman who lived in New Mexico in the latter half of the 19th Century. Her given name, Ated-bah-Hozhoni, meant “Happy Girl” in Navajo, but she was taken from the wreckage of her family after a raid. She was sold to a man named Martínez for 150 pesos and given the name Rosario.

She lived 70 more years. During most of that time, slavery had already been outlawed, but for three generations the census places her in the service of that same family, listed in the census records from the time as a “servant,” and a “day laborer,” and a “wool weaver.”

The reality, of course, is that she had been a slave. A tragedy in the unknown history of Indian Slavery in our country. Not just forgotten, but in a society that tried to make sure everyone forgot, that the crime went unnamed, unremarked. And it would have, but for Estevan.

The Trust is working to make sure these stories are told. And they need to be told. They need to be seared into our collective memories, because the dark chapters in our history as well as our triumphs need to guide us as we chart the course toward our country’s future.

Of course, there is no greater blemish on our nation’s history—no darker chapter in the story of America—than that of chattel slavery. And there is no greater inspiration—no greater example of American values and the American spirit—than men and women who dedicated themselves to seeing that institution eliminated.
Whether they themselves escaped the bonds of slavery and then made it their work to help others do the same, or led soldiers into battle, or sat in a room and wrote the ideas of the Abolitionist Movement into our law, the fruits of their labors illuminate our history. Their example stands today as a challenge to fight this evil, no matter where or when it may occur.
And President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and the other members of the Cabinet are heeding that call, fighting what the President calls “the intolerable yoke of modern slavery.”

On the first of this month, we marked National Freedom Day, commemorating the date that President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. Freedom Day. It started under President Truman; it grew into Black History month. In fact, the Freedom Day movement was founded by Major Richard Wright, born into slavery but by the end of his life a successful businessman. A survivor, whose voice could not be stilled.

And later this year, we will reach the 150th anniversary of the date on which President Lincoln issued the Executive Order beginning the process of freedom – the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation that let millions of voices lift and sing.

But as we sit here, perhaps in the very room where those words were first written, there are estimated to be 27 million men, women and children around the world living in slavery today. Twenty-seven million. More than at any time in history.

Just as in New Mexico in the late 1800s, people want to turn away, to act as though it is not happening. Frederick Douglass once ridiculed the euphemisms that polite antebellum society used to avoid actually saying the word “slavery” outright. He might be surprised by the lack of progress we’ve made in that regard.
The polite term we now use to shield ourselves is “trafficking in persons.” “Trafficking” evokes movement, but at its core this is a crime of exploitation. The U.S. government broadly considers trafficking in persons to be all of the conduct involved in reducing a person to or maintaining a person in a state of compelled service for labor or commercial sexual exploitation. In a nutshell, slavery.

It takes many forms. It occurs in every country. And although the policy attention to “trafficking in persons” as a concept is relatively new, at the end of the day this phenomenon is nothing more than the newest manifestation of an ancient crime. As Secretary Clinton says, “Let’s just call it what it is – it’s modern slavery.”

A little more than ten years ago, led by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, the international community came together to address this problem, and here at home we updated our own laws. Nearly 150 countries today are parties to the Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, which established what we call the 3P Paradigm—prevention, protection, and prosecution—as a guideline for fighting human trafficking.

In the United States, President Clinton issued what I think was the first Executive Order on this issue since President Lincoln, and signed into law the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which focused our anti-slavery laws on these new types of exploitation and established my office, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, within the State Department to spearhead our efforts to combat trafficking abroad.
And now, under now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, my office is responsible for diplomacy and foreign assistance to root out modern slavery around the globe. We produce the annual Trafficking in Persons Report to assess nearly every government, including our own, on their efforts to stop trafficking.
In fulfilling these responsibilities, my staff and I spend a lot of time engaging with others who are part of the fight against modern slavery—whether our foreign government counterparts, or leaders in the NGO community, or academics, or business leaders. One of the things we try to make clear is the reason why the United States government considers this effort a priority.

These conversations are often geared toward those concerned with laws or development issues or a gamut of other policy concerns, and our rationale for fighting this crime often fits with those concerns. Trafficking in persons undermines the rule of law. It threatens our security. It devastates communities and hurts families. These are all very good and sound reasons for pressing full steam ahead in our battle against trafficking in persons; it is “fitting and proper that we should do this.”

But the way I usually end those conversations is to say that—as important as all of these policy reasons for fighting slavery might be, fighting slavery is also simply part of who we are as a nation. It’s part of delivering on the promise of freedom. It’s part of building on the legacy sprung from this very house, 150 years ago.
Why is this not simply a policy priority, but something more ingrained in the stuff of our country?
It’s because those two documents I mentioned earlier—the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment—reflected the ultimate goal of the Abolitionist Movement, but they aren’t merely words in our law and history books. And they don’t mark moments in America’s history when slavery all of a sudden ceased to exist.

