Hello and welcome to Conventions, a podcast about the history of constitutions brought to you by the Quill project at Pembroke College Oxford.
My name is Grace Malan and I'm your host.
Before, during and after the American Civil War, African-Americans fought for their freedom and for the right to participate in American democracy.
Many people are familiar with the history of this struggle,
but what is sometimes overlooked is how African-Americans cultivated their own political institutions during this period.
Places where representatives from across individual communities,
states and nations could develop collective strategies and responses to policies that threaten black freedom.
In this episode, I talked to Denise Burger and Jim Casey about the coloured convention's movement of the 19th
century and the work they have done with a groundbreaking digital project to recover its history.
My name is Dennis Berger. I am, along with Dr. Jim Casey, one of the co-directors of Douglas Day.
I'm a senior team leader for Coloured Conventions Project,
where I am the director of Historic Churches and community engagement and the director of the Curriculum Committee on the Curriculum Committee,
as it sounds, is engaged in building curriculum and an iterative process with teachers based
on the archives of the Coloured Convention's movement and historic churches.
And community engagement is, as it sounds,
interested in building relationships with the historic independent black churches that are aligned with or connected
with the coloured convention's movement and community engagement means every single person on the planet.
And I try to bring into interaction with our archives and with their colour conventions project.
My name is Jim Casey. I'm an assistant professor of African-American studies, history and English here at Penn State,
where I also serve as associate director of the very new Centre for Black Digital Research,
which is home to a number of black digital research projects now,
including the Colour Conventions Project, which I'm a co-founder and co-director, Douglas Day,
of which I'm also a co-founder and co-director, and a new enterprise called the Black Women's Organising Archive.
So first of all, we're going to dig into what the project does in various different angles.
But the first thing I wanted to ask is a quick overview What is the coloured convention's project and then how did you both get involved with it?
The Cover Conventions project is a community of scholarly research project and set of websites that are
attempting to gather and better understand the long history of what we're called the college conventions.
This is a movement that has for a good while now been known to many specialists in the early 19th century African-American history.
But as we've discovered over the last ten years of working on this project,
this is a movement that began in 1830 in Philadelphia and continues all the way through the end of the 19th century to hold city, county, state,
regional and national meetings of black leaders, both black men and women who met oftentimes to discuss how they might collectively address many
of the problems facing their communities and to organise their communities in positive ways.
And so we see from our records that there were probably something in the order of five or six hundred state national conventions,
with delegates representing every part of the United States, many parts of Canada and parts beyond the number of delegates probably runs.
Nobody truly knows, but probably runs somewhere north of ten or eleven thousand people.
And if we think about the people who are in the halls and the audiences of so many of these conventions
that it's truly a mass movement that has until we began this work largely escaped the notice,
certainly of public attention about the history of black activism,
about political organising and also about the ways that black people and communities before the civil rights movement,
before the NAACP participated in government, participated in pushing and speaking up and many, many different ways across a wide variety of issues.
There's no real one monolithic topic that concerned the conventions.
It began early on with a concern for anti-Black laws being passed across the country in the late 20s and early 30s,
but came to involve conversations about emigrating from the United States,
conversations about education, about forming newspapers to speak for black communities.
There's a seemingly unending list of topics that were at centre at centre stage and many of these conventions.
And so part of the work that we're trying to do as members of the convention project is to help
gather these materials and show that what has oftentimes been taken as an exceptional moment in,
say, 1843 or 55 or 65. It's actually part of a much larger movement of generations of black activists travelling,
meeting, debating, strategizing and writing these documents together.
And so we know we have a great ways to go, but we're here in part to be able to share some of the work that we know that
can touch on so many different parts of the study of African-American history,
American history and all of the subjects that connect from there.
The Cover Convention project was founded in 2012. By a group of us at the University of Delaware who had started to look at.
The 1859 New England Convention in a graduate course that was being taught by P. Gabriel Forman,
our collaborator and partner on so many of these projects.
And when we began to look at this single document, we realised that there was a much, much larger set of histories to be gathered.
And so the project that has evolved over the last ten years to involve more than 100 different collaborators,
students, faculty and librarians has been one that has welcomed many people because there's so much work to do,
including as we've brought in folks like Denise who helped introduce herself in a moment who have taken on real leadership roles across this work.
Absolutely, as Jim mentioned, the start pre-dates what has become known as the colour conventions project.
I came in in 2014 as a community organiser.
And then when I joined the University of Delaware as a graduate student.
Joined the team at another level, if that makes sense, not as a working with the team, as a community organiser,
but then I joined the team officially when I became a student and became a colour conventions project fellow.
So we've been functioning in ways that might be recognisable as a black teenage project
after its initial beginnings out of the closet jumped out of the graduate closet gym,
as mentioned. I would say within a year of getting started because it initially was just that.
How are we going to do something interesting and creative in the context of this grad class that evolved over time?
So in others, the goal was not to create a D.H project out the gate.
That was not the original idea. In fact, it was. With Jim's suggestion,
and they the the earliest iteration of the project was a Facebook page that showed a map that showed networking relationships of coloured conventions,
delegates and organisers that allowed for a visual representation of what the connexions between the delegates might look like that eventually
evolved over the years and through a lot of work and strategic planning into the award winning project like each project that it is now.
But that was not how it started. And yeah, so it started in 2012.
I came on in 2015, 2014, fully and completely 2015 for the first crowdsourcing effort.
Given that we are on the this, this podcast is is principally focussed on constitutional history and particularly this idea of a convention,
which is a process of collective decision making. So I wanted to ask is why conventions, which may seem like a like a sort of obvious question.
