Source: Mint Images / Getty White Restaurant Owner Only Sentenced 10 Years For Enslaving Black Man We’re warning you now, this story is going to REALLY piss you off. According to CNN , the manager of a South Carolina restaurant, Bobby Paul Edwards, has been sentenced to only ten years in prison for torturing and enslaving a mentally ill Black man named John Christopher Smith for, wait for it, SEVENTEEN YEARS! Smith began washing dishes at J and J Cafeteria in Conway, South Cack as a 12-year-old boy, when Edwards took over as manager, his life turned into a living hell. Edwards yelled racial epithets at Smith, beat him with a belt, hit him with pots and pans, and burned him with scalding hot tongs to “make him work faster”. In a WPDE interview, Smith says he was afraid to lose his job so he did whatever Smith told him, including being confined to a back room whenever his family would come into the restaurant. “I wanted to get out of there a long time ago. But I didn’t have nobody I could go to,” he said. He said he was denied access even to his own family. “I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t see none of my family so that was that,” he said. “That’s the main basic thing I wanted to see was my mom come see me. I couldn’t see my mom…and I couldn’t talk to nobody.” Edwards is almost 40-years-old now and he would have never been freed from his slavery if not for a customer who called police after noticing a bevy of scars on his hands and body as he brought them their food. “It is almost inconceivable that instances of forced labor endure in this country to this day — a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband of the Civil Rights Division. “The Department of Justice will continue to investigate, prosecute, and convict human traffickers involved in forced labor, seeking justice on behalf of their victims.” In a press release, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Edwards was sentenced to a decade in prison FOR SLAVERY and forced to pay Mr. Smith $272,952.96 in restitution. Only. Ten. Years. FOR SLAVERY. We hate it here.
