Colored Conventions Project: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life. Codirected by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey

Scot French, University of Central Florida

DOI: 10.55520/990E7XYM | Scholarly Editing, Volume 43

Colored Conventions Project: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life, codirected by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey, Center for Black Digital Research, Penn State University, https://coloredconventions.org/.

§Introduction

For the past decade in the graduate seminars I lead at the University of Central Florida, History in the Digital Age and Digital Tools for Historians, I have included a scaffolded research assignment culminating in a 1,000-word review of a digital humanities project. My aim is threefold: introduce students to digital humanities (DH) projects of relevance to their own research; provide them with guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in its myriad forms; and help them understand the potentially transformative and occasionally radical/disruptive nature of DH collaborations within and beyond the academy.

This long-standing class assignment, combined with my deep scholarly engagement with nineteenth-century “Colored Conventions” for my dissertation and book on Nat Turner’s Rebellion, provides the intellectual-experiential framework for my review of Penn State University’s outstanding Colored Conventions Project (CCP), “a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades–long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life.”1

Here is how the Colored Conventions Project introduces itself on the home page:

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 Project (CCP) is an interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life. Mirroring the collective nature of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions, CCP uses inclusive partnerships to locate, transcribe, and archive the documentary record related to this nearly forgotten history and to curate engaging digital exhibits that highlight its significant events and themes.

CCP defines its target audience as “a new generation of researchers, students, and community scholars” with an interest in “Black collective organizing” and nineteenth-century advocacy for “educational, labor, and legal justice.”2 Key design features—artifact-rich exhibits with interactive maps and timelines, digital records with keyword searchability and full text transcription—cater to the expectations of twenty-first-century users. From a teaching and research perspective, the collection opens vast new avenues for inquiry. The CCP website serves as a digital repository for hundreds of state and national convention proceedings, ca. 1830–1900, gathered from various sources by CCP team researchers or submitted to the site by users. Twenty-one exhibits and sixteen teacher guides showcase the research potential and pedagogical value of the collection.

Much-honored and oft-cited in digital humanities/Black studies circles since its founding, the Colored Conventions Project merits a wider audience for its innovative, integrative approach to archiving as digital community-building. “Launched and cultivated” at the University of Delaware from 2012 to 2020, now a “flagship project” of the #DigBlk/Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, CCP offers a unique window into building—and, importantly, sustaining—a scholarly research and teaching community committed to “collective organizing” in the service of Black history, Black communities, and Black lives.3

The individual contributions and collective accomplishments of the Colored Conventions Project are meticulously documented in a “Project CV”—itself a noteworthy innovation.4 The idea for a digital repository originated in a 2012 graduate class taught by literary historian and founding CCP director P. Gabrielle Foreman. By 2017 the project had expanded under Foreman and codirectors Sarah Patterson and Jim Casey into a grant-funded digital research and teaching hub. CCP has received $275,000 in external funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; earned prizes from the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Popular Culture/American Culture Association; generated numerous scholarly papers, panels, and publications; and received laudatory press coverage in Slate and the New York Times.5

These external markers of success, so vital to continued funding and institutional support, may obscure a less visible, internal strength of the project: a clearly articulated set of “Project Principles” linking “the collective values and practices” of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions Movement to the “Black lives”–centered historical work and project practices of the twenty-first-century CCP team. In practice that means:

Through these Project Principles, CCP aligns itself with the growing scholarly movement and community of praxis known as Black digital humanities. In her foundational 2016 Debates in Digital Humanities essay, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” Kim Gallon examines the question of “how humanity is framed in the digital humanities” and argues for a Black studies–informed, technology-based intervention that “can further expose humanity as a racialized social construction.” Gallon focuses not on “exact definitions” of this emerging field or “questions of ‘who is in or who is out’” but rather on “the ‘technology of recovery’ that undergirds black digital scholarship” and “how it fills the apertures between Black studies and digital humanities.” By “technology of recovery,” Gallon means “efforts to bring forth the full humanity of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools.” She writes:

Recovery rests at the heart of Black studies, as a scholarly tradition that seeks to restore the humanity of black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization. It follows, then, that the project of recovering lost historical and literary texts should be foundational to the black digital humanities. It is a deeply political enterprise that seeks not simply to transform literary canons and historiography by incorporating black voices and centering an African American and African diasporic experience, though it certainly does that; black digital humanities troubles the very core of what we have come to know as the humanities by recovering alternate constructions of humanity that have been historically excluded from that concept.7

Gallon’s “case” for the Black digital humanities as distinguished from mainstream DH theory and practice is echoed and extended in the work of Jessica Marie Johnson (“Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads”), Safiya Umoja Noble (“A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies,” “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities”), and Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs (The Digital Black Atlantic), among others. A series of conferences on the theme “Who Owns Black Data?” held at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University in 2024 and 2025 has facilitated spirited discourse on archiving and Black data curation as critical areas of focus.8

Significantly, in its statement of Project Principles, CCP articulates a core commitment to responsible Black data curation and stewardship:

We affirm the role of Black people as data creators and elevate the ways in which Black conventions generated data and statistics to advance, affirm and advocate for Black economic and organizational success and access. We also recognize that data has long served in the processes and recording of the destruction and devaluation of Black lives and communities. We seek to avoid exploiting Black subjects as data and to account for the contexts out of which Black subjects as data arise. We seek to name Black people and communities as an affirmation of the Black humanity inherent in Black data/curation. We remind ourselves that all data and datasets are shaped by decisions about whose histories are recorded, remembered, and valued.9

§The Colored Conventions Project and Typologies of Digital Scholarship

Classifying the Colored Conventions Project as a particular “type” of digital scholarship for purposes of review is somewhat daunting, given its multifaceted aims and multiple user interfaces: an Omeka collections database; a WordPress exhibit gallery; and web-accessible, pdf-downloadable K–12 and College/AP Teaching Guides that can be taught in conjunction with a peer-reviewed print volume, The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).10

Following my own class assignment, I propose to apply DH review guidelines developed by historian and longtime contributing editor Jeffrey W. McClurken for the Journal of American History. The JAH launched its pioneering “Web Site Reviews” section in 2001, when few academic journals viewed digital projects as scholarship worthy of peer review; today the section, renamed “Digital History Reviews,” “appears quarterly and normally runs two to five reviews.” McClurken explains the need for DH-specific review guidelines: “Although these scholarly reviews of digital history projects follow the long tradition of reviewing books in the JAH—as well as the more recent practice of reviewing museum exhibitions, films, and textbooks—digital history reviews have some unique features” requiring special attention.11 As McClurken notes: “Digital history projects share a common medium, but they are quite diverse in their character. Reviewers need to keep that diversity in mind and to evaluate them on their own terms.”

Locating CCP within the JAH sampler of project types highlights the varied forms and flexible design of digital scholarship as compared with print. Is CCP an Archive/Database? An Essay/Exhibit/Digital Narrative? A Teaching Resource? A Digital Community? Indeed, CCP is all the above.

§The Colored Conventions Project as Archive/Database

The JAH guidelines define Archive as “a site that provides a body of primary sources. Could also include collections of documents marked up in TEI or databases of materials.” CCP features “hundreds of primary sources from the conventions movement. Primary sources include minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images.”

A home page tab for Digital Records invites users to browse the convention proceedings by year/decade or via chronological lists of proceedings under separate tabs for National and State Conventions. An Advanced Search function allows for keyword searching by All Fields or Titles Only. Filtering allows for targeted searches by City, County, Convention Type, etc. My search for “Douglass” (as in Frederick) returned 229 items; my search for “insurrection”—a key focus of my long-ago dissertation research—returned twenty-three files, many drawn from the same bound reference volumes I laboriously scoured in the 1990s. For most searches, clicking on a hyperlinked title brings up a pdf file, a document viewer, Dublin Core metadata, and a Scripto-generated transcription—a researcher’s bounty.