But no, why was that what you absolutely know?
It's definitely not an obvious question. So to so to emphasise it a bit more.
The first coloured convention was called to order in 1830 by Bishop Richard Allen, who was the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
and he called the first image to order in Philadelphia and organised it at Mother Mother Bethel, which is the founding church.
The actual physical location which exists and the reason why he called this group, called this gathering was to do just what you described.
Have a call together leaders, thinkers, strategists, business people and religious leaders,
many of whom wore more than one hat at the time in a collective to have a
series of conversations in order to respond collectively to a problem that was.
Pressing in Ohio, which I'm going to explain very quickly,
but actually was a shared experience across the United States and one could possibly argue across the desk.
So what do I mean by that? So in Ohio. A series of black codes that had already been on the books were activated in
order to harass and to persecute the free black community in Ohio at that time.
And as a consequence, African-Americans were being beaten were being insulted.
Houses are being destroyed when you look at the news.
Newspaper reports at the time the African-American community came under severe attack and for no other reason than the free blacks.
The free black community in Ohio had been purportedly competing with free white men for jobs, literally for labour.
And so a campaign started in the news papers and ordinary Ohioan white men took it in hand
to to express their their their negative feelings towards the African-American community.
And so the community was really under siege and quite beleaguered.
However, this was something that was happening across the United States in different contexts.
And so when Richard Allen and the men and women that he gathered in my mother, Bethel, to have a conversation about what to do.
So this clearly Philadelphia and Ohio are hundreds of miles apart.
It was in order to mount a collective response to what was actually a collective issue.
Very, very interestingly, a delegation was the decision was made to appeal to the Crown government of Canada at that time, which was, of course,
still a British colony to ask for what amounted to refugee status for
African-Americans who left the United States and not just to ask for refugee status,
but to see what would be in it in contemporary language to be refugee status,
but actually was a request for African-Americans who left the United States
to be allowed to enter Canada legally and not just to enter Canada legally,
but to be allowed to settle in Canada legally. And the Crown governor said yes.
So truthfully, what happened as a consequence of the first meeting was delegation was sent to the Crown governor.
The delegation was received and the request was agreed to.
And that led to the establishment of a community in Canada called Chatham West, which,
based on our own research established on the the major depot in Canada for the Underground Railroad.
It's interesting because somehow or another, all these details fell out over time.
But when you have this image of people running to Canada, they weren't just running to Canada on the hopes that everything might be OK.
There was actually a legally agreed on place and space for people to go and to settle.
And so once that was agreed to, the delegates returned to United States.
The information was communicated to the black community in Ohio, and they left newspaper reports,
then talk about how hundreds of black Ohioans actually left left and went to Canada West,
dependent on the fact that this had been arranged by these African-American leaders in Philadelphia.
So this then also became broadcast all across the United States.
And so more and more African-Americans who felt that there were limited or constrained options in the United States
knew that Canada was an option and Canada wasn't legally recognised and understood option to exercise Canada.
Mexico, there were others. But can this arrangement with Canada was the result of this first convention?
Following that, there were a seat. There are five of the conventions that took place immediately asked by, I mean, every year after the first.
But that was again and in an effort to think about and respond in a collective manner
to the issues that were affecting African-Americans within the United States.
But conceptually, it was understood to be within the Diaspora.
It was understood that this was a diasporic problem and needed a collective response, not just an individual response.
The African-American community and African-American collectives created what are sometimes described as.
Parallel structures of citizenship. Parallel forums.
And so in the same way that hundreds of thousands of conventions discussing different topics and issues took place in America during this time period,
African-Americans used very similar but different structures and forums to talk about,
to advocate for, to develop and then to infiltrate and shape the actual political and activist
and statesmanship spaces that they were not allowed access to by way of race,
but then ended up shaping and infiltrating over time.
And so in the same way, you had these varying conventions that were taking place on all types of issues, not only were African-Americans present,
but they were also developing these parallel institutions that were meant to function for the community.
But at the same time, shape the dominant official community to which African-Americans are not allowed access.
I think this idea of a parallel institution was something as you were talking,
I was thinking, this is like a government, this is like having a separate government.
That that and the fact that they were communicating with British imperial officials and organising official policies,
essentially that is absolutely correct and communicating through newspapers because the general
to be able to say more about there were several independent black newspapers because of course,
African-American people affairs events were not covered in the dominant white press or were covered generally in ways that were disrespectful,
that were scurrilous, that were disparaging.
And so there was an independent black press and it was quite well developed and it was all across the United States,
into the Caribbean, into some African nations, into Latin America as well.
And so the reports of the coloured convention's movement, the advertisements for the actual meetings themselves were printed in the papers.
The day by day reports of what would happen, so-and-so said this,
we agreed on that all of those were actually printed in the papers and then later still,
the minutes were printed in the papers and then the concluding reports at the end
were printed in papers and or printed whole as pamphlets and distributed or sold.
So yes. And this is something that I wanted to get on to next, which is, the documents say,
one of the brilliant things about a convention and one of the things that interests me about the fact that
they used the model of a convention is it is this formal parliamentary legislative type process where,
yes, as as Denise was just discussing, there is a set of four minutes that are produced.
There is a report that is produced over the course order.
The aim of this, the thing is to produce a document with a set of policies or a or whatever it may be that the convention is seeking to produce.
And so what I wanted to ask you next is about the documentary record that is left behind by the conventions and then going on from that,
the kinds of things that we can hope to learn as historians from these records that are left.
That's exactly right. The conventions, I suspect,
sometimes escaped a lot of historians notice because many of the documents themselves are not particularly fascinating reading.
