Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center Hosts Conference on Confronting Legacy of Slavery

Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition will hold its seventh annual international conference, titled “Repairing the Past: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery, Genocide and Caste,” October 27–29 at Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave.

Hosted with the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, the conference will explore the crossroads among historical knowledge, the obligation to remember and the necessity of seeking retrospective justice.

The conference will open at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday with welcoming remarks by Yale professor and Director of the GLC, David Blight. A keynote address, titled “The Continuing Significance of Reparations: Callie House and the Ex-Slave Pension Movement” will be delivered by Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

The conference’s six panels will cover a broad range of topics facing historians today including: “Slavery, Exploitation and the Philosophy of Reparations,” “Law, Memory and the Politics of Reconciliation, Atonement and Apology,” “American Slavery and the History of Reparations” and “Germany, Holocaust Memory and the Idea of Historical Justice.” Panelists come from an extensive assortment of historical perspectives and include Yale’s Stephen Pitti, author of “Bracero Justice: The Legacies of Mexican Contract Labor”; Ben Kiernan, the Whitney Griswold Professor of History and director of the Genocide Studies Program; Stuart Schwartz, the George Burton Adams Professor of History; and Gerald Jaynes, Director of Graduate Studies in African American Studies.

The conference will prompt a deeper examination of how 21st-century nations and cultures attempt to remember, reconcile and learn from traumatic events in their common histories. Additionally, panelists and conference-attendees will address issues about the obligations of those who endeavor to reconcile the convergence of knowledge, memory and justice.

Prior registration for the event is required. To register visit the website http://www.yale.edu/glc/justice/index.htm