They’re promises. A promise that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist. A promise written in the blood of all who lived and died in slavery. In the blood of all who answered the Battle Hymn’s challenge to, if necessary, “die to make men free.”

Abraham Lincoln said famously “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.” And he bound us with a sacred promise: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever again exist.
Not then. Not now. Not ever.

But maybe that doesn’t have to be my closing point anymore. Maybe people are starting to make that connection themselves. Just think: here I am, an American official who fights against slavery every day, standing in a room where Abraham Lincoln thought about – perhaps even actually put pen to paper to write – the Emancipation Proclamation. And what’s on display here 150 years later? An exhibit about modern slavery. About delivering on the promise of freedom.

It’s not just here. Last week, I spoke at an event commemorating the birthday of Frederick Douglass. Tomorrow, members of my staff will visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati to explore ways to amplify that remarkable exhibit which focuses on the continuum between chattel slavery 150 years ago and what we call “trafficking in persons” today.

You see, whether here, in the Park Service, or in the civil rights museums, it seems that the people who are entrusted with preserving and interpreting the legacy of our country’s original sin are already reaching the conclusion that I have tried unartfully to make in my speeches and my diplomatic interventions:
Slavery, and our promise to end it, are not just part of the past. Emancipation was a promise for all time. Those of us who care about civil rights bear a responsibility to continue the fight.
So now that we’ve drawn that line, from past to present, how does the slavery of 150 years ago inform our struggle today?

First of all, when the 13th Amendment became the law of the land, this became the government’s fight, because slavery was from that moment forward illegal. Today, slavery is a crime, and we have an obligation to respond to it accordingly. And while the values that underlay the abolition of slavery and the promise of freedom haven’t changed, slavery itself has, and so has the way we’ve responded to it.
Over the last 150 years, enforcing the 13th Amendment has required laws that adapted to the way slavery had evolved. In the first half of the 20th Century, involuntary servitude and slavery continued across the American South as what we called peonage. It was debt bondage. Sharecropping.
A few administrations, under Presidents Grant, both Roosevelts, and Carter, made some progress curbing this crime, but those efforts always dropped off when power changed hands.
The longest sustained effort we’ve seen has taken place in the last 15 years. It has spanned three administrations and both major parties. When President Obama declared last month Slavery and Trafficking Awareness month, he continued and intensified the commitment shown by former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Another thing that’s changed is America’s role in the world. As the United States has become a global leader and worked to advance our interests abroad, we count among those interests the eradication of slavery.

Part of our foreign policy agenda reflects the belief that trafficking in persons should be eradicated wherever it occurs, and thanks in part to our leadership, much of the international community has partnered in this struggle. Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights track almost verbatim our Constitution’s 13th Amendment; the United Nations’ “Palermo” Trafficking Protocol closely mirrors our own anti-trafficking law of the year 2000.

These are the structures that in the last 15 (and indeed the last 150) years have been built around the promise of ending slavery. But laws and policies and college courses and the annual Trafficking in Persons Report—while all these things help us understand the changing nature of slavery and allow us to counter it—those things themselves aren’t slavery.

Slavery today is what slavery has always been about. Slavery is about people. People trapped under the power and cruelty not just of a system or a culture, but under actual cruel masters.
Slavery is about a woman leaving her home and her family because she’s been promised an opportunity for a good job, only to find herself locked in a basement as a domestic worker, or made to work in a field without pay or a way to leave. Slavery is about a man on a fishing boat, forced to work 18 hours a day for months on end, and beaten when he fails to catch enough fish in a day or asks for just a little chicken in his rice.
It’s about children who should be learning to read and write, but are instead forced into the worst kind of exploitation imaginable. Like Frederick Douglass as a small boy experienced when he was sent to be a “house servant” in Baltimore, it is the escalating violence of the curse… then the hand… then the belt.
That is why we continue this struggle.

And as much as our laws and policies are rooted in the past, so is the constant reminder that this crime is about people. It’s because we know about the life of Frederick Douglass that we’re so sure that the experience then can help us tackle this challenge today. It’s because we know that survivors like Harriet Tubman and Richard Wright endured and accomplished that we can truly see the line from the plantations of the antebellum South to the sweatshops and brothels where exploitation occurs today.