If you open up some of the ones that we've gathered on our site and look at the first five or 10 pages of many of them, the.
Bulk of the documentary record are debates about procedure are about how they're going to vote,
about whether or not they need a majority vote or a consensus vote about how they're going to organise into working groups
where committees will gather reports or addresses and then propose them for the entire body to either endorse or reject.
And when you first read these, they can oftentimes seem very quotidian, kind of just part of that process.
And that's to miss a really, really important point, which was that when they decided to organise a state convention or a national convention,
they were specifically drawing on what they understood as the cachet of things like
the Continental Convention of things like the state constitutional conventions.
And they knew this. They knew this really, really carefully because black communities,
when they started have to these conventions in the 1830s had that historical memory reaching back to the 18th century,
but then also watching during the 1830s as many of the state constitutions were being revised about the ways that this was a kind
of organising tactic that would bring representation from across the country together that we are oftentimes like to note as well.
We're operating in a more democratic fashion than many of their formal government counterparts were at the time.
And then the last part of that is that the conventions understood themselves to be speaking in a collective voice.
And so much of the middle and latter parts of these documents will involve their debates about
the wording of a particular resolution about whether or not to endorse certain principle or not.
One of the most famous examples that many people might have heard of if they've heard of the code conventions is that in 1843,
the National Convention, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet writes an address in which he more or less proposes that it's
better to die in active resistance to being enslaved rather than to live a sentence life person.
And this is one of the most radical militant calls for fighting against the system of enslavement,
and so he proposes this as the message not coming from himself as an individual, but as coming from one of the committees at the convention.
And he could have just as easily gone and self-published it as many of his colleagues did.
He could have tried to put it in a newspaper, but he proposes in 1843,
and they wound up having to extend the convention by several days in the fight over whether or not to adopt the address that Garnett has put together.
And it's so important for him to get that vote to say yes, this convention endorses it and it winds up losing by a single vote.
And people really fought and they tried to reopen the vote to get the endorsement of the convention once again,
and why is it losing by that single vote in the decisive decision?
Because many of his fellow delegates said, Well, I'm not comfortable putting something so radical together.
I live in Cincinnati, right on the border with with states where slavery is still the rule.
There were lots of different objections. And so he retraces this speech once again at the 1847 convention.
He keeps trying to get one of these conventions to endorse it because he knows that if he just says something by himself, that's one thing.
But he sort of points at the power of these conventions to really kind of speak
in that collective voice and that that for us is such an important example,
not just because it's a dramatic turn of events that we've long thought, Oh, there should be a movie or something about that.
But because it also helps us to see the ways in which the published documents that came out of these
conventions were not kind of objective journalistic reports of who said what and what they did.
But we're understood by the delegates as they put these things together as really a kind of collective form of expression.
And so they help us to see some of the ways in which conventions and convention proceedings
are not really these kind of archaeological records of what was said and done,
but our sort of collective forms of writing. And this is some of the stuff that our colleague Gabrielle has done some writing on as well,
but helps us then to see in the rest of this movement every time that folks are debating
about this word for resolution or whether or not to include this report or that address,
it's really because they understand that there's a kind of collective autobiographical narrative being told here.
And so for us, even thinking disciplinary,
there are implications that we oftentimes think of the slave narrative as the foundation of African-American literature
because there's a singular figure and it's easy to see some of that kind of literary economies happening there.
But for us, the kind of complexities of the language coming out of a collective voice in these conventions
also helps us to see that these are historically important that are legally important.
But they also have a kind of role in forming a literary imagination that helps with things like Imagine freedom beyond a moment when,
for example, in the 1830s when the franchise is being revoked from black communities or during reconstruction,
when they're pushing up against state conventions to write constitutions that were explicitly
aimed to harm black communities and so that they would hold convention sort of directly parallel.
So there's lots more to say, but I'll say at least that these conventions were really self-aware.
They were not just kind of adopting what everybody else was doing. It was a really kind of self-aware, self situated project for many of them.
I like your attention to the fact that there is this amazing sort of grown parliamentary procedure.
Oh my gosh, how boring is this? But the fact of the use of parliamentary procedure?
I could even point folks to a place where one of the contributors to our recent volume and to an exhibit on our
website have really dived into the exact parliamentary procedures that helped to organise my media convention.
So Dr. Erika Ball, who wrote a fascinating chapter about the conventions of the conventions as she called them,
takes a sort of deep dive into the rules of the conventions,
into the different kind of manuals that they used, where they would read out sort of chapter and verse of these parliamentary procedures to say,
no, we're we're really going to use this process, and here's why.
So I'd encourage folks to take a look at that on our website, and it's in the book as well. So there's also an exhibit.
So for the people who are super interested, they should absolutely look to the chapter.
But for the people who are just want to get a better understanding of it,
then if they take the time to go to our website and they look at the exhibit,
the conventions of the conventions, they will have an opportunity to learn in a super accessible way.
The conventions that we use some of the actual text,
whether it was Robert's rules of dance and Phillips organising of that and and
all of that's mapped out and with actual examples pulled from the archive.
I think the history of parliamentary procedure is absolutely fascinating.
I think that when Denise and I were talking obviously about sort of the the role of the
conventions as parallel institutions and the significance of a formal parliamentary procedure,
the significance of record keeping, the significance of the collective voice and for that sort of role as a parallel institution.
And the question that I have then is something a word that has come up is obviously, well, words that have come up representation and reception.
And the idea of these conventions as being representative of a broader not only local, not only regional, not.
National, but even transnational diasporic identity or group.
And what was the representative structure of the conventions, who went to the conventions?
