 
David Brion Davis
Harold Hongju Koh |
Two Yale faculty members are among the five individuals who will be honored with the second annual Amistad Freedom Awards in recognition of their commitment to promoting equality and justice.
David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, has been selected to receive the Josiah Willard Gibbs Award, while Harold Hongju Koh, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, has been chosen for the John Quincy Adams Award.
The Amistad Freedom Awards are presented by AMISTAD America, Inc. in five categories. The awards were scheduled to be given at the Amistad Freedom Awards and Friendship Ball, a gala fundraising event hosted by AMISTAD America, Inc. on Saturday, Sept. 22, but the event has been postponed until further notice due to the recent terrorist attacks.
AMISTAD America, Inc. is a national, nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to promote reconciliation and harmony among races through ownership and operation of the Freedom Schooner "Amistad." The ship, which serves as a floating classroom, is a replica of the Spanish schooner on which 53 Mende Africans were held captive as slaves until they staged a mutiny in an effort to win back their freedom.
The Josiah Willard Gibbs Award celebrates a Yale alumnus, faculty member or student who exhibits the qualities of Gibbs, a Yale scholar and linguist who worked to break the language barrier between the Amistad captives and their American supporters. After learning how to count in Mende, Gibbs traveled to the docks in New York City searching for someone who could understand and translate the language so the captives' story could be heard.
Davis, who is the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, is one of the world's preeminent historians of slavery. His major works include "The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture," for which he received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, and "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution," which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award and the National Book Award in 1976. Davis is currently working on "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation," a two-volume work that will conclude this series.
The John Quincy Adams Award celebrates people who have served as proponents or protectors of laws ensuring individual liberty. It is named in honor of the former U.S. president and lawyer, who defended the Mende Africans in court.
Koh served under President Bill Clinton as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. He is the author of more than 70 articles and several books on foreign policy and international human rights, including "Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights" and "The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair," which was selected by the American Political Association for the 1990 Richard E. Neustadt Award as the best book on an American presidency. Koh, who represented Haitian and Cuban refugees before the U.S. Supreme Court, has received numerous awards for his work to foster human rights, including six honorary degrees.
The other recipients of the Amistad Freedom Awards are Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabba, the president and minister of defense in Sierra Leone, West Africa, who will be given the Senge Pieh Award in recognition of his efforts to bring a lasting peace to war-ravaged Sierra Leone; William Blasé, president of Southern New England Telephone Company (the founding sponsor of AMISTAD America, Inc.), who will get the Louis Tappan Award in celebration of his support for education, diversity and philanthropic endeavors that foster positive change in the community; and the Reverend Bernice Powell Jackson, executive minister of the United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries and former representative in the United States to South African activist Bishop Desmond Tutu, who will receive the Sarah Margru Kinson Award in recognition of her own activism on behalf of civil rights, women's rights and human rights issues around the world.
For further information, call (203) 498-9000 or visit www.amistadamerica.org.
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