The Negro today faces a problem similar to that he encountered during the early days of slavery in this country, Oscar Handlin, Winthrop Professor of History, told the Association of African and Afro-American Students at Harvard and Radcliffe last night.

Although the Negroes were not the only group originally enslaved in the New World, Handlin explained, the others were able to gain their freedom, while special conditions made this impossible for the Negro. "This has happened again more recently," Handlin continued, in that other groups have ben able to advance more rapidly than the Negroes.

No Distinction Made

When Negroes were first brought to America, Handlin said, no racial distinction was made between them and such people as Irish and Welsh indentured servants. A whole generation passed, he said, before the greater cultural difference of the Negroes and the involuntary nature of their servitude caused them to be distinguished from other slaves, and it was not until the nineteenth century that the identity of "Negro" with "slave" was established.

Handlin explained that slavery in the United States was unique in that it considered the slave a commodity rather than a person, leading to a disregard for the slave's personal life. He attributed this to the fact that before 1820 slavery was assumed to be only a temporary situation.

The lecture, which was followed by as informal discussion, was the first in a series of seven on Negro protest movements in the Western hemisphere. Among the speakers planned for the future are Kenneth B. Clark, professor of Sociology at Rochester University, and Ira Roed, chairman of the department of Sociology at Haverford College.

Next Sunday, Carlos Russel of Liberator magazine will speak on protest movements of Latin American Negroes.

The series is designed to study "a facet of American history that has gone too long unrecognized and is often misunderstood" in an attempt to gain insight into the present civil rights struggle and discover "visible alternatives" for action today.