And how did they get chosen? Is my next question.
This is a fun question, because there are so many different answers to it, but perhaps we can try and sort of open up some of them.
The earliest conventions tended to be some of the relatively elite black communities of the Northeast.
Many of the conventions, where roughly synonymous with conventions of ministers at the time,
many of the initial leaders were already sort of in leadership roles.
We also have folks like Barbara shoemakers, small business owners of all sorts, educators as well.
So early on,
we tend to see that they sort of reproduce many of that kind of leadership structures that were common to a lot of black communities in the Northeast.
That changes pretty significantly over the course of the century, in part because more people get involved, right?
And so into the later parts of the antebellum period,
we do see a kind of organising nested structure where local town or village or county wide meetings will get together,
and they will choose a representative to send to the state convention or a state
convention will choose a representative to send to the National Convention. Oftentimes with.
Fairly prescriptive instructions. You know, this was not an abstract.
Please go and see what you think on our behalf.
We don't have a huge amount of documented record for that, but we do see that there are consistent patterns in terms of voting and topical priorities.
For example, we see differences between the representatives from Ohio as compared to the representatives from upstate New York, for example.
And so that more or less coalesces, we hesitate ever to speak too much about any kind of strong patterns because there's so much eccentricity here.
But that pattern more or less holds for most of the antebellum period now in 1865.
Of course, there are four million more people who are around in the American South to participate in these conventions.
And this is one of the places where I think a lot of the knowledge is still relatively unsettled.
We had something in the order of 64 or 65 antebellum state national conventions.
There's probably a few more, but that's about the rough number.
We had at least 80 conventions in the years 1865 and 1866 that were a real explosion of different kinds of political participation.
And many of these conventions were led by very recently enslaved people.
All of a sudden meeting in auditoriums, concert halls and even many of them were in the state legislatures themselves, the actual physical halls.
And they were sort of all across the spectrum in terms of the parliamentary procedures they adopted, some of them very strict.
Some of them tried to arrive at a more organic process.
And that's one where I think there's still lots and lots of conversation to be had and some of the really interesting work.
I think if any of the listeners are looking for it,
the new research project will say one of the really interesting dynamics that comes about is that there are conventions to rewrite the official
formal state constitutions and oftentimes the state level conventions in the South would meet immediately before or during the other conventions.
And sometimes there were even delegates or representatives who were active in both of those meetings.
And so this is a very kind of layered practise in terms of who is representing from
the local level to the state level and from the state level to the other state level.
If that makes sense. And as soon as we start to get a sense that there's some kind of stability around the practise,
of course, things continue to change the reconstruction period. One of the conventions that I've spent a lot of time looking at most recently,
I suppose we all have is that eating at three national convention in which the collapse of reconstruction, it's more or less fully arrived everywhere.
There's a lot of scepticism about organising black conventions as opposed to participating Republican Party conventions,
not wanting for many black leaders to be seen as outside the party structure and not therefore being, you know, included in the real wheels of power.
And so there's a call it goes out in the spring of 1883.
Frederick Douglass, his name is attached. There's a whole group in Washington, DC, and most of the black communities around the country say no thanks.
We would not like to be included in your quote unquote coloured convention.
We're trying to do what we can at the local and state level, so don't include us.
And there's a whole back and forth that.
Proceeds went Douglas goes on, basically a media tour giving interview after interview, trying to convince people, No,
I think it's important that we gather to represent black communities interests distinct from or overlapping with,
but really distinct from the party, the party politics.
And so a bunch of the states start to hold conventions to decide, are we going to participate in the National Convention or not?
And I think this is one of the places where we see the most direct, transparent forms of democratic participation,
in part because states like Arkansas and Ohio decide not to participate.
And they hold these state conventions, they follow the full procedure and say, no, thank you.
We're not going to have it ready. Please don't include us. Please don't speak for us.
And so it's interesting to see the ways in which the convention, as expansive it is and it's also in its heterogeneity,
shows us the ways in which representation is not just an abstract kind of speaking on behalf of,
but really has a kind of transactional interpersonal quality to it as.
Something be interested in when people are really immersed in records is like, you know,
things that have stayed with some aspects of the record that have stayed with them.
And individuals have stayed with them. And as you've said, like sometimes, sometimes legislative records are not the most gripping.
But you definitely have a lot of a lot of interesting individuals and stories involved here.
So I wondered if if each of you could perhaps drum up an anecdote or an individual who is
sort of struck you from the documentary record that you've engaged with on the project?
There are certainly aspects of the covered convention MeToo archives that are dry and legislated, but there.
But there are reams of documents that are over the top, dramatic and riveting.
So, for example, some of the California conventions,
some of the some of the secretaries who were taking the minutes were literally recording by the moment of what was happening.
And so you read some of the documents and they'll say some of the minutes and I'll say.
Mr Casey then cleared his throat and then someone in the audience yelled, You are a fool.
It's as if you are there while it is happening.
And I was laughing. I remember transcribing just being like, This is the funniest because it.
And of course, mirrors some of the more impassioned legislative debates that you will watch on TV.
Or if someone has been to a City Council meeting and it gets pretty hectic and you're just like, this feels.
Very familiar, except this is from 1869, what is that?
And so there is so there are moments like that. There are also moments where I've read a torrent of comments that I transcribed
and others that I've just read through because I do actually find them very,
very interesting. There's a lot of pathos where you'll have someone say, Mr. Speaker, I wish to ask the assembled gentlemen to pause and allow this.
Mr Jenkins, who has recently escaped from enslavement to speak.
And then you'll have the words of this man who yesterday.
