Jim Casey, Perkins Postdoctoral Fellow in the Council of the Humanities, has been working with P. Gabrielle Foreman, Professor of American Literature and Professor of African American Studies and History at the University of Delaware, on how the historiography of the Colored Conventions had been shaped by the racial hierarchies we inherited from the nineteenth century. Colored Conventions had often been presented as a small subsidiary of the abolitionist movement, but were actually a phenomenon of their own—a Black-led, Black-organized, and Black-attended activist movement demanding serious scholarly engagement.
Since 2012, Casey and Foreman have been digitizing hundreds of collected documents of the Colored Conventions movement, spanning from the 1830s through the 1890s, and over the years have expanded the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) into a multi-faceted digital humanities and public history initiative.
Read the full story on the Center for Digital Humanities homepage.
