Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Black delegates met at state and national “Colored Conventions” to advocate for educational justice, labor and voting rights, and to organize against slavery; when it continuously seemed as if this country could never embrace full and equal rights for racial groups they enslaved, exploited and oppressed, they debated plans for emigration to Canada, the Caribbean and West Africa. These meetings, which began in 1830 and passed from both delegates to their communities and from one generation to another for nearly seventy years, were both acts and pedagogies of resistance and dissent. Unlike the abolitionist and antislavery movements and the Underground Railroad, the Black-led Colored Conventions Movement has remained largely outside of popular and even scholarly narratives until the launching of ColoredConventions.org which makes the proceedings of more than a hundred and fifty meetings available and fully searchable for the first time. Embracing a collective ethos that mirrors the organizing it recovers, the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) has created a distributed model of bringing this record of 19th-century dissent to digital life through pedagogy. Its national teaching partners, two of which are on this panel, partner with CCP to engage students in research that resists dominant racial, gendered and geographic narratives of 19C organizing for Black rights to create digital exhibits that bring those stories to digital life for a range of viewers both within and outside of the Academy.

The Colored Conventions provide a window into the history of nineteenth-century black political activism, highlighting topics such as black agency, leadership, and organizational power. Moreover, the conversations present in these convention proceedings demonstrate a clear link between nineteenth-century history and current sociopolitical discourse.

This panel focuses on CCP’s digital archive and its commitment to social justice activism. It centers on the following questions: What possibilities does digital history offer to overturn traditional epistemologies and carve out new spaces of rebellion and dissent? In ways do these new methodologies facilitate the creation of new spaces for learning and teaching that allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom as we reach new audiences?

We propose to highlight how digital projects like CCP operate at the intersection of research, teaching, and public engagement using collective processes of pedagogical and public engagement to decolonize archives to reach new audiences and increase participation in the process of writing new historical narratives. In particular, the papers on this panel demonstrate how scholars and students have contributed to and used the project’s digital archive to write new histories about nineteenth-century black political activism addressing a range of topics including the black press, Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves,” and black boardinghouses. In organizing this panel, we hope to explore critical curation and highlight how we can use digital technologies to construct and reorganize archives in order to better represent those outside of the traditional record through new modes of presentation including exhibits and interactive data visualizations.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Gregory Eiselein, Kansas State University

Individual Presentations

• Colored Conventions and the Black Press - Benjamin Fagan, Auburn University

• Reconsidering Henry Highland (and Julia Williams) Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves” as Collaborative Text - Derrick R. Spires, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Visualizing Black Boardinghouses and the Colored Conventions Movement in the Digital Age - Anna E Lacy, University of Delaware

Comment

• Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut