On May 9, 1843, a Black delegation gathered for a two-day series of meetings in New York City and resolved to collaboratively write and publish a public call for a national convention of colored citizens. A committee of three writers drafted the call and approximately fifty signers from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania pledged support. The delegation identified the dearth of annual national conventions as a key issue preventing Black-led political organizing from having a stronger impact on the condition of Black people in the U.S. In the reprinted call appearing in minutes of the 1843 National Colored Convention, the signers argued:

Since we have ceased to meet together in National Convention, we have become ignorant of the moral and intellectual strength of our people. We have also been deprived of the councils of our fathers, who have borne the burden and heat of the day—the spirit of virtuous ambition and emulation has died in the bosoms of the young men, and in a great degree we have become divided, and the bright rising stars that once shone in our skies, have become partially obscured.

The call represents Black men’s increasing anxieties about the growing intellectual and organizational distance between senior figureheads and emerging leaders. The signers cite the eight years since the last national colored citizens convention was held in Philadelphia in 1835 as irrefutable evidence of this distance. And yet this call inadvertently creates another form of distance: by focusing on the politics of male leadership, the call truncates Black women’s ideological and economic contributions that also helped to sustain colored conventions’ interests, political viability and cultural influence.

I describe two instances where historical records either ignore (Black women) or misrepresent (Black communities, in general) lived reality. In 2015 the Colored Conventions Project launched online exhibitions to encourage our learning and meaningful exchange about the significance of the colored conventions movement to American political history. Using digital media as a critical lens, I sketch a portrait of Black intellectual cultures by clarifying links between the socio-economic character of Black women, communities and political organizing. I also illuminate the ways in which rich social histories can be charted through open-source digital media by taking as an example the online exhibit “Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention.” The exhibit highlights the economic and cultural assets of Black people as well as the narratives and initiatives connected to the convention. It especially highlights Black women’s often-underrepresented contributions to convention cultures. The exhibit brings attention to diverse forms of political expression captured in convention proceedings and newspapers while also placing important antebellum Black political conventions in a broader context of regional Black political activity.

More than a century before the digital age emerged, Black activists sought to translate a multitude of Black experiences into records about Black life that could answer the question: what is the condition of free Black Americans? For these Black thinkers, data describing individual and collective achievements forced readers to acknowledge Black Americans’ contributions to contemporaneous nation-building efforts. Departing from styles of biographical writing that cage Black women’s economic and political roles within patrilineal narratives about their husbands, fathers and brothers, the exhibit “Black Wealth” situates Black women as the leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs that their life stories prove them to be. Scholars have traditionally studied and characterized colored conventions with men as central points of entry into convention cultures and ideological debates. By moving Black women from the margins to the center of the exhibit, the Colored Conventions Project makes a crucial intervention in the historiography of the colored conventions movement. The exhibit’s tabulations depict a collective image of Black antebellum life taken from data reports presented by the convention’s Committee on the Condition of Colored People. By extrapolating and visualizing these reports, the project inserts Black-led, census-style reports into politics surrounding Black Americans’ struggles for power over self-determination. Working toward meaning-making in the digital age, this essay interrogates the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

Colored Convention Cultures: Black Women’s Economic Prosperity and Census-Style Reports        

Delegates of the 1843 national convention emphasized Black communities’ diverse labor and entrepreneurial pursuits, characteristics they thought would best communicate a diverse number of Black communities’ economic achievements and potential. Fifty-eight credentialed delegates met to debate various subjects before a lively audience. The men discussed delegates’ voting rights, regional favoritism, the role of Christianity in Black political organizing and the effectiveness of collective insurrection to securing civil liberties for oppressed Black people in the U.S. Many of the convention’s most celebrated Black leaders, including William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, James N. Gloucester, and Charles B. Ray, represented Massachusetts and New York. Indeed, this convention is best known for the heated debate that ensued when delegates voted on whether or not to endorse Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”—with Douglass leading the charge against endorsing Garnet’s radical call to arms and defeating its adoption by the slimmest of margins.

1. Delegate Attendance Trends at National Colored Conventions, 1830-1864. The minutes of the colored conventions movement offer many insights into Black mobility and geographically concentrated activities during the ante- and postbellum eras. This graph charts rates of delegate attendance at national conventions in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1864.

The convention’s publication committee captured and printed many of these leading Black men’s interventions, as did activist-themed newspapers such as The Cleveland Daily Herald, The Emancipator and Free American, and The Liberator. But what of Black women intellectuals and community leaders? Although women are seemingly invisible within the printed proceedings, the Colored Conventions Project’s larger mission is dedicated to highlighting women’s political and economic contributions. Thus, “Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention” focuses on the socio-economic histories of connected women such as Julia Williams Garnet, Elizabeth Gloucester and Dr. Sarah Marinda Loguen-Fraser. Their prosperity and activism furthered the convention’s principles and missions beyond delegate appointment. In one compelling example, an important member of Brooklyn’s Black bourgeoisie, Elizabeth Gloucester, amassed business holdings and a personal fortune that matches, and in many cases surpasses, that of the convention’s male celebrities.

Elizabeth Gloucester’s economic history—one glimmer in the archives of the Colored Conventions Project—prompts us to explore her activism and professional ties. Gloucester’s husband, James, hailed from a family known to many as a Black ministerial dynasty in Philadelphia’s free Black elite communities. An orphan upon her mother’s death, Elizabeth joined the Gloucester family while just a girl. She grew up in a thicket of activity among Philadelphia’s Black intelligentsia wherein Black religious and political cultures were tightly bound. During her climb to economic eminence in Brooklyn, Gloucester acquired several properties and businesses including second-hand clothing stores, a furniture store, and a boarding house known as Remsen House, which was nestled between Myrtle and DeKalb Avenues, a popular merchant district. As directress of and a fundraiser for the New York Colored Orphans Asylum, Gloucester donated significant sums to the home to further its educational goals and to improve the lives of impoverished children. Indeed, the businesswoman’s properties and organizational affiliates were deeply intertwined with a host of political activities and institutions: Underground Railroad sites, Black churches, literary societies, freedom parades, a women’s commerce and trade group. Gloucester’s economic history is an invaluable conduit by which we understand Black women’s integral roles in promoting the principles and missions of the 1843 national convention. Undoubtedly, Gloucester’s estate and occupations would have been prime evidence to support the 1843 delegation’s interest in validating Black communities’ social value and community development by publishing data reports in the pages of the proceedings.

Because we know that colored conventions were not historically discrete meetings, but were rather embedded in broader historical contexts involving many actors and events, the exhibit likewise highlights Black-led data reports. Convention organizers could only “hope that…every city, town, hamlet, and village [would] be represented as well as Literary and Benevolent Societies” at the five-day series of meetings. But delegates knew that enumeration could defy space, time, and racial bias; they also knew that the federal decennial census apportioned taxes and congressional representation. Even today as we struggle with the dilemma of racial bias in the “historical record” over 170 years later, we should increasingly seek out historical Black data repositories that challenge and complicate our understanding of American (political) history. Such repositories present a compelling opportunity for new investigations into Black data curation. This is especially significant in light of federal reports such as a 1918 Department of Commerce publication that confirms the bureau’s frequent misrepresentations of Black population trends prior to the thirteenth decennial census. The 1843 delegation seized an opportunity to dispel myths about Black people’s economic stagnancy by including statistical and qualitative reports that could reframe readers’ understanding of Black communities’ progress in America.

