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During her 26 years as an elementary public school teacher, Barbara Vogel has comforted her students through the horrors of the Challenger space shuttle explosion, Oklahoma City federal building bombing, and multiple school shootings. But she says nothing prepared her for the response of her fifth-grade students at Highline Community School in Aurora, Colorado, to a newspaper article she read to them on slavery in Sudan.

"They sat at my feet and tears streamed down their faces," Vogel recalls. It happened in February 1998, just after the students had studied the Civil War. "They thought slavery was over. So did I," Vogel says. "The first thing they said was, 'What are we going to do about this?' " Vogel did not want to stand in the way of her students' idealism and budding sense of citizenship. "We became instant abolitionists," she says.

Following one of their class rules, "Do small things with great love," a quotation from Mother Teresa that hangs across five feet of the classroom wall, the students soon discovered through Internet research that the Swiss group Christian Solidarity International (CSI) buys back Sudanese slaves for about $50 each, and a Boston-based organization, the American Anti-Slavery Group, raises money for CSI's slavery redemption efforts. They studied the United Nations' Declaration on Human Rights. "These are all God's people, and you do not own another person," Vogel says.

The students began to wonder if they could buy back a slave. They launched a STOP (Slavery That Oppresses People) campaign, writing thousands of letters to government leaders and celebrities such as President Clinton, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey. They collected allowance money, organized lemonade-stand sales, and sold used toys to raise money. After publicity on national television shows, the fifth graders, along with Vogel's new fourth-grade class last fall, began receiving individual and corporate donations from around the country. With every $50 raised, the students added a new brown-paper cutout of a freed slave to the classroom wall. After 17 months of fundraising and awareness-raising efforts, the students had raised $50,000, enough to free 1,000 slaves.

AMERICA'S YOUNG ABOLITIONISTS: The students—whom Vogel calls "patriots" and "humanitarians"—have sparked what some are calling the largest abolitionist crusade in America since the Civil War. Individuals, churches, and more than 100 schools in eight countries—from the elementary through university level—have followed suit:

• In Miami, grade-school students performed a play about slavery, raising $700 to buy back Sudanese slaves.

• Good Shepherd Community Church near Port land, Oregon, has raised $74,000 for slave redemptions, $5,000 of which came from a teenager who had been saving money for a car.

• Christian students at more than 60 Christian and secular universities have joined Freedom House's Campaign of Conscience for Sudan, writing letters to congressional representatives and holding prayer vigils and public demonstrations. One staff member at Southern Wesleyan University in South Carolina braved three nights of below-freezing temperatures in a mock slave pen until 75 percent of the student body sent e-mails to Congress.

Momentum has been growing among American Christians to do something about the captives in Sudan. But recently, evidence has surfaced that suggests purchasing the freedom of slaves may be doing more harm than good. Christians are now deeply divided over the issue, which may serve to diffuse charitable interest in one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent decades.

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August 9 1999, Vol. 43, No. 9