Beginning with his breakthrough essay, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” published in 1968 by The Massachusetts Review, Professor Stuckey maintained that political and cultural studies of Africa must encompass people in North America and the West Indies.

He wrote that enslaved workers imported to those places from diverse tribes, with slavery as a unifying force, perpetuated and adapted their traditional music, dance, poetry and art to resist the efforts of slaveowners to destroy or demean that heritage, and that those traditions went on to imbue modern American culture.

That overlooked cultural history was evolving, he said, while in colleges as well as in the cotton fields “the besmirching of the African past” became pivotal to the process not only of enslaving blacks but of destroying their spiritual and psychological moorings.

“His article stood out as the harbinger of the new slavery studies that would be taken up in the next decade,” Prof. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, chairwoman of Harvard’s history department and president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, said in a statement after Professor Stuckey’s death.

In 1970, when “Through the Prism of Folklore” was included in an anthology of essays, Julius Lester, an author and professor, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Professor Stuckey had methodically made the case that in the long years of slavery the black spiritual — among other cultural tools, like the ring shout dance — “was a major weapon of resistance to that dehumanizing institution (which others have found only ‘peculiar’) and the principal means through which the slaves fashioned and maintained an identity separate from that which the slaveholders fought to impose upon them.”