As James McCune Smith discovered after deftly sifting through the 1840 federal census, the U.S. government had published erroneous and blatantly fabricated calculations on the condition of Black people while simultaneously presenting the still-young federal census as a legitimate means by which Americans and global readers could construe an intelligent understanding of the nascent New World. Labor, educational attainment, family units, service, physical ability—each of these categories, among others, were thought to reflect the general ambition and progress of a young and vibrant nation. McCune Smith exposed incorrect calculations in the census’s population category for Deaf and Dumb, Blind and Insane Colored People, and exposed misleading interpretations of vital statistics on Black people. As the 1843 convention’s statistical reports suggest, some Black leaders viewed faulty calculations and resulting interpretations of the general condition of Black people as threats to free Blacks’ prosperity and uplift initiatives.    

Erroneous census records dangerously impaired Black mobility, undermined community building and seemed to render moot the advances Black leaders had made within their communities. Further, such records offered legislators and communities a rationale for discriminatory practices, promoting the idea that free Black populations were disproportionately insane, impoverished, rapidly decreasing, and thus degenerate. For these reasons and others, a number of northern states and western territories in antebellum America passed a series of laws that limited Black travel in and out of the state, that disallowed or restricted Black people’s ownership of land and chattel, that disallowed or restricted Black voting and court testimony rights, and that generally required free Blacks to meet onerous measures in order to live and work. For example, Ohio’s application of Black exclusion laws in 1829 proved an impetus for the colored conventions movement.

Falsified federal census records also threatened Black economic freedom during a time when many Black leaders believed that economic progress among the Black masses would be a ticket to gaining civil rights. How would ambitious Black entrepreneurs know where to settle to start a new business venture? How likely was it that talented Black teachers would travel to and seek out employment in a seemingly economically stagnant school district?

2. Reported Societies in New York, 1843. Black communities often organized and raised funds to support a host of societies that enriched Black communities’ educational, moral, political, and economic well-being. This graph enumerates the number and variety of New York societies that appear in the 1843 report of the Committee Upon the Condition of the Colored People, presented at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, N.Y. Cities without values reflect absent statistics in the report.

Thus, we should critically interrogate the 1843 convention delegation’s self-reporting efforts as responses to at least two conversations. They should be viewed in relation to racially discriminatory data collection practices apparent in federal censuses and the power they subsequently apportioned. They should also be viewed as responses to intra-communal concerns about Black people’s general elevation. The 1843 convention strategically appointed data collection leaders with access to pecuniary support and to socio-economically diverse Black populations. And, because political philosophy played an important role in data collection processes, these leaders undoubtedly needed to have the intellectual acumen to move reports from aggregation to publication. Elizabeth Gloucester’s husband, James, chaired the reporting Committee on the Condition of Colored People, which included Abner Francis, William Munro, Sampson Talbot, Theodore Wright, and W. H. Yancy. Organizers directed delegates to submit statistical and qualitative information about their constituents and later compiled and printed reports in the minutes. Black elected representatives might have asked simple, survey-style questions: What sort of work do you do? How much money do you earn per year? What types of societies host meetings? How many drunkards and morally degenerate people are among you? They also consulted local, state and private organizations’ statistical data. Black data collectors often lacked sophisticated skills in statistical analysis and contended with limited funding for data collection. Still, their reports accumulated and organized information about Black communities that the U.S. State Department would not gather until 1850. Their reports portrayed a more diverse image of Black free communities while also providing evidence of the sorts of intellectual inquiries that represented their view of free Blacks’ economic vitality.

Delegates initiated the 1843 statistical report with the lofty goal of a large-scale portrait of Black American life. They intended to collect information about Black communities’ character, divisions of labor, and state of well-being or disunion as they existed in the east, west, north and, perhaps most quixotic in ambition, the south. However, the 1843 statistical report ultimately provides occupational, population, organizational, and economic data only for three states: New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio. In relation to cities in the triumvirate states, the stats depict New York City as an organizational hub of numerous societies including men’s and women’s benevolent and literary societies, an educational society, and a public library. Mechanics, merchants, and agriculturalists are among occupations most represented in Albany, Buffalo, and Rochester, N.Y., and in New Bedford, Mass., and Columbus, Ohio. A related report on agriculture was also featured in the minutes of the 1843 national convention. It argues that numerous Black men and their families had excelled at community-building in Ohio, where they collectively owned thousands of acres of land, built schools and homes, and manufactured their own goods. These reports challenged contemporaneous political theories such as the notion that Black people lived longer (and thus better) within the institution of slavery than they had as free people, and that free Black men and women had not contributed to the nation’s economic and social well-being. The 1843 data reports enumerate the labor and social conditions representing what free Black northeastern and midwestern communities had achieved through entrepreneurial diversity and organizational achievement. This brief overview of a colored convention’s ties to Elizabeth Gloucester, a Black woman of incredible success, and its numerical and sociological reports, seeks to broaden what we know about Black informational enterprises and the broader debates to which they are connected.

We continue to confront a striking absence of Black voices and lived experience in historical records, so the onus is upon scholarly and public communities to critically examine and explore a more substantial history of America’s development. The Colored Conventions Project is leading the charge to bring buried histories of Black men’s and women’s political organizing to public audiences. We champion online exhibits as an important form of digital pedagogy. We collaborate with national and local teaching partners, student content contributors and the scholars featured in our forthcoming collected volume to promote innovative undergraduate and graduate research and exhibits. We have also benefited from a historic agreement with Gale, part of Cengage Learning Inc., to feature newspaper articles hosted in its databases. In many ways, the project’s collaborative nature is a reflection of the collaborative spirit so strongly embedded in cultures of the colored conventions themselves. 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Sarah Patterson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation examines Black intellectual cultures and ideals, particularly through the ways in which Black women’s political writing addresses social reform movements between 1856 and 1910. She is a co-coordinator for the Colored Conventions Project and will co-edit the collection Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age.            

Beginning in 1830 and continuing for decades after the Civil War, Black communities sent thousands of delegates to multi-day state and national colored conventions. There, representatives considered resolutions to advance educational and labor rights, voting and jury representation and the role of the Black press. They debated the utility of jobs in the service sector, the power of owning one’s own land and businesses, and how to best support the self-emancipated, the still enslaved and the newly freed. They gathered and disseminated data about Black occupations, property and institutional affiliations. Earnestly, and often angrily, they questioned whether or not this country would—or could—ever deliver on its democratic rhetoric when it came to a people its national founders and founding documents disparaged and degraded. What options could advocacy and emigration offer, they deliberated over and again, if that answer were no.

