TO understand American history one must recognize the central role of slavery, says Dr. David Brion Davis, the Sterling professor of history at Yale and a Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar on slavery and abolition. Dr. Davis is the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the nation's first research center to focus on slavery in the New World, which was recently established at Yale. The centerwas endowed by two Yale graduates, Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, who share a passion for American history.
''We are emphasizing the centrality of slavery not only in American history but in the history of the modern world,'' said Professor Davis. ''It is not a marginal topic of something that happened a long time ago.'' He concurs with the historian and educator W. E. B. DuBois that the leading issue in the 20th century is the color line. ''He was right,'' Professor Davis said, and ''I believe it will remain an issue in the 21st century.''
The African slaves who were brought to North America beginning in the 1500's, ''in a sense, created the New World and made settlement possible,'' explained Professor Davis, who finds it troubling that many teachers portray slavery as purely a Southern phenomenon, a small aspect of the Civil War. ''It was absolutely the major cause of the Civil War,'' he declared.
Training for high school teachers will be offered by the center in an attempt to improve the quality of classroom presentations. Slave resistance is not widely understood and Professor Davis says he expects to disseminate more information about slaves' struggle for freedom.
Professor Davis is especially interested in the contradiction between America's celebrated ideals of democracy and freedom and the bitter price paid by millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants to make this possible for white males.Continue reading the main story
''Slavery has been from the beginning a strange paradox,'' he said. ''The New World was seen as a place of opportunity and new beginnings translated into the vision of the Declaration of Independence, but was combined with a kind of coerced labor that was dying out in Europe. And the first parts of Europe where slavery died out were Northwestern Europe -- England, Holland, France, Scandinavia -- the very nations that were major transporters of slaves.''
One of the tasks of the Gilder Lehrman Center will be awarding the annual $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, for the most outstanding book on slavery or abolition.
Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings has attracted national attention and will be the subject of a future conference. The first scheduled conference, next fall, is on the internal slave trade in the American South, Brazil and the British West Indies and the abolitionist response to this huge movement of people.
Despite the forced illiteracy of American slaves, abundant research material exists. ''We have more information on American slaves in the 19th century than any other working class in history,'' said Professor Davis. Scores of slaves escaped and told their stories, and the 1930's brought the creation of the Federal Writers Project, under the New Deal, which sent reseachers to interview thousands of elderly former slaves and produce oral histories.
In addition, foreign travelers recorded their observations and occasional conversations with slaves. And plantation owners often kept meticulous records. Some masters wanted slaves to read and the clergy backed this movement so slaves could read the Bible. These people were able to record their own stories.
When discussing his field of study, Professor Davis is careful to use the word ''issue'' rather than ''problem.'' He said, ''We have to be careful not to say it is a problem of blacks. For a long time people talked about the 'Negro problem' because they implicitly assumed that everything in America would be fine and dandy if we didn't have black people around.''
Those ideas were in vogue before the Civil War, with various schemes to deport or induce blacks to leave the United States on the grounds that black people really didn't belong in the United States. But Professor Davis says, ''One has to emphasize that they were here in the very beginning. Slaves came with Conquistadors as early as the 1500's. Free blacks accompanied Columbus.''
But American racism only worsened after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. ''Racism has been very persistent,'' Professor Davis points out. ''It has diminished since 1960's but it's by no means even close to disappearing.''Continue reading the main story