In American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Conventions_Movement).
The Colored Conventions Project (http://coloredconventions.org) (CCP) is a Black digital humanities initiative dedicated to identifying, collecting, and curating all of the documents produced by the Colored Conventions Movement.
In this episode, two of the CCP’s cofounders and co-directors, Jim Casey (https://twitter.com/jimccasey1) and Gabrielle Foreman (https://twitter.com/profgabrielle) are joined by Project Fellow Denise Burgher (https://www.english.udel.edu/people/dburgher) to discuss how the Project mirrors the energy and collective commitments of the Conventions themselves, how to see data as a form of protest, and creating an a set of organizational principles.
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Topics and Links
00:00: Intro
00:15: Colored Conventions Movement
01:23: Gabrielle Foreman And Jim Casey
02:00: Colored Conventions Project
02:21: Denise Burgher
03:34: Data As A Form Of Protest
06:25: Terms Of Use For CCP’s Data
07:20: “To Respect, Not Just Collect”
09:20: “Celebratory History Of American Progress”
10:23: The Understudy Of The Colored Conventions Movement
11:25: Women's Centrality To The Movement
12:30: Getting People Involved
12:54: Douglass Day
14:15: Museums And Digital Spaces
15:00: Announcing Museum Archipelago Stickers


Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 57. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.



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In American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement.


GABRIELLE FOREMAN: "The Colored Convention movement was Black-lead and Black organizers came together across so many of the states. Beginning in 1830 folks began to gather in Philadelphia, and there were both state and national conventions that discussed labor rights, educational rights, voting rights, violence against Black communities, the expulsion of people who were not considered residence and citizens.”

JIM CASEY: “The Conventions Movement was not just a single thing, where there was one issue that they were really dedicated to solving or figuring out. Conventions were held in at least 35 states. And keep in mind that this was the 19 century, so there weren’t 50 states even back then. That we really think there is a way, through this history, to rethink everything that begins far long before the Civil War and leads up into the 20th century.


GABRIELLE FOREMAN And JIM CASEY are two co-founders and two co-directors of the Colored Conventions Project, a Black digital humanities initiative focused on researching and teaching the Colored Conventions Movement.


GABRIELLE FOREMAN: "Hi, my name is GABRIELLE FOREMAN, and I teach at t