The United Nations General Assembly declared 2004 as the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition (having welcomed the fact that UNESCO had proclaimed it as such earlier).
The General Assembly resolution in its entirety (of which this declaration was a single paragraph) was voted against by the Israel, Palau and the United States, with Australia and Canada abstaining.
The United Nations International Years, beginning with the World Refugee Year in 1959/1960, are designated in order to focus world attention on important issues. The proclamation of an international year to commemorate the struggle against slavery and its abolition marked the bicentenary of the proclamation of the first black state, Haiti, as well as the reunion of the peoples of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
Among the initiatives that marked the commemorative year was a virtual exhibition, Lest We Forget: The Triumph over Slavery, created by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and New York Public Library.
Another effort that was launched during the year was a research and information programme, Forgotten Slaves. The programme was implemented by the French Marine Archaeology Group (GRAN) with the support of UNESCO. It was inspired by the wreck of the slave ship l’Utile off the shores of the Tromelin Island in the Indian Ocean in 1761 and was intended to be part of an information campaign to raise awareness of both the history of slavery and modern forms of slavery.
Famous quotes containing the words year, struggle, slavery and/or abolition:
“I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us.... Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.”
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Woman—with a capital letter—should by now have ceased to be a specialty. There should be no more need of “movements” on her behalf, and agitations for her advancement and development ... than for the abolition of negro slavery in the United States.”
—Marion Harland (1830–1922)