Crossed the border and knew that there was a coloured rendition happening or
heard and decided that this would be a place for him to spend his first hours.
Officially, as a free person and to hear that person talk about their experiences and how they feel to be there,
the last thing that I would say is the language of a lot of the addresses so beautiful and so sweeping,
the dramatic over the top, the jokes, the sarcasm, the witticisms that are speaking to you from the 19th century,
thinking about what it would have meant for someone to say what they're saying in public and to know that it was being
recorded and to know that you could have perhaps even gotten this newspaper and mailed it to a family member or a friend,
or kept it in your Bible and know that these were your words. So recently,
transitioning from being perceived and understood and described and experienced outside of this all
black space as someone who was less than to someone who is now in this space speaking and being.
And then just again, the beauty of some of the language.
As Tony says, these conventions oftentimes held themselves out as very orderly, very grand, very formal proceedings.
But there are these small moments when emotion or a bit of humanity sort of creeps in.
In the speech that I mentioned earlier that Henry long ago, that gives it the 1843 convention.
One of the things that has long fascinated me is that he's giving the speech in which he argues that if you are an enslaved person,
it's better to take people on with violence than to continue to live in that situation.
And at least half of his audience, amongst the other delegates, were people who had emancipated themselves from being enslaved.
And so it's one of the very rare moments in the early conventions where we see emotion actually annotated.
And there's a brief sentence that says something along the lines of there was not a dry eye in the house.
And so that people felt this kind of wrenching complex of emotions about maybe family relations
who were still enslaved while they were trying to organise and trying to make progress.
And so. I think it's really important to preserve that when they were passing resolutions appealing to abstract principles.
They were oftentimes doing so from a very human place that these were living,
breathing three dimensional people with trauma, with personal histories, with hopes involved in all of these.
And there are many, many different examples of that.
As Tony said, there are many examples as well on a more light-hearted note where we actually see laughter being noted in the conventions.
In one of the funnier moments, the great activist George de Downing,
who's a personal favourite amongst many of us on the convention from Rhode Island to D.C., makes a joke where he says something effective.
We have this letter from somebody who participated in the colonisation scheme to move free black people to Africa,
and he wants us to read it, but he must be fooling himself.
And so we're just going to burn the letter and he makes a motion to burn the letter and the parenthetical comment says.
And then there was tons of laughter in the room.
You know, so they were having jokes, and there's a number of those across the conventions that that have long really entertained us.
The other point that I'd like to point, though, that I think is fundamental towards understanding the larger movement and why I think this is such an
important question is that we see in these conventions ninety nine point nine percent of the names are men.
The representation, of course, is only partial representation because it's reproducing the sexism of its day,
and we've been very careful to try and be intentional about recognising the roles that black women played in many of these movements,
even if we can't always see it from the legislative records themselves.
We can't see it in a few places, and this is one of my favourite moments across the entire seven decade history when women would be involved.
It would more often not be in a breaking of the rules of parliamentary procedure, that there would be a motion to set aside procedures for a moment.
And we'll hear from the ladies of Harrisburg or we'll hear from local.
Some of the local activists, for example, in Ohio, and many times it's people who are sort of speaking from just off the podium.
There are a couple, though, who managed to elbow their way to behind the podium with these conventions.
And for us, that begins and ends, oftentimes with marriage.
Had Kerry, who was one of the first black woman to serve as a delegate at these conventions, as well as a teacher, a newspaper editor.
She later goes to law school herself as the first black woman to attend law school at Howard.
And she she manages to fight her way onto the podium at a couple of different conventions and 55.
She makes the greatest speech, everybody says of the convention, even though it's later left out of the official published proceedings.
But we know from letters and newspaper coverage that everybody thoroughly disagreed with her speech but was thoroughly compelled by.
And so as we follow her through the movement, she's one of the long running figures at the state national and regional levels who's
thinking about what it means to try and agitate for improvement of black lives.
And at the 1869 convention, which is held in Washington, D.C., there are representatives from all across the country.
It's maybe arguably the first truly nationally representative country that includes delegates from every state in the Union.
And because it's in Washington, D.C., because there's such electoral power all of a sudden associated with this convention.
There are senators. There are congressmen,
there are Supreme Court justices who are in the audience and dropping in and out and who are receiving committees from the convention itself.
So this is a charged atmosphere. This is a high profile one.
And midway through the convention, you can find this in the document because they actually recorded it midway through the convention.
Man should carry more or less, usually unilaterally stands up and says,
I know that we didn't decide to have a committee on women's rights, but I really think we should.
And so we're going to. And here's our report, and it's her speaking on behalf of five or six other black women.
And it's one of my favourite examples because she really understands the problem and a procedure that's happening at the moment.
And she says that's not good enough.
And so she pokes through, and it's one of the few times when we see a committee on women's rights that any of the conventions and for me,
that's such an important moment because it shows how much the procedures could have really liberatory potential.
But sometimes there's that potential was really limited by things like gender.
Also, things like class often do, and man should carry with their kind of chip on her shoulder and sort of no holds barred stands up and says,
I think we could do better for folks who are interested in constitutional studies and legal history.
Some of the conventions might immediately seem to be beyond the scope, but for us,
the people who are speaking from the margins, even at these conventions are engaging in that kind of constitutional thinking.
You know, we haven't even talked yet about many of these conventions actually would write
formal constitutions and proposed amendments and submit petitions to the local,
state and national governments. I was I was just going to quickly say I've been thinking a lot about the concept of popular constitutionalism, right?
Which is often understood to be something that's a little bit fluffy and vague.
But this is in a sense, particularly in those circumstances where people aren't being formally represented in government.
