Slave

Leonard Weaver realized pretty quickly after his Comcast SportsNet interview aired Tuesday that fans weren't getting the message he had intended to send. In referencing and agreeing with the statement of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson that owners looked at the locked-out players as "slaves," Weaver set off a backlash that flooded his Twitter account. Yesterday, after apologizing via Twitter, the Eagles fullback made the media rounds, trying to explain himself. Weaver said he wanted to draw a parallel between workers who feel powerless when treated arbitrarily and NFL players, whose huge salaries might make them seem immune to such treatment.

Insurance Co. of North America was set up to protect Philadelphia shipowners against loss from storms, Arab pirates, and the British and French privateers who preyed on Caribbean sea lanes in the 1790s. That history has fed a modern controversy: Did INA also profit from slavery by insuring masters against the loss of their slaves? Ace Ltd., which bought INA two years ago, says a careful search required by a California law that took effect this year turned up no evidence it ever insured slaves or slave ships.

FORMER BLACK slave Benjamin Spaulding, who married a free Native American named Edith and went on to have 10 children and 83 grandchildren, lived to become a prosperous man for his time. But there's no way that Spaulding, born in 1773, could have envisioned what's about to take place in Philadelphia in his name. An estimated 400 family members will converge Friday on the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn's Landing for a gathering so well-organized that it rivals some professional conventions.

The "world's richest nun" and the African slave are saints together. The link between St. Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia banking heiress, and St. Josephine Bakhita, tortured and branded as human property in the Sudan, was not lost on pilgrims and participants at the Vatican yesterday. Both were 19th century women who lived to pious and productive old age in the mid-20th century - worlds apart. And both were among those canonized yesterday. Saints from two other continents - Asia and Europe - also were canonized.

SALT LAKE CITY - A team of genealogists has found evidence that President Obama could be a descendant of an African slave - but not through the lineage of his black father, the most likely route researchers had followed and exhausted. The link, genealogists with Ancestry.com said Monday, came through an examination of his white mother's family history. "We were surprised and excited to make that connection," said Joseph Shumway, a member of the Utah-based Ancestry.com team. Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother was from Kansas.

The sobbing woman told a jury she was forced to be David Pepe's sex slave for three days in December 1997. She said she was raped at knifepoint, handcuffed, tied with a telephone cord and kept in a small plywood box in the basement of his Kensington house for up to 12 hours - until he wanted more sex. Before the lid was closed, she was forced to swallow cough medicine, she said. He told her it would make her relax. Pepe fed her hot dogs and water, she said. The woman testified that Pepe, 34, also known as David Wilson, placed a pillow and blanket in the box, then piled clothing on top, leaving only a tiny opening for air. "I lay there and cried," said the woman.

Five generations separate Elsie Styles-Harrison of Malvern and the ancestor who served as a slave in the White House. In the years between them, Paul Jennings, the property of President James Madison, became the subject of a passing reference. He had something to do with an attempted slave escape, an aunt mentioned to Styles-Harrison decades ago. It wasn't until she got her first computer that Styles-Harrison discovered the historic importance of her great-great-great-grandfather.

After all these re-enactments, the pageant still gets to me: Young Simon, perhaps 12 years old, on a forced march from Virginia to Kentucky, watching in helpless horror as his mother, several months pregnant, stumbles again and falls. The boy turns to help her, but is ordered back in line - ordered to leave the dearest person in the world to him to die like a dog on the trail. It's the last time Simon - my great grandfather - ever sees his mother. He never even knew her name.

The 20-year-old former "sex slave" of a now 72-year-old man asked the judge to "punish him for what he did to me. " "I didn't like what he did to me," she sighed yesterday. Alfredo Rodriguez, of Watkins Street near 4th, looked straight ahead, rubbing his chin. He said nothing. Common Pleas Judge Anthony J. DeFino then sentenced Rodriguez to three to six years in prison for rape and a series of other charges. "Just because he's 72 years old, I'm not going to give him a slap on the wrist and say go home," DeFino said.

Granville Burgess clearly remembers how he came to write Dusky Sally, the play that opens Wednesday at the Walnut Street Theater. "I was visiting some people and I said, 'I've got to write another play now. Does anyone have any ideas? A woman said, 'What about a play about Sally Hemings?' And I said, 'Who?' " The woman explained that Hemings was a slave who was Thomas Jefferson's mistress for 38 years. "I said, 'Wait a minute. I majored in American history and I never heard of this woman.