Unlike any other nineteenth-century effort for racial justice, colored conventions speak to the ongoing issues Black people face as disenfranchised denizens of the United States and as global, diasporic, citizens of the world. The abolitionist movement, and in the U.S., the Underground Railroad, are the lenses through which scholars and the public almost habitually view nineteenth-century movements to advance Black freedom. Often viewed as symbols of interracial cooperation led by courageous whites and a select group of individual Black abolitionists, both abolition and the UGR formally end with slavery’s official demise, literally closing the doors of the institutions and print organs that supported their work as the Civil War waned and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed. Public narratives often repeat these tropes of white bravery and leadership and of interracial cooperation. The Black agency and the intra-group cooperation, complexity and heterogeneity that the colored conventions display across region, status, denomination, decades and interests, rarely take center stage.

The Colored Conventions movement shares the chronological genesis of the antebellum movement against Southern slavery. But though it begins in 1830 at Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel AME Church, it swells rather than stops in 1865. Indeed, in the churches and halls in which they met, attendees fleshed out issues that reached well beyond the thematic and temporal boundaries of slavery; they insisted on their claim to dignity and to full human and citizenship rights. They demanded that their children be free not only to survive the violence meted out by the state and its recognized citizens—but also to thrive and prosper. Far from being centuries removed from the pressing concerns of today’s Black organizers, parents, community leaders, and laborers, the scenes and scenarios discussed at these conventions speak directly to the value of Black lives and to the continuously necessary assertion that they do, in fact, matter, then as now.

When delegates to the 1865 “State Convention of the Colored People of South Carolina” met on Charleston’s Calhoun Street, they gathered “for the purpose of deliberating upon the plans best calculated to advance the interests of our people [and] to devise means for our mutual protection.” Convening in the heart of the Confederacy less than a year after its fall, among their first orders of business was a motion to appoint “doorkeepers” and a Sergeant of Arms. This six-day meeting was held in Zion Church, which stood “nearly opposite” to what was slated to become—that very month—Mother Emanuel AME Church’s first new building since it was forced underground after the famous revolt planned by one of its founders, Denmark Vesey. “Resolved,” they declared, “that we will insist upon the establishment of good schools for our children throughout the state.” In their “resolve,” they echoed and anticipated the issues that resonate in that state, indeed that still resound quite deeply, as we mourn the death of the Emanuel 9 and reflect on the ongoing fight for educational, legal, bodily and representational justice in South Carolina—and well beyond it—in 2015.

The Beginning of the Colored Conventions Project: Turning a Class Assignment into a Leading Digital Humanities Project

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) started in a graduate class in 2012 when I assigned each student a delegate from the 1859 New England Convention and asked each to create a Facebook page, upload pictures and friend other delegates after unearthing, in relatively new databases, newspaper coverage, publications and images most of us had never seen (fig. 1).

As J. Sella Martin, George Allen, Jermain Loguen, William Wells Brown, and George Downing made their twenty-first-century appearance on social media, the minutes and delegates who attended that convention came alive: we could examine the frontispieces of their narratives, log their travel and see how their personal and professional circles overlapped. (This was before Facebook abandoned the sophisticated maps and apps that visualized social networks and geographic circuits.) After their seminar presentations, Sarah Patterson and Jim Casey, now CCP’s co-coordinators, asked questions that helped launch the project. Sarah posed, as politely as she could to a new faculty member known for making Black women’s roles in the nineteenth century central to her intellectual enterprise, “why replicate the exclusionary biases embedded in the minutes when we know that the history itself was richer and more complex?” What can we do to push against and resist the gendered limits of the archive—the minutes we were mining—she asked? Jim Casey pointed out that Facebook is a commercial site, not an educational one; as soon as its algorithms discerned that William C. Nell and Amos Beman weren’t consumers, but that their creators were, it would shut down those pages. This was too interesting not to continue, he added; why not shift to a platform not driven by capital production?

The class voted. We moved to Omeka. The semester ended. We continued to meet weekly. Recruited a design professor. Brought in undergraduate researchers. Added graduate students from across disciplines. Registered a domain name. Partnered with librarians. Created research guides. Located more minutes. Crafted a curriculum. Brought in national teaching partners. Continued working on top of our regular loads. Stopped sleeping. Convened a grants committee. Secured funding. Compensated student researchers and graduate leadership well. Facilitated a transcription initiative. Brought on a historic churches and community liaison. Partnered with the AME Church. Created exhibits. Brought on a computer scientist. Launched a major database. Crafted a generous permissions agreement with Gale Cengage. Became the subject of an NPR video.

Soon coloredconventions.org (fig. 2) was the first place to digitally bring together convention records that had appeared beforehand only in rare and out-of-print volumes or in repositories that had never made them available. In the three years since that assignment, almost a thousand students have been exposed to the conventions and engaged in original research writing cultural biographies about the locations in which they met, the songs conveners sang, associated women and the delegates themselves. In spring 2015, we held what we believe is the first symposium that took the convention movement as its focus—(think, if you will, of how many have been held on the Underground Railroad and abolition movements). We are now editing a volume, Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age, that will fully interface with coloredconventions.org. Digital exhibits complementing the essays will be included in this collection, the first to address the movement, are also on the docket. We hope the database the project is launching will likewise support scholarly and independent research for decades to come.

Mapping Connections, Remapping Archives

The conventions themselves highlight the activism and interconnections between known and relatively unknown Black reformers, from the giants of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to those who carried Black activism into the twentieth century. AME founder Bishop Richard Allen lobbied to have the 1830 inaugural convention held at Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel Church; and Abraham Shadd attended all five of the early conventions. Mid-century icon Henry Highland Garnet at 25 attended his first New York state convention in 1840 and continued to be present at a score of others until just five years before his death in 1882; Frederick Douglass, who made his debut at the famous 1843 national convention, was equally active. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the last of the AME Church titans known as the “Four Horsemen,” called for a National Colored Convention as late as 1893. Newspapers such as California’s Mirror of the Times sometimes were founded in direct response to convention calls. And editors such as Douglass, Martin Delany and the Colored American’s Rev. Charles Ray were attendees alongside the era’s most prominent businessmen and pastors. Sometimes women appear directly in the minutes, such as the Provincial Freeman’s Mary Ann Shadd Cary, whose presence was debated before her speech at the 1855 Colored National Convention (it was reported in papers some twenty years after her father’s last appearance as a regular delegate). Author and activist Frances E.W. Harper gave the keynote at Delaware’s 1873 State Convention (fig. 3).

Despite this richly networked print and activist history, scholarship often reproduces the tropes that emerge from historiographical choices and archival structures that replicate neo-liberal modes of domination, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History brings home. For example, Rev. Charles Ray’s online biographies stress that he “dedicated most of his life to the abolitionist movement” and highlight the opportunities abolitionists (read: white patrons) opened up for him. This despite his role as an editor of the Colored American, as a prominent pastor, and his more than twenty years living and working beyond slavery’s official demise. Likewise, Douglass’s life often unfolds in relation to white collaborators William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Griffiths, and Ottilie Assing. In biography after biography, article after article, Douglass is embedded in the social relations that reproduce his connections to whites—when he also spent many important hours traveling to, and also in, the Black spaces in which the Colored Conventions movement is grounded. Mifflin and Jonathan Gibbs, brothers who excelled in the roles of newspaper editors, businessmen, reverends—each later became prominent Reconstruction state elected and nationally appointed officials—met or strengthened their relations to Douglass and figures crucial to their lives at conventions. As young men they accompanied Douglass to Rochester, where he became a mentor and patron. With antebellum abolition taking center stage, however, these stories of Black connection and Black sponsorship are relegated to the margins.

