The stated purpose of the Colored Conventions Project is to “provide further insight into the Colored Conventions and expand our understanding of early black organizing.” 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. These “Colored Conventions” “brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.”
After considering the purpose of this digital archive, we can conclude that anyone can learn from the CCP project. The CCP does mention specific people who this archive can be particularly helpful to. Within the “Teaching” section, there is a sub-section titled “Research Resources and Classroom Modules” which states that the CCP has “developed a range of research-based teaching materials to engage faculty, students, and the general public in the rich documentary record of the Colored Conventions movement.” It goes on to state “CCP scholars and librarians have curated sample writing assignments, research guides, educational resources, and an innovative classroom teaching module, all designed to encourage investigations into the themes and debates that arose for the Black men and women who organized, attended, and supported the Colored Conventions.”
The CCP meets the needs of the audience it is designed for in several ways. There are many different forms of media within each exhibit that help to illustrate in different ways the depth of black political organizing in the 19th century.
Within the project is an archive of digital records of the hundreds of collected documents of the Colored Conventions movement, spanning from the 1830s to the 1890s. Listed there are transcripts of each convention with records. Within this records section, there are links so that one can search for conventions by (1) year, (2) by national conventions, and by (3) state conventions. There is also an advanced search feature where one can search for keywords from the transcripts of conventions and can narrow that search by particular “fields” such as convention type, date, location, etc. The results can be shown in a table view or an image view, and for a table view, one has options to view by “type” or “convention” and can view up to 200 results per page or “only items with images or files.”
There is also a section that lists exhibits. That section states “these curated exhibits draw from our collections to present cultural artifacts and materials related to Black organizing in the nineteenth century.” An exhibit that is illustrative of many of the other types of media in the project’s other exhibits is about Henry McNeal Turner, who was a politician, pastor, and community organizer. One can find not only prose on the life of Turner, but also photographs and drawings of Turner. Within Turner’s biography section there is a Sutori timeline where the viewer can scroll down and read up on events from Turners life and view photographs and drawings of his mother, his wives over the years and of the institutions where he worked.
Within the biography section is a photograph of a recruitment poster for African Americans from the time of the Civil War and an interactive map where letters from Turner and black soldiers in the Union army detailing their experiences in the war can be read. In the section titled “Turner and the AME Church,” one can view image files of book covers and title pages of works of literature that Turner was involved in. Also within that section can be found Google slides of a sermon Turner gave and image files of historical newspaper pages featuring Turner. In the section, “Turner’s Travels” there can be seen an interactive Google Map detailing Turner’s travels to and from Africa and when they were undertaken. In “Turner and the Conventions,” one can find an interactive map of the United States pinpointing visually Turner’s attendance at various Colored Conventions over the years with short summaries detailing the conventions and photos of convention’s posters. Also in this section is an interactive Google Map pinpointing places where newspaper accounts of the conventions were published. In the section “Emigration, ” there is a Sutori Timeline detailing the ways in which the idea of emigration was repeatedly invoked during the Colored Conventions movement and it includes various historical excerpts and photos involving emigration.
The CCP project meets the needs of it’s audience to a great extent by not only providing a wealth of information from various sources, but by having that information illustrated in several different forms of media, which allow for multiple different avenues of understanding this historical period. In reviewing the CCP project Bolter and Grusin’s “Remediation” came to mind. They stated, “digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness. . . .” This can be seen in all the various forms of media displayed in each exhibit, which gives the viewer many different ways of processing information to create a broader and deeper understanding of black political organizing in the period. The three views of remediation can all be seen within the project. The mediation of mediation can be seen in the way a Sutori timeline can remediate photographs, drawings, and prose in the form of an interactive timeline. Secondly, every form of media in each exhibit comments upon something that is real that explains, illustrates, or comments upon the work that was being done by African Americans during the time period, whether it’s something like a photograph of a newspaper passage that comments upon a specific Colored Convention or a Google Map that traced the voyages Henry McNeal Turner took to Africa to forge connections there between Africans and African Americans. Lastly, remediation functions as a reforming or refashioning of other media in the example of an interactive Google Map which visually documents in map-form the locations of local newspapers around the country which had pieces on Colored Conventions in that local area, with the map refashioning the newspaper excerpts. The CCP project is ultimately a very insightful, creative and thorough project.
