On April 5, 2006 Sudan activist and former slave Simon Deng and a band of supporters completed an arduous 300-mile trek on foot from New York City to Washington, D.C. as part of the historic Sudan Freedom Walk. The three-week-long event was Simon's personal protest against the ongoing genocide and slave trade in Sudan — most notably, in the nation's western Darfur region, where more than 300,000 civilians have been slaughtered and over 2 million displaced since 2003 alone.