Link to digital archive: https://coloredconventions.org/

The Colored Convention Project (CCP) is an online archive that highlights early black mobilization and organizing, in particular the understudied aspect of the 19th-century reform movement that is black conventions. These were meetings held by African-American men and women between the 1830s and 1890s in the United States and Canada to discuss their civil rights. The online project was founded by a graduate class at the University of Delaware and is supported by grants from National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Its digital archive houses a collection of the minutes, letters, transcripts, proceedings and newspaper articles of the conventions. The website offers a usable interface and full access to primary sources. It is very easy to navigate the site as it is structured into five major parts that feature information about the people behind the project, a general information about the history of the conventions, a digital records site, digital exhibits of scholarship research that use these records, teaching materials for educators, and an overview of the project’s news. 

The massive digital collection of the project can be found on the Digital Records site. Its start page provides historical information about the conventions, with links to other digital editions and resources, enriching research possibilities. The user can either explore the project’s huge database by searching the conventions by year, or by looking through the national as well as state conventions. It is possible to either browse the records or conduct a specific search through an advanced search option. In the browse option, the site is interposing informational text with images of the related documents, resembling a map of the files, which makes it very easy to navigate through, and is inviting users who have no prior knowledge of the history and want to learn about it to ‘take a look’ through the collection. The latter provides users with specific research needs and projects with a great number of search options. The database is fully searchable through all its digital documents. For example, users can search for persons, buildings, etc. When a convention is selected, the user is redirected to a new page that presents the record and all the information about the event. All documents are provided in high-resolution in a document viewer as well as being offered as a PDF-download. They have not been edited, and in a lot of cases are provided with a transcribed section on the site. Researchers have added metadata, as for example the creator, publisher, date, source, type of the convention, the region etc. In addition, they provided a hyperlink of the specific collection the document belongs to. The project’s endeavor of digitizing the collection and making it accessible to the public while preserving its original intent exemplifies the process of remediation. 

One major interdisciplinary accomplishment of the project is its digital and interactive exhibits section. These exhibits of scholarly research are created by professors and their undergraduate or graduate students, using primary documents of the CCP’s collection to draw attention to a specific aspect of the Colored Convention movement. For instance, the graduate student Samantha de Vera built one exhibit to highlight Black women’s contributions to these conventions, which was made possible through the CCP’s effort of digitizing and transcribing not only the minutes that explicitly mention the male delegates, but newspaper articles, proceedings and other materials that document the conventions. Here, the Colored Convention Project specifically aims to include researchers and students to become a part of the scholarly conversation and to produce narratives from its archival records that have been invisible in the academic and public discourse. In addition, these exhibits utilize several different forms of media to visualize and achieve a greater understanding of the provided information. 

In its teaching section, the project offers classroom teaching modules that include  research-based teaching materials, sample writing assignments, research guides and educational resources which were curated by CCP scholars and librarians. The site provides links to additional information on instructions as well as an online tutorial on how ro build a CCP exhibit from the research that was conducted in the classroom. Additionally, they have designed the Seeking Records Classroom Module that invites participating faculty and students to join the project in conducting archival research and locating historical documents that are related to the Colored Conventions. Here, the project’s purpose is to establish collaborations with teaching partners throughout the country.

On its website the CCP underlines its mission as a “scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth century Black organizing to digital life.” Not only is the archive intended to provide information about the movement that remained invisible in popular history that highlights black agency and black leadership, it also creates a dialogue between the past and present of black organizational activism. Many of the issues that are of topics in the primary sources speak to ongoing issues like state violence and police brutality that current movements such as Black Lives Matter are focused upon. Thus, the site very capably puts the project in the context of the sociopolitical discourse of today. Aiming to bring interdisciplinary scholars, students, teachers, researchers and the public together, the Colored Convention Project presents a valuable and creative research platform.