REGISTER AT: douglassday.org
Douglass Day is an annual celebration of Frederick Douglass' life and legacy, and now each year the organizers coordinate with archival collections across the country to transcribe and digitize historic Black collections to make them more accessible to educators and researchers, and support their historic preservation.
This year virtual transcribe-a-thon efforts will be held across the US to digitize the records of the Colored Conventions, specifically focusing on the Black women, and attendees of these events.
From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national levels. A cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century, these “Colored Conventions” brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights. The Colored Conventions anticipated the rise of the NAAACP and the Civil Rights Movement.
Participants preserved the legacy of the Colored Conventions movement through the records that they kept. Delegates produced “minutes,” or transcriptions of the meetings, which include role calls and reports from various committees, including committees on civil rights, the Black press, and education, to name just a few of the topics that arose at conventions. We also know about Colored Conventions through newspaper articles that reported on them. Minutes and newspaper articles are some of the historical documents that you will get to transcribe on Douglass Day 2022.
Black Women in the Colored Conventions Movement
We know that Black women played important roles in the Colored Conventions. They were at the podium and behind the scenes. Yet they were often left out of the official records or the newspaper reports. We are going to lift up their memories this year by challenging everyone to help us find clues to the important work these women did.
Transcribing helps us rediscover these histories of Black activism
The records from the Colored Conventions exist today in hundreds of different places across the country. Over the past ten years, a group at the University of Delaware and Penn State called the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) has worked to gather and digitize these records. The collections of the CCP are the first of a kind. We can study and learn about these histories in ways that were previously impossible.
We need help from everyone
Many of the files gathered by the CCP are still difficult to search or share. We are asking for help from everyone to transcribe the documents. Also, we will ask for your help to find the names of everyone who attended these conventions — and especially the names of Black women. Our work together will change the history of African Americans and the larger struggle for equality and civil rights. On behalf of future generations of teachers and students, we thank you for your contributions!
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