This is a kind of popular constitutionalism, which is very muscular, right?
Like having all of that parliamentary procedure knowledge, producing your own constitutions,
producing amendments to constitutions and resolutions that are intended to be directed to legislatures.
They were not just highly organised, but they were intentionally strategic, and they actually, as a record, as a historic record has shown.
Sorry, these intellectual activists did in fact, shape the laws and shape the institutions that have now come down to us through time.
So you had coloured and then you had newspapers that were created as a result of the coloured convention movement.
You had schools that were created, you know, Talladega Howard Law School,
the charter for Howard Law School, was generated at a coloured convention meeting, for example.
We don't know what the other institutions and or organisations that were created
directly out of the colour convention movement that we could point to and say,
Oh, OK, well, there is Talladega. And they actually have the documents of the coloured convention meeting.
That was the foundation of this institution that then educated generations of African-American
students who are now in every walk and layer of American society and perhaps internationally,
right? Like literally coming out of a coloured conventions meeting.
So this is not just OK, quote unquote shadow work, but this is work that existed.
Explicitly and overtly in the African-American community, which is still in the United States,
but also more subtly and in the more nuanced but distinctive ways in quote unquote white dominated official
spaces that as a result of anti-Black racism and African-Americans were explicitly prohibited from.
The immediate example that comes to mind is the start of the Equal Rights Leagues,
which begins with the 1864 National Convention held in upstate New York and immediately,
literally on the same day they turn around and say, OK, we're going to form this new organisation called the Equal Rights League.
That becomes one of the longer movements after the conventions in the 19th century, and they pass a formal constitution.
And this happens at many of the conventions, which I'll return to in a moment.
But they pass a formal convention, and then they charge many of the people who are there with going home and starting
state level chapters of the Equal Rights League and then forming bodies,
which will then vote to approve or disapprove the convention's constitution.
And this is a really important moment because while many of the local chapters tend to agree,
it's a fairly short, fairly kind of broad minded constitution.
It's one of the few places where we see that kind of state and national level integrated organising that
that is really kind of passing because it helps to kind of reveal some of the themes for us as well.
If the movement. The second place that I might point people, and this is a relatively unmapped set of conversations, but one,
I think that somebody should be able to write a really important dissertation or a book that we'd all love to read.
And that is that the movement goes to the end of the 19th century, and folks might notice that we tend not to attach a certain year to that date.
There's no hard and fast kind of ending, in part because we see that there are the formation of new movements.
There's the Niagara movement and the NAACP.
There's the National Association of Coloured Women and their clubs and many of the same people who are at some of the later conventions in the 70s,
80s and 90s become some of the major founders of those movements.
But there's also a generational inheritance that happens where folks who were organising at some of the earlier
conventions see some of their descendants then participating in the NAACP or participating in that ACW.
One of the great examples is the. The family history of W.E.B. Dubois, who grows up in Massachusetts in the 1870s.
His grandfather, Ethel Burkhart, is attending these conventions.
The other example of famous faces is that Langston Hughes counts amongst his predecessors Charles Langston and John Mercer.
Langston, who along with Frederick Douglass, probably went to the most conventions of the 19th century.
And so when we think about sort of early 20th century major movements and organisations for us,
one of the major outstanding questions is to understand how the history of the conventions during and after reconstruction helped to shape.
What we came to know is that kind of, or, excuse me, what we often attribute as the beginnings of major national black organising.
These, of course, are not new questions, but the ones that, as we gather, were more these materials.
We could start to reach more, more authoritative and more complex conclusions.
And then the last thing that I'll leave with.
Is that many of the conventions from the very beginning, all the way to the end of the movement as we understand it,
did sit down and write formal constitutions for permanent organising body that they
hoped would emerge out of these conventions and all but the Equal Rights League.
Maybe a few other short life exceptions never really came to pass.
A few of them might have a couple of annual meetings. They might hire a travelling agent to go and solicit funds and speak to local communities.
But they weren't really always in a position to put together a formal means of essentially a second government.
But I think what's worth dwelling on is that there's a kind of imagination of a different future at many conventions.
That in that very formal, very kind of highly wrought language of constitutional language,
there's a kind of dreaming a kind of anticipation of what might be possible that frankly goes.
To the contrary of almost everything that we understand about the history of these times,
right, when we think about the 1850s after they had passed the Fugitive Slave Act,
then the conventions of passing constitutions which call for full citizenship, which call for full civil rights.
I think it's easy for us to miss from our perspective today quite how radical of a move that was for them to say,
we don't just believe these things, but we want to codify them in a collective way and then we want to try and organise beyond there.
And so I think that when we start to think about what some of the true legacies of this movement are,
it's really in that kind of speculative thinking that manifests as constitutional thinking.
That's a kind of aspirational quality that holds out, frankly,
a more ambitious sort of redemption of things like the Declaration of Independence in the original
U.S. Constitution than almost anywhere else that we look in the 19th century United States.
So we've been talking a lot about all of the materials that you've put together for the project.
This sort of extraordinary documentary history, which runs not to just legislative records,
but also things like newspaper reports and other other kinds of of materials,
and the fact that there is so much more work to be done clearly here in this area.
But that is a an edited collection associated with the project.
Jim, you were one of the editors of the of the collection.
And I wanted to ask.
I wanted to ask about who is working on this, that we should be reading and what kinds of work they have been doing with these materials.
Thanks for this question.
It gives me an excuse to be able to shout out to people who have really informed our thinking about all of this movement to so in 2021,
we were delighted to be able to publish with the good folks at university.