Creating a New Archive: Recovering Women’s Roles

Placing colored conventions at the center of historical discussions about African American justice and the nineteenth century raises the danger of women being shunted off to the margins if only in the name of fidelity to extant records—the minutes themselves. But the Colored Conventions Project’s mission, like the symposium it hosted, deliberately highlights women’s roles as we also interrogate the definitions of public and domestic space in relation to social and political networks. Early Black subjects participated in “shadow politics” in “the mimicry of formal political activity in black-controlled institutions,” as Richard Newman defines it. To modify the description, they participated in a “parallel politics,” that is, in a political practice actualized in the face of exclusion, derision, and violence at worst, and ambivalent and uneven access at best. The antebellum convention movement readied thousands upon thousands of convention delegates, and those to whom reports were read or disseminated, to actualize the post-War promise of democracy. Likewise, Black women were adept practitioners of a politics of influence outside of formal coordinates of power and inclusion, as Elsa Barkley Brown has made clear. It’s useful to broaden the spatial contexts of convention goers from the halls and organizations from which they were sent and in which they met to also include the question: “Where did they stay and what did they eat?” as Psyche Williams-Forson did in her Colored Conventions Symposium paper. This angle of vision inserts (hundreds of) women and children back into the political equation, recognizing the overlapping, augmented, and accreted spheres of activity and intellectual labor that happened in domestic spaces Williams-Forson redefines as “political meeting places before, during, and after the convention day” (fig. 4).

Tracing Roots, Forging Legacies and Today’s Changing Same

Though the genesis of this project, like the inauguration of the Colored Conventions movement itself, is clear, it doesn’t end as much as it streams into rich tributaries that flow from it. In the nineteenth century, the National Association of Colored Women, the Niagara movement, and the NAACP all can trace roots from the rich precedent (and in some moments, concurrent work) of the Colored Conventions. Later convention/association activists such as Frances E.W. Harper and Rosetta Douglass Sprague emerged from families that were active, or who were active themselves, in earlier conventions. W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the Niagara movement and the NAACP, was a grandchild of Othello Burghardt, who was a delegate from Great Barrington, Mass., to the 1847 national convention. As the Colored Conventions Project seeks to identify as well as make public and searchable more (and particularly later) conventions, we also grapple with larger questions about convention contours and contexts which inform whether or not the decades of meetings have a defined “ending,” what sorts of the many (Black education, Black Republican, Black labor) conventions “count” for the purposes of this project, and whether or not they constitute a movement. What is clear is that the Colored Conventions Project is committed to making available the decades of Black organizing involved in this effort because this activism directly speaks to issues that occupy today’s movements, today’s concerns, today’s changing same. I wrote this during the weeks that mark the murder and day-after-day burials of the Emanuel 9.

Why embark on this digital project as Black people again must ask whether or not—in our everyday lives—the masses can be included in the broader body politic at this late date, while evidence mounts that the answer is still “no” (fig. 5).

This project is dedicated to recovering the history of the Colored Conventions movement and its participants as they advanced Black-visioned, Black-executed efforts that demanded that Black lives and Black equality and Black dignity matter. What we continue to learn from these minutes, from this movement, speaks across time and place, speaks to today’s violence and the need for perpetual mourning and movement-building in ways that make them relevant and resonant despite their obscurity, indeed despite their all but erasure as a major force in contemporary history and historiography. We #SayTheirNames as a commitment not just to healing but also to recovery that includes historical and activist redress.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

P. Gabrielle Foreman, faculty director of the Colored Conventions Project, is Ned B. Allen Professor of English and professor of history and Black studies at the University of Delaware. She is finishing a book called The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Poetry, Performance and Material Culture. She will also co-edit the collection Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age.

This piece narrates the Colored Conventions Project’s work to transcribe, catalogue, and visualize the minutes of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions. I describe the CCP’s public and collaborative process, but this account does not mean to be prescriptive or formulaic. Our experiences offer an example of how digital collections can become a common space where public audiences can collaborate in meaningful ways and fuel innovative research. Transcribing, cataloguing, visualizing: the processes of public digital history compel us into ever more intimate and wide-ranging knowledge of the conventions.

Recognizing the uses and limits of the convention minutes

As Curtis Small describes in his piece for this roundtable, the project’s collection of Colored Conventions minutes provides unprecedented ease of access to these rare texts. In 2014, as our project developed, we grew increasingly aware that the digital reproductions of the minutes remained difficult to read or search. The minutes needed to be transcribed to make them not only reliably searchable but amenable to large-scale textual analysis.

What we initially perceived as issues of aesthetics (Does it fit the look and feel of our site?) and usability (Is it easy to use?) evolved into questions about access and authority. We worried about discouraging transcribers.

To transcribe the minutes, we considered a wide range of options. Double-keying the minutes into a word processor far exceeded the project’s capacities and desires, so we looked at Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. The range of options for those of us without large budgets or advanced skill sets includes Adobe Acrobat, ABYY FineReader, or any of a variety of Websites that provide free or cheap PDF-to-plain-text conversion. Unfortunately, all of these OCR tools struggled with the eccentricities of nineteenth-century typography in even the highest possible quality images. In our technical challenges, however, we recognized an opportunity. Just as the delegates back then met in public spaces to create the minutes together—with resolutions, songs, and speeches—so too might we transcribe the minutes online with as large and diverse a community as possible.

Transcribe Minutes

We began building Transcribe Minutes in 2015 as a new initiative to create high-quality texts by engaging multiple publics in our work. We joined forces with the University of Delaware Library to build Transcribe Minutes. After reviewing a number of platforms using Ben Brumfield’s guide to collaborative transcription tools, we chose a free, Omeka-compatible tool called Scripto. Scripto follows after most crowdsourcing platforms by breaking a large goal (transcribing an entire document) into smaller tasks (transcribing a single page at a time). As we now invite any and all to help us transcribe the minutes, volunteers can quickly and easily find pages to work on.

Over a six-month development process, we worked with our partners at the UD Library to navigate a range of questions at the nexus of public history and editing. What we initially perceived as issues of aesthetics (Does it fit the look and feel of our site?) and usability (Is it easy to use?) evolved into questions about access and authority. We worried about discouraging transcribers. Should we require them to register for accounts? How much could we ask in editorial markup? Considering our variety of intended audiences and analyses, how faithful to the historical documents should the transcriptions be? All of these questions were undergirded by the security and spam threats that could (and do) try to disrupt our site.

The interface for Transcribe Minutes reflects our efforts to credit and support the transcribers’ contributions. We require user accounts to prevent spam but mainly to credit the transcribers as co-creators of the transcribed minutes. As in figure 1, we populate each page (where helpful) with rough drafts generated by Acrobat so that volunteers can improve rather than create transcripts. These decisions, and the editorial principles expressed in our Advanced Instructions on Transcribing, aim to make it easy for volunteers to contribute substantively.

