Today’s St. Pete Times posted a profile of former Hastings, Fla. slave Jewel Goodman, talking about his time working in the cabbage and potato fields for (now convicted) Ronald Evans. The paper is doing a series on the people behind the statistics on modern day slavery. Goodman is one of 1,000 slaves who have gained freedom in Florida since 1997.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel — editor, part-owner and publisher of The Nation — wrote a moving piece on the Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s Modern-Day Slavery Museum following its stop in St. Augustine last week.

“In textbooks across the country,” wrote Heuvel in a post to the magazine’s website, “students are still taught that slavery in the US ended with the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

“But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers knows better, and its Modern-Day Slavery Museum is traveling throughout Florida to drive that point home — that slavery persists in the agriculture fields of the state right up through this very day.

“The bulk of the museum is housed inside of a 24-foot box truck — a replica of the one used by the Navarrete family in Immokalee to hold twelve farmworkers captive from 2005 to 2007. The workers were beaten, chained and imprisoned inside of the truck, and forced to urinate and defecate in the corners. US Attorney Doug Molloy called the operation ’slavery, plain and simple.”’

To read the rest of Heuvel’s article click here.

After touring the state with the Modern-Day Slavery Museum, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) will lead a farmworker Freedom March, April 16-18 to continue their campaign for better working conditions and wages for farmworkers. Protesters will walk from Tampa to the corporate headquarters of Publix in Lakeland with the Slavery Museum in tow. The goal is to pressure Publix to restrict its tomato buys to growers who’ve signed a code of conduct on the humane treatment of workers and who’ve agreed to raise the wages for picking tomatoes by a penny per pound.

— Susan Eastman