North Carolina press an edited collection, the first edited collection to rethink the histories of the college conventions.
And it's by no means a comprehensive take, but it's one that we hope can propose at least some of the themes for future conversations.
I also would be remiss not to recognise Pico Brown-Forman and Sarah Lynn Patterson, my co-editor,
as well as the many people Michelle Blum, Denise Berger, Cal Rouda, Selkirk Small.
I hesitate to name everybody because there's so many to name who had helped to plan an initial symposium that led then led to the collection.
We should also thank our funders, I suppose, as well, the DeLaughter Historical Society and each other, folks who helped make that possible.
And the. I wanted to shine a light at least a little bit on the many folks who hoped to put that together, because for us,
it was a very difficult process to try and take this massive new archive that we were starting to assemble and try and make sense of it.
And so what we did was rather than try and attempt some kind of comprehensive account that's still probably not even possible,
but instead tried to sort of think about some of the major themes that might help us to organise some of these conversations.
So just to kind of name a few of them. The first and foremost for us was thinking about the roles that black women played in this movement,
in part because it helped us to see so much of what happened behind the scenes and at the granular level.
For many of us, the absolute go to text at this point is Psyche Force and Williams essay Where Did They Go?
Denise help me with the title. I always get it backwards. Where did they go?
Where did they stay? Thank you. And in that essay, it's a fabulous essay.
I should apologise. We're not getting the title exactly right.
But it's been maybe the most frequently cited essay so far out of the book, because in it, she makes the argument.
If we looked at the whole, we can see that there's some of the action happening, there's some of the conversations.
But if we reflect on how many of us go to conventions and conferences and our own experiences,
we all know where the most important conversations happen not on stage, but usually over a meal or over a drink or catching up with friends.
And we can have deep, long winded conversations. And so by doing some really fascinating work on material, culture and food cultures,
she points to some of the the boarding houses in Philadelphia that hosted some conventions and suggests that there were these
spaces that were being created outside of the convention hall that were still fundamentally part of the actual convention itself.
It's a fascinating essay.
We should also mention that there is an online companion exhibit that extends some of the materials that she presents in her chapter.
And that's true for I believe about half of the chapters in the book have an online exhibition on our website at Colleague Mentioned DaUg,
in which the author of the chapter collaborated with a graduate student at the University of
Delaware to produce an exhibit that share some of the primary sources and so on and so forth.
Many exhibits even go very far beyond the chapters themselves.
Denise is the co-author of one of the fabulous chapters about Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
that particularly really expands what we understand about his role in the movement.
There's a whole chapter of folks who are thinking about what does it mean when we take seriously the
thesis that the conventions were a much wider body of organising than just the anti-slavery movement,
which largely wraps up after the Civil War, as opposed to being a full seven decade movement and trying to really dislodge for us the historic
graphical suggestion that the conventions were just a subset of the anti-slavery movement.
We're very much convinced that it's actually the opposite that the anti-slavery movement,
when it would show up at the conventions was oftentimes just one in a very long string of conversations.
We're also trying to sort of think about the ways in which our model of this history, largely based in Philadelphia, York,
New England, is also one that really, really expands as we start to pay attention to the later parts of the movement.
And so some of the really productive chapters in the latter half of the book look, for example,
at the Texas conventions or at the California conventions or southern immigration
conventions that help us to see some of the longer threads that go across this book.
So I encourage folks to look at it. I can't nearly do justice to all of the chapters in it.
I believe there 16 chapters total that we're hoping will become not just ends unto themselves,
but opportunities for whole conversations to unfold from here.
The name of the volume is the Colour Convention's movement black organising in the 19th century,
available from UMC Press, as well as bookstores everywhere.
We, of course, encourage folks, as always, to seek out black bookstores to make the purchase as well.
Finally, something as we wrap up something that has been mentioned a couple of times already is Frederick Douglass Day.
And I would love to hear you talk about what Frederick Douglass Day is and how it
came out of this sort of the work you've done on the Coloured Connexions project.
I can start and then I'll let Denise elaborate, since we've been partners on that for quite a while.
Across his life, Frederick Douglass spent 40 years attending colour conventions, maybe longer than any other pursuit in his entire life.
He was attending state and national conventions and so we had understood this and.
Really had begun to reflect on it around 2016 2017, shifting political winds in the country where we live as they are.
And at the same time, we were also reaching the end of what we call transcribed minutes,
which was an effort to invite members of campus and community groups to help us
transcribe the often very difficult to read digitised records of the cult conventions.
We were pretty close to it,
and we thought maybe something that could put us over the finish line would be to just organise a day where we can all get together,
have a little bit of solidarity in these difficult times and see if we can't finish some of the transcriptions.
And no sooner had we organised at the University of Delaware when colleagues and friends from other schools began to reach out and say,
Hey, we heard that you're doing a transcribe it on.
What's going on with that and we said, well, we chose Frederick Douglas was chosen birthday, which falls on Valentine's Day every year, February 14th.
And they said, Well, we'd love to be a part of that, and we said we have no objection.
And so the first year we had nine or 10 people, excuse me, nine or 10 different schools and groups involved,
we learnt something from the experience that taught us that there's a real appetite for opportunities,
not just to consume versions of these histories, but to participate in the remembrance of black history and especially history that
speaks to so many of the issues that are still unfortunately resonant in our day.
And so we've grown it over the past six years into an annual holiday, a collective action for black history,
as we call it, where we invite people to organise groups with their schools,
classes, communities, churches and participate in a crowdsourcing project that we've queued up for everybody to help accomplish in a particular year.