§The Colored Conventions Project as Thematic Research Collection

While the “Digital Records” section of CCP clearly fits the JAH definition of an Archive/Database, perhaps a better, more precise categorization—first developed by Carole L. Palmer (2004) and referenced in a typology of digital scholarship by William G. Thomas III (2014)—is the Digital Project/Thematic Research Collection:

Combining tools and archival materials framed around a historiographically significant or critical problem, these projects are sprawling investigations into a major problem. Typically gathering thousands of objects and records from widely varying institutions and in widely varying formats, digital history projects contain “digital aggregations” of primary sources that support research on a particular theme or historical question. Scholars embed interpretive affordances in the collection and use these affordances to open up new modes of inquiry and/or discovery. They are open-ended projects and often support ongoing research by multiple scholars or teams.12

Is there a “historiographically significant or critical problem” at the heart of the Colored Conventions Project? CCP is somewhat stealthy about this, letting its curatorial choices largely speak for themselves. While the CCP home page offers a succinct description of the site’s historical focus and collaborative research and teaching methods, it makes no clear reference to a central research “question” or “problem.”

Nevertheless, CCP makes an implicit (and occasionally explicit) revisionist argument for a “long” Colored Conventions Movement spanning the antebellum/US Civil War era (1830s–1865) through the early 1900s and concluding with the Niagara Movement. This represents a radical geographic and temporal reframing of a movement once narrowly viewed by historians as a northern, free-state phenomenon of the antebellum/US Civil War era. Indeed, the first sources mined for the CCP online database were convention proceedings reprinted in Howard H. Bell’s Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, C. Peter Ripley et al.’s The Black Abolitionist Papers (1830–1865), and Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker’s Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865.13

CCP’s historiographical contribution turns, in large part, on its expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “Colored Convention” and its case for continuity between “Black organizing activity” of the pre- and post-Emancipation eras. In the absence of a CCP web page or companion essay articulating this interpretive shift by direct reference to previous scholarship, one must look to CCP’s definition of “Colored Conventions” and interpolate the historiographical logic of its editorial/curatorial practice.

What is a Colored Convention? The term “Colored Convention” continues to expand as our knowledge about Black organizing over the nineteenth century grows. Colored Conventions share some of the following traits [bullets added for clarity]:

  • The convention should be organized and led by Black people, meaning that delegates and attendees are Black (although the convention may include a number of “honorary” non-Black delegates).
  • The convention’s format tend[s] to include the following features (although the print record may not entirely survive): parliamentary procedures and organization, a call, recognition of official delegates and elected officials, committees, and delegates, often identified by location (e.g., city, state, district, ward).
  • A “Colored Convention” will cover issues related to Black communities at specific scales, including but not limited to: congressional district, state (note: we treat DC as a state), regional (includes multiple states and/or territories), or national level. *We also recognize a growing variety of conventions concerned with Black freedoms and rights in Canada, the Caribbean, and Native/Indigenous communities. These conventions usually identified themselves as a “convention,” or the document under study describes the convention as a “convention.” *For DC or smaller-scale conventions, conventions might appear under names like “congress,” “mass meeting,” and others. In this case, the convention scale should be at the state level or greater. These conventions do not have to be led by a particular group, but if they are, they must be led by Black organizers (e.g., Colored Labor Unions, Equal Rights Leagues, and Teachers and Educator associations).
  • Conventions organized under general political party and religious organizations are not included as conventions (e.g., a convention for the Republican party composed of Black Republicans, Methodist Conferences, etc.). Colored Conventions may be in dialogue with these institutions and structures, but maintain financial, political, and/or ideological independence.