Public Collaboration with the African Methodist Episcopal Church

Just as the organizers of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions depended on the strength of African American churches, so has the CCP today. The Colored Conventions originated at Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia in 1830 and AME churches hosted many conventions as far away as California and as late as the 1890s. Given the large number of conventions hosted by AME churches and the AME Church’s historical and contemporary importance, we envisioned a natural partnership facilitated by the Historic Church and Community Liaison we brought in, Denise Burgher. Denise and our project director, Gabrielle Foreman, engaged the AME’s national leadership and worked with the indefatigable AME national Historiographer for the Lay, Pamela Tilley. The AME recruited an army of transcribers with extraordinary energy and commitment, and an understanding of the links between the AME Church and generations of African American leadership and activism. As of this writing in June 2015, together we have transcribed over 1,200 pages from forty-one conventions (and counting). These texts—and those to follow—will be easier to read, search, and share thanks to the efforts of the transcribers from the AME Church. By creating these texts, our partnership further enables the CCP’s experiments with digital research methods for illuminating the lives of hundreds and thousands of important but forgotten nineteenth-century African Americans.

Cataloguing Collaboratively

Once Transcribe Minutes was underway, we redoubled the work of searching for minutes and soon identified more than sixty additional conventions. In response to our rapidly growing collection, project members Jordan Howell and Molly Olney-Zide developed a catalogue of convention records. The catalogue benefited from an interdisciplinary conversation on matters familiar to librarians—including cataloguing, controlled vocabularies, and matching OCLC numbers—and to researchers—sorting out the conventions from among the many overlapping but distinctly different meetings of organizations related to abolition, temperance, education, and labor. That catalogue has proven invaluable for both ongoing research and subsequent efforts to preserve our digital files in the University of Delaware’s institutional repository, UDSpace, to ensure long-term availability.

The Amplifications and Silences of the Conventions Database (CoDa)

The research advantages of the catalogue of conventions inspired us to begin building a relational database of our project’s growing array of information. The Convention Database (CoDa), which we will make available online, provides information on the many people, places, and publications of the conventions. Using the accurate texts generated by Transcribe Minutes, we began systematically gathering our data by compiling the names of convention delegates through a two-pass method using the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer followed by the painstaking work of manually checking and adding any missing names. We are working slowly through the data using a tool called OpenRefine to attend to the messy initials, misprints, typos, and false matches. Additionally, building the database requires encoding the project’s conceptual work into the relationships between the data. It is a slow and deliberative process of dialogue between the project’s leadership, librarians, and Rashida Davis, a computer scientist who recently joined the CCP.

The CoDa thus far contains approximately 3,000 names from sixty-three conventions. Those numbers may double as we obtain more and more records, particularly those from Southern postbellum conventions where delegates often numbered in the hundreds. When public, the CoDa will provide additional information about many delegates’ and connected women’s lives, professions, churches, and travels. The seductive scale of the CoDa makes it important, though, that we remember that the minutes were highly political, mediated documents. Women’s key roles are largely absent from the minutes, but we do not wish to reproduce these historical silences. How can a database account for the conditions of historical silences? Simple categories, and database tables, are often not enough. From a practical perspective, it would be much easier to create a separate database table for the many faint traces of women in the minutes. Instead we need to restructure the central organizing category of “Delegates” in the CoDa to become “People” so that users will encounter “a lady” (Philadelphia, 1832), “One Hundred Ladies” (Schenectady, 1844), or “the ladies of Sacramento” (Sacramento, Calif., 1855) in search results alongside more familiar names like George T. Downing or Henry Highland Garnet. (All this and more are viewable on a map: “Women in the Conventions.”) The questions about gender are yet another example of the deep conceptual issues often implicit in technical questions about database structures, menus, and more that arise in the process of building historical websites.

Social Networks of the Colored Conventions

While we account for the richness of individual and lived experiences, the database allows us to ask larger questions about the social dynamics that emerged in the conventions. Even seemingly basic information—convention dates and delegates’ residences—enables us to ask wide-ranging and complex questions. Can we perceive patterns of the mobility of African American leaders throughout the nineteenth century? What kinds of communities emerged in the conventions as delegates attended meetings together, served on committees together, and co-wrote reports and addresses? Did certain unheralded individuals help bridge dispersed communities? Figure 2 is a prototype that visualizes the antebellum national conventions (blue dots) and delegates (red dots). While we should resist the temptation to draw any final conclusions from such graphs, these digital tools enable us to raise these broader questions that, in turn, invite many more specific questions that return us to the minutes and the archives.

Or we might take up other networked perspectives, such as a graph (fig. 3) of the conventions as linked by shared delegates.

For example, figure 3 might prompt us to ask questions that spark further conversation and research. How do we explain some of these strong connections that do not correspond to geography or reach across professions, religious denominations, or even different historical periods? Frederick Douglass attended conventions across five decades—perhaps the longest of anyone—with some who had known Richard Allen and others who would know W. E. B. Du Bois. Or, to take a broader example, we might study the links between 1830s and 1840s Pennsylvania state conventions, 1850s California state conventions, and Reconstruction-era national conventions in the South to glimpse a pattern of mobility for some African Americans in the nineteenth century. The entanglement of conventions and Black periodicals stands out as another arena of exciting opportunities for continued archival research guided by social network analysis. These questions are only a modest sample of the many ways that approaching the conventions as a source of historical, if fragmented, data can spark new conversations around opportunities for archival research in the years to come.

Next Collective Steps

Our process of transcribing and exploring the minutes has been shaped by the public and collaborative nature of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions. We seek to build networked learning communities at each step that include and highlight the contributions of women and people of color. Looking ahead, we can only hope to contribute to a growing conversation about the dearth of diversity in the digital humanities by continuing to build partnerships that push us to explore the history of the Colored Conventions in evolving ways. As we look next to collaborative annotated editions of the conventions, new curriculum for college and church groups, and formal academic articles and books, there is much work to be done and plenty of room for new partners.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Jim Casey, a co-coordinator of the Colored Conventions Project, is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware. He is writing a dissertation on the evolution of editorship in mass-market and African American periodicals during the mid-nineteenth century. He will also co-edit the collection Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age. 

During the past three years I’ve had the opportunity of working collaboratively with the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), a dedicated team of scholars, students, and library professionals whose goal has been to unlock the history of the Colored Conventions movement that for decades has been relegated to the pages of long out-of-print texts or buried within the millions of pages reproduced by the Google Books Library Project, the Internet Archive, and similar mass digitization projects.   The CCP is a highly diverse working group with respect to ethnicity, age, scholarly discipline, professional expertise, and educational attainment. The work of the project is carried out by many—from first-year college students to endowed professors—and while we have varying levels of knowledge about African American history and culture, one thing that challenges us all are the complexities presented by intellectual and physical property rights within the context of a digital humanities project. Rather than be daunted by copyright issues, we’ve tried to embrace them and seize teaching moments as they arise.

The open access movement, which is gaining significant traction in the academic community, highlights the merits of authors making their work freely available on the Internet and emphasizes the benefits of increased readership.