Frederick Douglass, of course, shed his bonds to become one of the great orators and statesmen in history. He travelled the country railing against the evil he had endured and escaped. He pushed President Lincoln to action. His activism expanded beyond the issue of slavery. His words and ideas about suffrage and immigration and civic responsibility still illuminate our nation’s great debates. He was one of the first to insist that Emancipation must apply to Hispanics and Asians, and to warn that slavery would not truly be snuffed out if we turned our backs.

I mentioned Richard Wright earlier. After Emancipation, young Richard Wright and his mother settled in Cuthbert, Georgia. He graduated valedictorian of Atlanta University. He eventually was appointed by President McKinley to be Paymaster of the volunteers of the U.S. Army, and was the highest ranking African American in the US military.

For 30 years, he was President of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth, now Savannah State University. At the age of 67, he enrolled in Wharton Business School and opened the first bank in the North owned by an African American. It was thanks to his leadership, his determination to commemorate the day Lincoln signed the 13thAmendment, that we now celebrate National Freedom Day on February 1st. It’s why February is now Black History Month.

These are the stories we all know, and we should. Harriet Tubman and others’ flight into the darkness – their journey on the Underground Railroad guided by Polaris the North Star – is as intrinsic to the fabric of America as are Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg.

One story I didn’t know until recently is about a man named Jourdon Anderson. Some of you may have seen this floating around the Internet in the last week or so. Jourdon Anderson was born into slavery in Big Spring, Tennessee, and after Emancipation moved his wife and children north to Dayton, Ohio.
According to some of the documents that emerged, in the summer of 1865, the man who had enslaved him, also named Anderson, wrote to Jourdan and actually asked that he come back to Tennessee and work on that farm where he had been held for 32 years.

Jourdon Anderson replied with the help of someone who could write, and apparently made his letter available to the press. It was published contemporaneously in the Cincinnati Commercial and the New York Tribune.

“I want to know particularly,” he wrote, “what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well.”

He went on, addressing the particular points of his former abuser’s offer, and I’m going to read a good portion of this because it’s truly remarkable. I apologize for such a long quote, but his voice, lost for so long, deserves to be lifted and to ring:

“As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to…. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense…. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.”
He ends his letter by saying this: “The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.”

Whether we’re talking about the famous or the should-be-famous, Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman or Richard Wright or Jourdan Anderson, when we look at what each of them accomplished, the way they lived their lives, what we don’t see are helpless people plucked out of enslavement by some righteous rescuer. We see survivors.

We don’t see men and women who needed someone else to confer agency upon them before they moved onto their lives as advocates and teachers and businessmen and mothers and fathers. They weren’t waiting around for someone to free them so that they could become all of these things. Those who secured their freedom on the Underground Railroad didn’t steal away in the middle of the night because somebody told them it was OK.

Did they have help along the way? Of course. Did Emancipation clear a roadblock? Absolutely. But I would wager that whether or not the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville had given Jourdan Anderson his free papers, in Jourdon Anderson’s mind, his freedom would still have been a fact.
The men and women who lived in chattel slavery didn’t fall victim to a cruel and exploitative institution because they were incapable or pitiful. And once free neither were they incapable or pitiful. We know this because once empowered it was through their own will and determination that they lived out their lives the way they wanted. Orators and advocates. Educators and businesspeople. Important to the entire world, or only to their family and friends – it was their choice. Mothers and fathers whose desire was to give their children an education. To get the education they themselves had been denied.

Census records show that Jourdon Anderson lived in the same house in Dayton, Ohio for many years, and after he died, his children and grandchildren were there for many more years. Those census records from 40, 50, 60 years later are the epilogue to that letter. The records tell the result of his journey to freedom. That his children and grandchildren got the education that he wanted so much for them.

These individual accounts of people like Jourdon Anderson or Rosario Romero show us that history isn’t a monolith. It’s a fabric woven of countless threads, each thread as unique as the experience it represents. And so today, when we consider the victims of modern slavery, we must first consider that modern slavery isn’t just happening in theory, or to some statistics. It’s happening to individuals with families and talents and hopes and lives as unique as those whose legacies we honor today.

Now, some have suggested that those of us who work to combat trafficking in persons envision ourselves as heroes swooping in to save the day, helping those who can’t help themselves. But if there’s a lesson to be learned from the lives of those who survived and moved on with their lives, if there’s one thing we should remember today as we think of all those who still endure exploitation, it’s that our goal should be to provide survivors the opportunities to lead the lives they choose.

Because they typically still want the lives the traffickers denied them. Many of them got enslaved because they were trying for a better life for their families. Because they were willing to chance it to get an education for their little sister, medical care for their grandmother, a roof for their parents’ hut.
Survivors may need protection from pimps or bosses. That doesn’t mean throwing them in a shelter and forcing them to stay there. If they’re immigrants, they may want to return home, or they may want to stay here and start a new life. That means providing them legal recourse. They may want to face their accuser in court; they may want to just walk away and leave their past behind. That means giving them the choice. It means letting their choices – and their voices – mean something.

Like Shamiya Hall. For years, the America she knew was the garage in California where she was kept by the family that enslaved her. They went to jail; she’s going to college and wants to be a federal agent, so that she can free those still in bondage. A few weeks ago, she became an American citizen. She had the opportunity. She is living a life she sought for herself. Like Douglass and others, she is a survivor whose voice cannot be stilled.

So when we talk about those laws and structures that surround modern slavery, we have to ask how the necessary government action—indeed, the primary responsibility for fighting this crime around the world rests with governments—how does that responsibility balance with the aim of empowering survivors?
The answer to that question depends on how far a government has come in addressing human trafficking. As I often say, no government is perfect at fighting modern slavery; no government is doing enough. But some are doing more, a lot more, than others. The governments doing the most have adopted the modern 3P Paradigm I was discussing before—prevention, protection, and prosecution.

It’s what we call a victim-centered approach. Whether in law enforcement or prosecution or survivor care, we focus on those who have been exploited because, again, at the end of the day this crime is about people. It isn’t a crusade to rescue those who can’t help themselves. At its best, effective government action is prosecuting and punishing the traffickers—something only governments can do—and providing survivors the assistance they need.

That’s the help we can give along the way, like so many did on the Underground Railroad. Treatment and counseling. Job training and education. We can level the playing field. We can put opportunity more within reach. But the reality is that many of the men and women who are freed from modern slavery are freed because they had within them the courage to walk away. To go to the police. To tell someone. Their courage gets them 90 per cent of the way there. Our role must be to get them across the finish line.
But not every government is there yet. Some have adopted modern anti-trafficking laws, but fail to use them; they’ve built the machine, but they’ve never switched it on. Some governments are resistant to call modern slavery what it is, and instead treat the exploitation as an immigration issue or a labor violation or some lesser crime. Some governments deny altogether that modern slavery occurs within their borders.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that slavery isn’t taking place. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a robust NGO presence on the ground, or that there aren’t activists and leaders pushing for the sort of changes needed to effectively combat this crime. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t toiling unseen and unheard. It means that they simply have no way to let their voices be heard.

Often the difference between the governments that use their laws and the governments that don’t; between the governments that have enacted modern anti-trafficking statutes and those where such provisions languish in legislatures; between acknowledging the problem of modern slavery and sweeping it under the rug — the difference is political will.

In too many places, that political will does not exist.
This room, these walls, this house, constitute a symbol of that political will. It didn’t all happen here. Political will existed and grew in different corners of our country for many years prior to Emancipation, and continued to evolve for many years after. It pushed Lincoln as much as he pushed it. And he tried to calibrate what was right and what was possible.

Because when the war came, Lincoln had face the consequences Thomas Jefferson had predicted when he said of slavery in 1820, “We have the wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him nor safely
let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

But the moment when the activism and the arguments and the opportunity and the bloodshed reached a tipping point come together in the very human and very daily life of President Lincoln. The ideas, and words, and decisions that Lincoln struggled with in this house.

This house will stand for a very, very long time as a monument to that moment. But if there’s one lesson to learn from that history—if there’s a bit of wisdom to glean from this place—it’s that as long as slavery endures, we need to keep building Lincoln’s Cottage.

We need to build it over and over again in halls of government around the world. We need to build it in our statehouses and our town halls. We need to build it in our board rooms and in the church basements where community groups lay out their agendas.

Just as Americans 150 years ago pushed and fought and died in pursuit of the promise that went forth from these walls, so too can we all contribute to making that moment happen again, and again, and again.
You don’t need to work in the anti-trafficking movement to be a modern-day abolitionist. We can all help to solve this problem. We can do it by learning the way our lives touch modern slavery—the way the goods we consume may be touched by forced labor—the way we are too accepting of a culture that permits exploitation in prostitution. We can do it by making sure people understand this lingering challenge, in our congregations, and our schools, and our community clubs.

Let’s write that final chapter. The promise made here demands that we continue to act. That we continue to be a voice for those who cannot lift their own. That we walk with them on that road to freedom and to recovery.

Lincoln foresaw the gravity of what he undertook here, and he understood what it took to write those words. The phrase on the wall behind me: “If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” This is our history. And it’s the promise we work to fulfill today. Because we all deserve to live in Abraham Lincoln’s world – a world free from slavery.
Thank you.”