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Steve McQueen’s work on awards-season favorite 12 Years A Slave has caught the attention the world’s oldest human rights organization.

According to reports, the famed director was named an ambassador for Anti-Slavery International this Black History Month. The committee, which works to remind the world that slavery is not just a thing of the past, was set up in 1839 to lobby against the phenomenon.

McQueen accepted the honor in his hometown of London on Monday. “Right now, there are Solomon Northups in every region of the world who have been taken away from their families and placed in slavery,” he said at the charity’s headquarters. “I hope that, 150 years from now, a film will not be made about our ambivalence to slavery. We have to do something about it.”

12 Years A Slave, named Best Picture at the Golden Globes last month, tells the story of Northup. He was a free Black man from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.

Steve McQueen Named Ambassador Of Historic Anti-Slavery Organization  was originally published on hellobeautiful.com