To be sure, anyone building a Website needs to have a working knowledge of copyright, but for a project such as the CCP that regularly works with issues pertaining to race, class, and gender, copyright and intellectual property rights (i.e. copyright, patents, and trademarks) take on broader significance. Too often copyright discussions focus on specific disputes while ignoring larger questions as to how knowledge and ideas are created and expressed, which ideas are protected, and which are denied such protection. Julie Cohen and Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, along with other legal scholars and social science theorists, have developed a body of literature that calls into question the neutrality of many legal assumptions pertaining to Black cultural expression. For example, Caroline Picart in Critical Race Theory and Copyright in American Dance: Whiteness as Status Property examines why ballet is more easily copyrighted than African American dance forms that are said to be derived from social dance steps, which are excluded from copyright protection. Richard Schur’s Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law discusses the courts’ shortcomings in making sense of hip hop music’s liberal use of parody and musical sampling. Are such uses transformative, one of the measures of fair use of copyrighted material? Schur further questions why Alice Randall had to legally defend her creative use of Margaret Mitchell’s characters in writing The Wind Done Gone, a novel stripped of romantic ideas about the antebellum South that reinterprets Gone with the Wind from an African American perspective. Noted critical race theorist Richard Delgado says of Schur’s Parodies of Ownership: “Whites used to own blacks. Now, they accomplish much the same thing by insisting that they ‘own’ ownership. Blacks shouldn’t let them. A culture that makes all artists play by its rules will end up controlling new ideas and stifling change.”

The educational venues for CCP to engage copyright issues are many: formal classroom settings at the University of Delaware where the conventions are being taught as units within English and History Department courses; the classrooms of CCP’s national teaching partners from Texas to California to Pennsylvania, and weekly project meetings comprising paid and volunteer students, alumni, librarians, and professors. We also wrestle with questions of copyright within our online community using Basecamp, the project management software we use to archive discussions and internal documents. As one might imagine, undergraduates undertake project work with motivation and enthusiasm, and many are passionate about creating work with a larger, long-term imprint; a few see their research as an assignment they must complete to gain a reasonable grade in their course. Most—and this is especially true of project members working outside the classroom—embrace the work enthusiastically and see it as an opportunity to build on what is often a very meager offering of African American history provided in high school curricula. Further, they find it empowering to know that their research, which often includes wonderful digital images freely available on the Internet, might be published on the CCP Website and used to advance our collective understanding of the condition of African Americans, both free and enslaved, during the nineteenth century. They are often stunned by convention goers’—and related women’s—achievements, mobility, and commitment. Why, they ask over and again, didn’t I know this? For those African American students unfamiliar with the Colored Conventions movement and the fight that African American men and women made for Black rights during the nineteenth century, the research is especially empowering and liberating. Students are incredibly eager to publish what for them and many scholars is newly discovered historical information. It’s vitally important that the CCP’s professionals urge those students to take the time to consider their legal right to do so.

While undergraduate students have very uneven knowledge of this period of African American history, their knowledge of intellectual property rights and license agreements is virtually nonexistent. They certainly are aware of the concept of academic honesty and the necessity to properly credit others’ ideas and employ good citation practices. Yet even students with a general understanding of copyright are perplexed by the limitations that exist on the use of material made freely available on the Internet. Perhaps more baffling are restricted uses of materials found online that were originally created before 1922 and are now in the public domain. It becomes the challenge of the project’s faculty and professional staff to harness students’ sometimes unbridled enthusiasm to bring forth newly found historical items, to clarify the sometimes murky matter of legal rights, and to create opportunities to teach students about copyright. The project’s graduate students, who themselves are in the process of writing dissertations and articles, are especially fascinated by discussions that juxtapose authors’ rights with publishers’ rights.

         The open access movement, which is gaining significant traction in the academic community, highlights the merits of authors making their work freely available on the Internet and emphasizes the benefits of increased readership, easy online sharing, and more frequent citation. As Richard Schur points out, such arguments often incorrectly assume a level playing field among authors without recognizing that some authors, to overcome perceived racial bias, are particularly anxious to publish in their discipline’s most prestigious journals, even if it means assigning their individual rights to the journal. Similarly, graduate students are sometimes cautioned against placing their dissertations into an open access repository because it may deter publishers from offering them contracts for their work. Despite these cautionary tales, the Colored Conventions Project—as a collective endeavor composed of work from hundreds of today’s students coupled with the powerful voices of nineteenth-century African American activists—is strongly committed to producing work that is open to all readers. While protected by copyright, the CCP site will be licensed under Creative Commons with the BY-NC-SA license that “lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.”

Dating items, especially images, and distinguishing derivative works from original works of art can be a particularly perplexing task for student researchers. For example, let us take a particular photograph made of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a forthright critic of national anti-Black policies, the first Black woman newspaper editor in North America and a native Wilmingtonian whose connections to Delaware made her a person of special interest. A student researcher found a nice rendering of Cary on a commercial Website and offered it for publication on the CCP Website. The site where the student found the drawing provided cryptic information on the artist and no date of the image. Further research by the CCP team leaders determined that the image was a contemporary drawing made by illustrator Christian Elden, that it was indeed copyright-protected, and that he had marked this territory in no uncertain terms. “Don’t steal images,” his site warned, “or I will slap you silly with legal problems.” The project, not wanting to be slapped silly, opted to instead use a nineteenth-century image that we were able to identify within the collections of the National Archives of Canada.

The project could have opted to contact Elden, secure permission to publish the drawing and pay appropriate license fees, but considerations regarding project resources (staff and monetary) brought us to instead select the original photograph. Choices such as these have allowed project members to engage in artistic decisions facing all exhibition curators—the necessity to balance content with design within the constraints of time, money, and space.    

Because they are in the public domain, many nineteenth-century materials have been digitized by commercial entities and compiled into proprietary databases. When libraries purchase access to such databases, they sign strict vendor license agreements regarding their use. CCP staff members have had to explain to student researchers that when dealing with public domain materials found in proprietary databases, signed license agreements are binding legal contracts that take precedence over copyright law, and concepts such as “fair use” or “transformative use” don’t neatly pertain. Terms negotiated vary from institution to institution, so a necessary first step is to become familiar with those terms and convey them to student researchers. After initiating a dialogue with library staff regarding license agreements, CCP members found librarians eager to join them in discussions with publishers about publication rights.

Researchers must also consider the rights of property holders, i.e. libraries and archives that own rare and unique materials, since as the owners of the physical material they may determine who can access material and how it may be used. Repositories of cultural materials are generally enthusiastic supporters of digital humanities projects such as CCP, but do want to ensure that resulting publications/Websites are properly attributed. While richly illustrated library and archival Websites showcase unique research materials of value to digital humanities projects, online exhibitions are costly to build and maintain. Researchers seeking digital images of materials should not be surprised if owning institutions require them to pay reproductions fees. Digital humanities projects will likely find nonprofit institutions with strong educational missions to be supportive allies, so complying with use policies and guidelines poses no significant barriers to scholarship.

Previous generations of scholars, when seeking to reproduce or reuse materials, had only two parties to contact: copyright holders and physical property owners. Scholars today may have a third party to contend with—the owner of the digital object. Commercial sites such as Google, which may own neither the original object nor its copyright, do claim ownership to the digital object and therefore control its use. Use of transcribed text, however, is an allowable exception permitted by Google. Materials provided through interlibrary loan pose special challenges since the source of an item may not be obvious. For example, some license agreements permit libraries to loan the content of a commercial database, but further reproduction is prohibited.