This curatorial definition of “Colored Conventions” expands the project source base well beyond traditional print volumes and documentary editions and opens almost limitless possibilities for future exploration. The Project CV boasts that CCP researchers—“dedicated scholars, graduate student leaders, librarians, and undergraduate researchers”—have “quadrupled the number of state and national minutes that had been collected in print editions, and made them fully searchable for the very first time.”14

Our collection is still growing. We began this work in 2012 with information on a mere 64 state and national conventions collected in the volumes of national and state conventions that historians had consulted for decades. Our current database provides access to documents from nearly 200 conventions. Building on that work, in 2023–2025 the CCP research teams located records for more than 600 conventions held across North America. Work is now underway to begin publishing the latest findings on the CCP Digital Records website alongside a new database of 15K+ names from across our growing digital collection. We look forward to sharing these vast additions to the digital collection and revisiting these histories.15

Lest there be any doubt about the presence of an argument or advancement of a thesis in CCP’s project management and curatorial practice, a 2017 Mellon Foundation–funded white paper (“Digital History and Argument”) authored by leading digital historians showcased the Colored Conventions Project as an exemplar for the advancement of scholarly argument through digital collections.16

§CCP as Essay/Exhibit/Digital Narrative

The JAH review guidelines define an Exhibit/Essay/Digital Narrative as “something created or written specifically for the Web or with digital methods, that serves as a secondary source for interpreting the past by offering a historical narrative or argument. This category can also include maps, network visualizations, or other ways of representing historical data.”17

As a companion to the digital records database, CCP’s founding directors recognized the need for public-facing exhibits that would showcase the contents of the collection and provide opportunities for student researchers—both undergraduate and graduate—to contribute. Built on a WordPress platform with a customized design palette, the Exhibits section invites visitors to learn more about people, events, ideas, and processes associated with the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions Movement.

Created in partnership with national and local teaching partners and student contributors, these curated exhibits draw from our collections to present cultural artifacts and materials related to Black organizing in the nineteenth century. They transform how we teach and learn about this dynamic period, bringing the buried history of collective Black organizing to digital life for a new generation of students, scholars, and community researchers.

Four exemplary exhibits are featured on the CCP home page, a sampler drawn from twenty-one student- and faculty-curated exhibits. Credits and acknowledgments are displayed prominently on each exhibit home page, showcasing the individual and collective labor involved in transforming class projects into polished, narrative-driven, museum-quality exhibits.

The “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper at 200” exhibit foregrounds the labor and leadership of Black women in the Colored Conventions Movement, fulfilling a core principle of CCP.18 Originally curated by Monet Timmons, an English PhD student in CCP founder P. Gabrielle Foreman’s spring 2019 course, the final “published” exhibit lists three additional curators, a production director, and seven contributors. In all, twelve scholars from three academic institutions (Penn State, University of Delaware, and UC Irvine) had a hand in producing, curating, and designing the exhibit.19

Notably, the “Harper at 200” exhibit features several well-designed interactive visualizations, including a biographical timeline built on Northwestern University Knight Lab’s TimelineJS; an Esri Community Map of “Frances Harper’s Baltimore” (showing Slave Trade Sites during Harper’s Residence, Black Institutions and Black-Serving Businesses, and the Watkin’s Residence); and an Esri GIS map of Harper’s Lecture Circuit, with links to reports on her lectures and addresses.

An entry on “Harper and the Colored Conventions” showcases her participation in three conventions—the 1858 “Convention of the Colored Men of Ohio,” where Harper was “the sole woman delegate;” the 1864 “National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, NY,” where records show Harper and a local woman named Edmonia Highgate spoke; and the 1873 “Convention of Colored People Held in Dover, Delaware,” where Harper advocated for “equal rights” and read from her poetry book, Sketches of Southern Life. The entry’s author notes the conspicuous lack of detail in convention records recounting Harper’s 1864 speech, a helpful curatorial insight.20

A navigational note: while the “Harper at 200” exhibit references convention proceedings within the text and cites related digital records by URL in the endnotes, it does not provide a direct hyperlink to the primary source documents. Users must copy and paste the URL into their browser to access the record. Nevertheless, this “Featured Exhibit” brilliantly showcases the value of collection for research, teaching, and public education.

