Price Lab Mellon Workshop - Colored Conventions Project

Featuring Gabrielle Foreman, Denise Burgher, Anna Lacy, and Allison Robinson from the Colored Conventions Project, this workshop will introduce the Colored Conventions and outline the Colored Conventions Project's mission. Afterwards, the group will move into a panel discussion on Douglass Day and Q&A.

Discussion will be centered around the following:

What does it mean to resurrect a holiday, Douglass’s Birthday Day which is also Feb. 14th as a day of “a Day of Collective Love for Black History” organized around a near hagiographic treatment of Douglass, who was active for 40 years in the convention movement. How do we complicate and disrupt the gendered politics that we enact even as CCP seeks to structure women into its principles of historical recovery, as Douglass himself did? What’s at stake since Douglass Day is CCP’s largest activity including various publics in crowd or community sourcing is on Douglass Day? What, too, can we do to ensure that descendant communities are absolutely represented in Douglass Day?

Colored Conventions Project

From 1830 until the 1890s, already free and once captive Black people came together in state and national political meetings called "Colored Conventions." Before the War, they strategized about how to achieve educational, labor and legal justice at a moment when Black rights were constricting nationally and locally. After the War, their numbers swelled as they continued to mobilize to ensure that Black citizenship rights and saftey, Black  labor rights and land, Black education and institutions would be protected under the law. 

The delegates to these meetings included the most well-known, if mostly male, writers, organizers, church leaders, newspaper editors, and entrepreneurs in the canon of early African-American leadership—and thousands whose names and histories have long been forgotten. What is left of this phenomenal effort are rare proceedings, newspaper coverage, and petitions that have never before been collected in one place.  

This project seeks to not only learn about the lives of male delegates, the places where they met and the social networks that they created, but also to account for the crucial work done by Black women in the broader social networks that made these conventions possible. 

ColoredConventions.org endeavors to transform teaching and learning about this historic collective organizing effort—and about the many leaders and places involved in it—bringing them to digital life for a new generation of students and scholars across disciplines and for community researchers interested in the history of activist church, civil rights, educational and entrepreneurial engagement.