Individual scholars may find that working collaboratively with digital humanities projects such as the CCP gives them greater backing to negotiate with publishers for various rights. The Colored Convention Project, working in conjunction with the University of Delaware Library and Gale Cengage Learning, has arrived at a mutually beneficial agreement whereby select items from the Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers database may be hosted on coloredconventions.org. The agreement allows the CCP to showcase visually intriguing items that complement convention minutes: announcements calling for delegates to attend upcoming conventions, ads outlining key convention resolutions, and letters to the editor giving added voice to Black delegates, speakers, and attendees. Highlighting such items at coloredconventions.org allows researchers and librarians to better appreciate the tremendous value of such databases to nineteenth-century African American scholarship, thereby driving use and sales, which ultimately benefit the vendor.

What then are the “best practices” of a digital humanities project in light of the tangled world of rights—copyrights, property rights (digital and physical rights), and license agreements? First and foremost is the obligation to educate not only student researchers but all team members on the importance of staying abreast of rights associated with the use of cultural properties. Second, we must attempt to put in place a triage system whereby materials are scrutinized for rights clearances before they are hosted. Also, we should try to sequester materials until all rights have been secured and practice due diligence in identifying rights holders and citing materials. We should also work with librarians and database vendors to secure amended license agreements that permit appropriate publication. Scholars reap no benefits from databases that cannot sustain modern forms of scholarly production, and vendors may face a declining market should they fail to recognize this. It is in the best interest of both scholars and publishers to work out agreements whereby materials may be used fairly and incorporated into new forms of digital scholarship. As James G. Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University, has eloquently argued, librarians and faculty are well-positioned to serve as strong advocates for the public interest in intellectual property, and with respect to fair use and exceptions to copyright, we should “re-commit to the education of our campuses, to political advocacy, and to collective risk taking.”

Digital humanities projects provide unique opportunities for faculty to teach students about ever-transitioning intellectual property rights, and for all team members to learn more about the responsibilities of being good stewards of cultural property. Working with publishers, libraries, and archives, digital humanities projects can work to liberate African American history from obscurity and misinterpretation and can shine light on movements such as the colored conventions movement—a movement solidly devoted to education, political advocacy, and collective risk taking.

Further Reading

For an excellent discussion of copyright law and its relation to the creative process, see Julie E. Cohen, “Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice” (accessed on September 29, 2015). For a fuller discussion of intellectual property and Black creative expression, see Caroline Joan Picart, Critical Race Theory and Copyright in American Dance: Whiteness As Status Property (New York, 2013) and Richard L. Schur, Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2009).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Carol A. Rudisell is a librarian at the University of Delaware Library where she serves as the subject specialist for history, African American studies, women’s studies and several other interdisciplinary areas. She currently edits the African American section of Magazines for Libraries. Working with the Colored Conventions Project since 2012, she has advised student researchers and served on the project’s grants committee.

The minutes of Colored Conventions constitute one of the most important bodies of primary sources in African American history. The Colored Conventions Project website has brought together a large number of these documents for the first time ever. The necessary work of locating, scanning, uploading, cataloging, and transcribing builds upon the complex print history of the movement. This article offers an overview of the ways in which convention proceedings came into print in the nineteenth century, with the ultimate goal of demonstrating why the work of the Colored Conventions Project is vitally important for historians and for the rest of us.

The Importance of Print to the Movement

A resolution from the 1855 Colored Men’s State Convention in Troy, New York, proclaims, “This Convention strongly recommend(s) to the colored citizens to withhold their support directly and indirectly from all public journals that make it a point to misrepresent us as a people and the world but to use all means in their power to aid on the circulating of such papers as are ready and willing to do us justice.” The last part of this quote points to the well-known technological innovations that multiplied the production of newspapers and ephemeral documents in the nineteenth century. Scholars have shown how African Americans took full advantage of this democratizing trend for their own purposes. The Colored Conventions movement is an important example of this development. However, this fascinating quote also lays bare a surprising counter-strategy, involving a withdrawal from or refusal of certain kinds of print. The published record of the Colored Conventions movement unfolded in a violently contentious space of representation where the stakes were quite high. Print was to be used to further the movement, but it needed to be used in the proper fashion.

Derrick R. Spires writes that the conventions “began and ended in print, producing and circulating documents at each juncture in a way that kept their civic claims constantly in the public eye.” Print technologies offered a means of preparing the public for the debates and decisions that would take place at conventions, and for disseminating and commenting on those actions after the fact. Delegates knew that influencing Black and white public opinion was essential to the success of their political project. As weapons against racial oppression, the words of conventioneers were meant to be “heard” far beyond the walls in which they were pronounced. The print medium made this happen. Today, the Colored Conventions Project is using digital technologies to carry those voices even further. Individuals around the world are accessing the texts of convention minutes. The result is a growing understanding of the true importance of this massive movement.

Circumstances of Printing

With regard to the question of print, convention meetings were exercises in Black organizational autonomy. Printing committees were established alongside executive committees, business committees, and others. Delegates approved plans for the printing and distribution of hundreds or thousands of copies of the proceedings, and decided on the means of funding. In some cases, the title pages of the resulting pamphlets reveal the names of the printers involved. Printed copies of minutes were often given to attendees, who were expected to distribute or sell them, thus helping support the movement financially.

An exhibition on coloredconventions.org features interactive maps offering information about how national conventions planned for the printing of proceedings (“The Print Life of Colored Conventions Proceedings, 1830-1865 “). Drawing this information out of the minutes and placing it within maps allows viewers to easily absorb material that is spread throughout the minutes, while also providing a visual sense of the important regional dimension of the movement.

One section of the exhibit quotes plans to publish 1,000 copies of an address that had been delivered at the 1843 Buffalo, New York, convention. The speech in question was Henry Highland Garnet’s famous address to the slaves, which Sarah Patterson has discussed in an earlier essay. Frederick Douglass led the opposition to the adoption of Garnet’s speech, which invoked violent resistance as a path to freedom for enslaved Blacks. Based on another passage from the minutes, the exhibit also reveals that both Garnet and Douglass were named to the committee that was to oversee the publication of convention proceedings. The fact that both men sat on this committee suggests cooperation that cut across the lines of a disagreement that is the defining feature of the 1843 convention. However one is to interpret such details, their presence underlies the importance of the minutes as historical sources.

Newspapers

Before a convention took place, the publication of newspaper announcements (“calls”) was a necessary act of publicity that set the tone for the convention to come. Sarah Patterson’s essay explains the events surrounding the call that preceded the 1843 National Convention. Ten years later, the call for the 1853 Colored National Convention decried the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, evoked other examples of discrimination, and announced the idea of a National Council, a permanent organization devoted to civil equality for Blacks. Championed by Douglass, this last idea was a direct response to the growing emigration movement, which Douglass opposed. The first significant document of the published proceedings of the 1853 convention elaborates on the topics announced in the call. In a lengthy address, Douglass again denounces the Fugitive Slave Act, calls for full citizenship rights for men of color, and gives details for the establishment of the National Council of the Colored People, which was envisioned as an expression of the democratic ideals that underpinned Douglass’s entire speech: the council was to be composed of free Blacks elected from each state, this at a time when the right to vote was non-existent for Blacks living in many of those states. The call had been used to announce the central feature of the coming convention.