§CCP as Teaching Resource

The JAH review guidelines define a Teaching Resource as “a site that provides online assignments, syllabi, other resources specifically geared toward using the Web, or digital apps for teaching, including educational history content for children or adults, pedagogical training tools, and outreach to the education community.”21

CCP relies on curriculum and instruction specialists and a teaching advisory board to prepare and review its robust collection of teaching resources. In 2021 the CCP Curriculum Committee released sixteen Teaching Guides for K–12 and AP/College Classes featuring resources, methods, questions, and standards. The guides link to exhibits and relevant chapters from a companion volume—The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021)—edited by CCP cofounders/codirectors Foreman, Casey, and Patterson. A website-accessible table of contents includes links to accompanying exhibits.22

CCP’s value as a teaching resource extends beyond K–12 and college/AP education. It can be seen in the central role played by graduate and undergraduate students as digital co-creators: researchers, writers, designers, transcribers, and curators. Twenty-six North American teaching partners from colleges and universities across the United States and Canada (Queen’s University and University of British Columbia) have worked with “thousands” of students to conduct research and design exhibits for the site. Project directors point with pride to an ever-expanding network of CCP-affiliated student and faculty alums who have gained valuable skills and experience as contributors to the project: “Graduate student CCP co-founders and leaders are now working at UMass Amherst, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University as faculty members, DH postdocs and in leadership positions in Academic and Digital Centers. Undergraduates have gone on to law school, PhD and Masters programs and have held paid internships with organizations and institutions such as the Smithsonian Museums, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Equal Justice Initiative.”23

§CCP as Digital Community

The JAH review guidelines define Digital Communities as “online social spaces that offer a virtual space for people to gather around a common experience, exhibition, or interest.” While the CCP website offers no virtual space for conversation, reflection, or publicly visible feedback, it invites those who wish to access CCP datasets to join a community with a set of shared principles called the CCP Corpus:

Defining community more broadly, founding director P. Gabrielle Forman has identified CCP as part of a “Black Digital Ecosystem” of “digital projects and scholarly work with shared values and missions.” Citing CCP Principles, she has publicly committed herself to “supporting and amplifying sibling projects” such as The African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative, Freedom on the Move, Black Press Research Collective (BPRC), the US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Center, and Life x Code: DH Against Enclosure.24

§Conclusion

In 2026 the National Endowment for the Humanities hailed the Colored Conventions Project as “essential”—one of fifty-seven “Great Projects Past and Present” spanning “60 Years of NEH-Funded Projects.”25

Much has changed in the ten years since the NEH awarded CCP a $75,000 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, Level II. The Office of Digital Humanities has been shuttered by the Trump Administration and nearly all its active funding awards have been rescinded. DH projects that depend on a steady stream of external funding face an uncertain future. Fortunately, the Colored Conventions Project rests on a strong foundation, not just institutionally but communally and philosophically. Should its leaders need inspiration in the face of political headwinds, they need only look to the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions Movement records they have so painstakingly collected and preserved.

§Footnotes

  1. “Introducing the Colored Conventions Project,” https://coloredconventions.org/about/. For the reviewer’s scholarship on Colored Conventions, see Scot Andrew French, “Remembering Nat Turner: The Rebellious Slave in American Thought, 1831 to the Present” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2000), 94–109, and Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 73–79. ↩

  2. “Project Curriculum Vitae (CV),” https://coloredconventions.org/about/cv/. ↩

  3. “Introducing the Colored Conventions Project,” https://coloredconventions.org/about/. ↩

  4. Notably, the CCP collective claims its “Project CV” design template as intellectual property: “If you create a project CV based on or inspired by this one, we ask that you cite this CV as a source.” See “Colored Conventions Project CV,” https://coloredconventions.org/about/cv/. ↩

  5. “Colored Conventions Project CV,” https://coloredconventions.org/about/cv/. ↩

  6. “Colored Convention Project Principles,” CCP, https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/. ↩

