Slavery

WASHINGTON -- It was not enough for Oprah Winfrey to do a movie about slavery. She felt she needed to live it, too. At least a little.So, she took off into the Maryland woods to participate -- blindfolded! -- in a re-enactment of what it was like to be a slave on the Underground Railroad.I was tempted to ridicule Oprah for her brief woodland adventure (Did she wear her designer hiking boots? Did her personal assistant tag along? What was her pager number? 1-800-TIC-BITE?)But I resisted, partly because I feel her pain.

The story of the Chinese immigrants who spilled onto a New York beach this week is more than a tale of people so desperate to enter this country that they will try any means, legal or illegal. It is also a reminder that the scourge of slavery is not entirely dead. Outlawed for well over a century in most parts of the world, slavery has stood as one of the human rights battles the world has already won. But in many countries, millions of people still live and labor under slavery-like conditions.

The Chinese who scrambled onto a New York beach one recent night are but a tiny blip in the annals of illegal immigration. Their arrival was more dramatic and public than most, but the conditions of their travel -- and of the servitude that awaited many of them -- are not uncommon at all.Like every country, the United States guards its right to control its borders and to regulate who can and cannot enter. But like other affluent countries, it is finding that desperate people can make any border porous.

MY GREAT-GREAT grandfather never fought for the Stars and Bars. The story goes that he was a Unionist who hid his horses in a nearby woods so the Rebs wouldn't take them when they marched past his northern Baltimore County farm on their way to Gettysburg.So I concede that I can but try to understand what the Confederate flag means to those whose great-grandfathers did fight under it -- just as I can only try to understand what it means to black Americans whose great-grandfathers suffered under it. I come without an emotional ax to grind to a debate that, as seen by last week's controversy over the state's refusal to allow the flag to continue to appear on Confederate veterans' special-issue license plates, is always argued on emotional grounds.

Washington -- If you think slavery is a thing of the past, guess again.A vigorous market in human beings continues in Mauritania and Sudan, according to a variety of investigators for the United Nations, the State Department, private human-rights organizations and, increasingly, concerned African-Americans who think Africa's dirty little secret has gone on long enough.A number of black newspapers and broadcast talk shows have spotlighted the issue, most prominently the New York City Sun, a black-owned Brooklyn-based newspaper that recently ran a five-part series on the problem.

BOSTON -- In his new, widely publicized book ''Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' author Keith Richburg of the Washington Post sees the corpses of massacred Africans and writes, ''If things had been different, I might have been'' one of them. ''So I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.''At another point, he visits the place where Africans were loaded for the voyage: Goree Island in Senegal. Many African-Americans cry when they visit Goree. Mr. Richburg writes that he felt ''little personal connection or pain.

Vineyard Haven, Mass. -- IMAGINEERING, an adroit neologism, is the Walt Disney Co.'s name for the corporate unit involved in developing Disney's America, the projected mammoth theme park in northern Virginia.Not long ago, the chief imagineer, Robert Weis, described what would be in store, among other historical attractions, for hordes of tourists."We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave, and what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad." He added that the exhibits would "not take a Pollyanna view" but would be "painful, disturbing and agonizing."

The Great American Dialogue on Race may have already begun, no thanks to President Bill Clinton, who so far has given us nothing but platitudes on the subject after declaring it an imperative for this year.But dialogues must begin with tough or uncomfortable questions. One caller posed one Sunday."What if," he asked, "there had been no slavery? Black people are much better off with slavery than they would have been without slavery."This man, judging from the tone of his voice and his question, was no snide, babbling racist.

In every social system there must be a class to do the menialduties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.Fortunately for the South, she has found a race adapted to that purpose at her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes.We use them for our purpose, and we call them slaves.A5 -- Sen. James Henry Hammond, South Carolina, 1861 WASHINGTON -- Thomas Jefferson called slavery ''this abomination.

Britain's deputy prime minister told a Baltimore audience yesterday that his country regretted its part in the African slave trade. He called on other nations to redouble efforts to combat modern forms of slavery. Deputy Prime Minister John Leslie Prescott made his remarks at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, where a major exhibition about slavery in Maryland is on view. "We recognize the active role Britain played in the slave trade," Prescott said, noting that millions of African slaves were forcibly transported to British colonies in North America and the Caribbean during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.