In many instances newspapers published daily synopses of convention activities and reprinted the minutes afterward. Publications such as The Colored American, The Liberator, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, The Aliened American, The North Star, and The New Orleans Tribune are the only known sources for certain sets of proceedings. Although white-owned abolitionist periodicals such as The Liberator published minutes, many conventioneers aimed for autonomy of representation. The creation and support of Black newspapers became important goals, just as Black antislavery thinking began to diverge seriously from the Garrisonian approach, with its emphasis on moral suasion rather than voting and political activism. By the mid-1840s there was serious discussion of the need for a Black national print organ. At the 1847 National Convention in Troy, New York, “The Report of the Committee on a National Press” suggested:

Let there be, then, in these United States, a Printing Press, a copious supply of type, a full and complete establishment, wholly controled by colored men; let the thinking writing-man, the compositors, the pressmen, the printers’ help, all, all be men of color;-then let there come from said establishment a weekly periodical and a quarterly periodical, edited as well as printed by colored men; let this establishment be so well endowed as to be beyond the chances of temporary patronage; and then there will be a fixed fact, a rallying point, towards which the strong and the weak amongst us would look with confidence and hope …

The printing committee foresaw the financial difficulties of sustaining a newspaper such as this, which, they predicted, would require 2,000 regular subscribers. As an alternative, the committee recommended designating an existing paper to play the envisioned role. One year later, at the Colored National Convention of 1848 in Cleveland, Frederick Douglass’s recently established North Star was identified as serving the function of a national Black newspaper.

Between 1830 and the end of the nineteenth century, scores of proceedings were printed in newspapers and as pamphlets, and even as handbills around the country. The strategy worked to publicize the meetings as they were happening, but made it difficult for historians to get a full sense of the published minutes as a body of texts. The print record of the movement was characterized by dispersal. Some sets of proceedings made their way into the collections of historical societies, archives, and libraries. The lack of centralized records reflected the absence of an anchoring, permanent central organization. (The national organization that had been envisioned by Douglass in 1853 never came into being.) Rather, the absence of central records was a result of separate, though often related, decisions to call national, state, or regional conventions in response to events as they unfolded. A researcher working during the pre-digital era had to cover a lot of territory to consult all the minutes that were extant, and even the most intrepid researcher would have been unable to locate many. This situation prevented a comprehensive assessment of the movement by historians. This is the gap that the Colored Conventions Project seeks to fill.

Twentieth-Century Developments

Several volumes of collected minutes appeared during the second half of the last century. In 1969, Howard Holman Bell’s Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions brought together proceedings from the twelve national conventions that took place between 1831 and 1864. For some reason, Bell does not indicate the archival sources of his facsimiles, with one exception, thus leaving readers in the dark as to where he had located the facsimiles that constituted the book.

He gives a fuller accounting in his doctoral dissertation, A Survey of The Negro Conventions Movement (1953), published as a book in 1969. Like so many other scholars doing research on African Americans during the 1940s and 1950s, Bell acknowledges the contributions of influential Howard University librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley to his project. He names Howard as one of the repositories with the best collections of pamphlets, along with Yale.

Bell notes that the pamphlet reports are official accounts of the conventions, but that in some instances they lack pertinent information or become clear “only when supplemented by newspaper reports” (iii). However, he affirms the importance of printed minutes as sources of information. Minutes provide lists of attendees as well as committee rosters. They lay out plans that were outlined at the meetings and speeches attendees made for or against these plans. Even in the absence of other information, these details are invaluable to researchers and students of the movement. Often the minutes are the only source of information regarding the identities of those involved in the movement, as well as the principle strategies and debates. Bell’s observation about the suppression of certain details in the published minutes might be illuminated by an observation made by Spires, who explains that conventions sometimes refrained from providing full details of heated debates, for example, lest there be accusations of disunity in the ranks.

In the introduction to one of their two volumes of proceedings from state conventions (1840-1865), Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker lament Bell’s failure to indicate the sources of the minutes he republished. Foner’s and Walker’s volumes were published in 1979 and 1980 (the two scholars co-authored both volumes). They assemble transcriptions of 45 conventions from fifteen states. In 1986, the two also edited the first of a projected three-volume collection of proceedings of national and state conventions that took place between 1865 and 1900. Fortunately, all three volumes indicate the newspaper or other source of each set of proceedings. These details have been vital to the Colored Conventions Project, which has drawn from these sources, and gone on to offer a much larger number of minutes, which can be searched using keywords.

While the volumes produced by Bell and by Foner and Walker were valuable tools for scholars of African American history during the decades after their appearance, they are now out of print and hard to find. Also, even these capacious resources omit many sets of proceedings, particularly from the state conventions. The Colored Conventions Project drew on the published collections for the first scans that made their way onto coloredconventions.org. Since then, the site has added scores of conventions from archival or online sources. Many had been rarely cited, and some had never been cited at all. New sets of proceedings are being discovered and added continually by the faculty director of the program, as well as by the graduate students, undergraduates, and librarians who make up the project team. And there are more discoveries all the time. At the recent Colored Conventions Symposium in Delaware, scholars pointed us toward groups of proceedings from Texas conventions. We are in the processing of obtaining images of those documents in order to make them available. These minutes should allow researchers to get a sense of the distinctive features and concerns of the Texas conventions movement.

Reflecting on “Hybrid” Texts

Project co-coordinator Jim Casey and other scholars often point to the hybrid nature of the convention proceedings. As seen above, the conversation created by this archive includes preliminary announcements, minutes in newspaper or pamphlet form, and post-facto commentaries in the form of letters or newspaper articles. In some cases they also include resolutions and petitions such as the one that delegates from the 1840 New York State Convention sent to the legislature to protest the exclusion of Black men from the voting process. Bell’s remarks about the importance of the minutes as historical documents show that juxtaposing these linked, heterogeneous sources is necessary to historical reflection on the topic. Not only is the Colored Conventions Project disseminating the constellation of documents that come out of individual conventions, the project is also allowing researchers to read all the available minutes together, or to search across them for names or themes. This tool has the potential to revolutionize understanding of the conventions movement. Reactions from our 2015 symposium suggest that scholars strongly agree. One attendee proclaimed on social media that his research agenda was changing before his eyes.

The Next Phase

In her introduction to the online exhibit documenting the printing of convention proceedings, curator and CCP co-coordinator Sarah Patterson points out that a full publishing history of the Colored Conventions movement remains to be written. By assembling the largest collection of minutes in the world and making them searchable in new ways, the Colored Conventions Project is already contributing to the writing of that history.

Further Reading:

The Colored Conventions Project Website has an extensive bibliography of sources relating to the Colored Conventions movement and nineteenth-century African American political advocacy. Derrick R. Spires’s “Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics of Publicity in Black State Conventions,” from the book Early African American Print Culture, was particularly helpful for the writing of this article.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Curtis Small is a special collections librarian at the University of Delaware. Most recently he has been assisting the Colored Conventions Project with obtaining permissions and with tracking down and acquiring new sets of proceedings. Working with the project has inspired his interest in the print history of the Colored Conventions movement and in African American print history more generally.