  7. Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 42–49, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.7. ↩

  8. Gallon’s core insight regarding Black DH’s role in exposing humanity itself as a “racialized social construction” is underscored (by reference to the transatlantic slave trade and Emory University’s Slave Voyages database) in Jessica Marie Johnson’s “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 1 (December 2018): 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658. Other foundational works in Black DH include Safiya Umoja Noble’s “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies,” S&F Online (2016), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/safiya-umoja-noble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/2/; Noble’s “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities,” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 27–35, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvg251hk.5; Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs’ The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021); and Catherine Knight Steele, Jessica H. Lu, and Kevin C. Winstead’s Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (Routledge, 2023). On the question of “Who Owns Black Data?,” see “Who Owns Black Data: Dialogues on the Future of the Black Historical Record?,” a conference series held at Johns Hopkins University (2024) and Yale University (2025), https://wobd.blackbeyonddata.org/. Links to YouTube videos of the 2024 Slavery and Data Conference at Johns Hopkins can be found here: https://wobd.blackbeyonddata.org/. ↩

  9. “Project Principles,” Colored Conventions Project, https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/. ↩

  10. For the web interface between exhibits, teaching guides, and print volume, see the CCP Curriculum page, https://coloredconventions.org/curriculum/. ↩

  11. “Digital History Reviews,” Organization of American Historians/Journal of American History, https://www.oah.org/publications/jah/submit/digital-history-reviews/. ↩

  12. William G. Thomas III, “The Promise of the Digital Humanities and the Contested Nature of Digital Scholarship” (2014), Faculty Publications, Department of History, Digital Commons@University of Nebraska–Lincoln, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/198. Thomas attributes this definition to Carole L. Palmer, “Thematic Research Collections,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, and J. Unsworth (Blackwell, 2004), https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH/. ↩

  13. Howard Bell, ed., Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864 (Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969); Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Temple University Press, 1979); C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3: The United States, 1830–1846 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991). ↩

  14. “Project Curriculum Vitae (CV),” CCP, https://coloredconventions.org/about/cv/. ↩

  15. “Conventions Records,” CCP, https://coloredconventions.org/about-records/. ↩

  16. Arguing with Digital History Working Group, “Digital History and Argument,” White Paper, November 13, 2017, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, https://rrchnm.org/argument-white-paper/. ↩

  17. “Digital History Reviews,” Organization of American Historians/Journal of American History, https://www.oah.org/publications/jah/submit/digital-history-reviews/. ↩

  18. See “Colored Conventions Project Principles,” CCP, https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/. “The Colored Conventions Project affirms Black women’s centrality to nineteenth-century Black organizing even as official records erase and anonymize the very contributions, labor and infrastructure that made the Colored Conventions movement possible. We pledge to account for Black women’s labor and leadership in our own historical work and in our own project practices.” ↩

  19. “Francis Ellen Watkins Harper at 200,” CCP, https://coloredconventions.org/harper/. ↩

  20. Monet Timmons, “Harper and the Colored Conventions,” CCP, https://coloredconventions.org/harper/lectures/colored-conventions-movement/. ↩

  21. “Digital History Reviews,” Organization of American Historians/Journal of American History, https://www.oah.org/publications/jah/submit/digital-history-reviews/. ↩

  22. Teaching the Colored Conventions,” Colored Conventions Project, https://coloredconventions.org/teaching/. ↩

  23. “Project Curriculum Vitae (CV),” https://coloredconventions.org/about/cv/. ↩

  24. P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Black Digital Ecosystems,” https://www.pgabrielleforeman.com/black-digital-ecosystems. ↩

  25. “Colored Conventions,” National Endowment for the Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/project/colored-conventions, accessed January 4, 2025. For a full list of “essential projects,” see “Sixty Years of NEH-Funded Projects; Great Projects Past and Present,” National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed January 4, 2025, https://www.neh.gov/essentials#projects. ↩