Genesis of the Keys Coalition
image public domain via wikimedia
by Tim Gratz, Program Policy Chair, Keys Coalition…
It really all began eight years ago this month. That is when the movie “Amazing Grace” was released. “Amazing Grace” has a brief scene with John Newton, the former slave-trader who wrote the lyrics to what became the popular hymn “Amazing Grace” but the film really tells the story of William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament who fought, with just a few followers, to end the slave trade in England, a fight that took him twenty years to accomplish..
Wilberforce would keep slave chains under his seat in the House of Commons and drape them around himself as he rose to speak against the terrible horrors of slavery. When he began his crusade, he had hardly any supporters. But through a long campaign and many defeats he finally persuaded Parliament, in 1807, to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain. So the film was released in connection with the 200th anniversary of that important event in the history of the abolition movement.
In connection with the release of the film there were many stories of modern day slavery, particularly sex slavery of minors in third world countries. I was appalled when I saw on “Dateline NBC” girls in Thailand and Cambodia younger than my daughter, who was then ten, being sold for sex, and frequently to men from the United States who traveled to such countries expressly to “rent” the bodies of girls in their teens and younger. I read about several organizations fighting slavery in those third world countries and I decided to organize a rally to raise awareness of their efforts.
The rally was held on March 25, 2007, the exact date, 200 years earlier, when England abolished the slave trade. One of the first persons to become involved in this rally was my friend Rev. Dr. Gwendolyn D. Magby. The rally at the high school auditorium was well attended (at least 100) with heavy participation from the predominantly African American churches.
But no organization was formed after that rally and there was really no follow up. Nevertheless awareness of modern day slavery was raised.
Four years later, in the spring of2011, my interest in the issue was re-ignited when a missionary to Belgium spoke at a mid-week service in my church. He and his wife headed an organization dedicated to freeing sex slaves who were brought to Belgium from third world countries, lured with false promises of legitimate jobs and then forced into prostitution and often held there with threats to kill their parents if they tried to escape.
Following this meeting I went on-line and discovered, to my horror, that sex trafficking exists not only in third world countries but also in America and to make matters worse many of the victims were minors, just as I had seen four years earlier minors in third world countries sold for sex.
I resolved then that I would devote every free hour I had to work to minimize modern day sex slavery. Keys Coalition was formally started in December of 2011 with our first rally in January of 2012. It featured Julian Sher, an expert and author of the book “Someone’s Daughter.”
As Rick Boettger pointed out recently one of my early accomplishments was persuading community activist Connie Gilbert to become involved in the organization and she chaired the Coalition for several years. When I first approached Connie, she, like me months earlier, was shocked to learn that sex trafficking and the sale of minors for sex occurred in this country.
One final note about William Wilberforce (obviously one of my heroes): his legacy is so well respected that when Congress first enacted a human trafficking act in 2000 it was subtitled in honor of Wilberforce.
Well, one more fact about Wilberforce that will interest many readers: in 1824 he was one of 22 people who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first and leading animal rights organizations.
Tim Gratz is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin Law School. In 1969, while a sophomore at the UW, he and three friends started an alternative newspaper, The Badger Herald. He practiced law in Wisconsin for nineteen years, winning two out of three cases he argued before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In Key West since 1993 he worked many years in hospitality and is now a CSR representative for Domino’s Pizza where He works part time so he can devote full-time to raising awareness and preventing minor sex trafficking.