We've worked with everyone from the Maryland Spingarn Library at Howard University
National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. Our colleagues at the Library of Congress just this past year,
and for this year we can mention it because we're going to be returning to transcribe the minutes of the conventions.
We've got a whole bunch of more documents since we concluded that first phase back in 2017.
And as part of it, what's really important for us, as we remember these histories,
is to create opportunities for people to be involved to organise their own kinds of gatherings.
We've heard from people who will undertake some transcription and then hold a poetry workshop afterwards,
or who will use it as an opportunity to make campus and community connexions that might not have been there before,
particularly that overwhelmingly white institutions who maybe don't have the best track
records with local black communities as a way of opening up some of those conversations.
And so folks can find all of the information at Douglass State Morgue, as well as on parts of the Colour Convention's project.
And the last part that I will read that I will leave listeners with before, Denise elaborates,
is also that because we're in the pandemic still, and we know that it's difficult for folks always to be able to gather in person.
We've attempted to try and create a substitute for a form of that community that
capitalises on the baking craze that has come with the pandemic for so many of us.
So we'd love to encourage folks to help transcribe on February 14.
Sign up ahead of time or just keep an eye out for the link on social media, but also.
We encourage everybody to enter the Great Douglas Day, Bake Off,
in which we will ask everybody to make your most delicious desserts, cakes, whatever you got.
And then post a photo of that to social media using our hashtag Douglas Day.
And then we have a panel of expert judges,
really our team who are going to make some selections and then give out prises to what they think are the most brilliant,
wonderful cakes that have been decorated for it. And it's silly and it's fun because we like to be all of the above.
But it also helps us to see the ways in which remembering black history oftentimes is a very sombre, solemn affair.
But it can also be an excuse for us to create spaces for joy where we can have fun together.
We're engaging with histories that could get very complicated and layered and not particularly comforting.
Could also be a space where we can have fun and welcome people in who maybe don't have a lot of background knowledge to this work.
And so that's a lot of the work that the nieces led us in, but I'm going to let her elaborate on that.
Definitely inspired by one of perhaps one of the greatest offerings from across the pond,
from our direction, which is the Great British baking, so please, please, please anyone listening.
You will get so much love from everyone across the world participating in Douglas Day.
And when you post your pictures, if you really, really, really want to get official, you can make.
Or is it plum pudding was was Douglas's favourite? And by that, I mean,
the British version with the lard and all the stuff which none of us have had the temerity to try to reproduce in the United States.
But we would love to see what an official.
British plum pudding would look like created in 2022, because that was Frederick Douglas's favourite cake for the less courageous, bold and intrepid.
He loved ginger cake. So if you're trying to go official and traditional.
Plum pudding, the OG boiled version, because we looked it up.
What the [INAUDIBLE] is this so plum pudding, if not plum pudding, ginger cake?
Enjoy. But yes, you post pictures. We look at the pictures.
People decorate and some of them, all of them are amazing.
Some of them are really, really fabulous. Yes, there are winners, peace.
Everyone's a winner and everyone gets the recognition and whatever fabulous prises we have in store for the winners.
So please do come along. Enjoy.
I don't believe that Jim mentioned that this year we are not just transcribing or transcribing is going to take another form,
and the transcribing is actually going to take the form of what would be more correctly called annotating.
And what do I mean by that is we are going to take our records and we are going to look through our records,
our existing transcribed records for mentions of women. So both where will say, for example, grace?
We'll see, Denise. And we're very, very pretty sure that no one was named it.
Well, you know, definitely men who were named Carol and Hillary in the 19th century, but you know, we're going to work with those.
So if we're not sure we're going to highlight those, but definitely worth is miss or miss or Mrs. Adler,
it's clear that it's a reference to a woman because there are feminine pronouns.
We're going to flag those individual and collective noun.
So, for example, the ladies of Harrisburg or the Bethel Amy Women's Choir.
And by so doing, we are going to have a collection of all of the mentions, references and her descriptions of women in our archive,
because then we will be able to offer this documented evidence that's going to be pulled out and then linked back to the actual archives themselves,
to art, to researchers, to students who are interested.
Then in following up on what this might mean because we discovered I personally and other researchers and students have discovered
that when you take some of those very slim references and you do the extra research work to identify either who is this woman or OK,
I know who this woman was, but what is she doing here?
You can find whole worlds of information about them that are not included in the records because, well,
misogyny and patriarchy and all the other things that function, or just quite frankly, was beyond the scope of that actual document.
But that information that you find by doing the extra work gives you so much context,
so much meaning has so much important significance that if you didn't do the extra work just on that one mention, you would have never discovered it.
So what we are doing this year is we're working with our archive, as you mentioned, and in particular,
we're working with our archive in such a way as to identify and look for document and track the presence of women in any any iteration,
which will then, like I said, be available for researchers, both for our own work and for researchers and students who are coming afterwards.
Of course, this is going to be livestreamed. And so you will be able to log on on Twitter or log on on YouTube in real time and participate.
I think also on Facebook, and you'll be able to participate with us that way.
We are going to be transcribing, we're going to be singing Happy Birthday, we're going to be looking at and.
Judging our Douglas steak cakes, we're going to be watching movies.
No, these are not blockbuster movies.
These are all movies about content, about Douglas Day, about Frederick Douglass himself, about the work that we're doing.
And so it actually really is a lot of fun. If you can join us for the full time is just a couple of hours.
If you normally join us for half an hour, please feel free to do that.
If you are a teacher or you are fortunate enough to know a teacher.
Or you remember your teacher? Please send them information about Douglas Day, we have curriculum content for K through 12 classrooms.
We have curriculum content for community colleges, colleges and universities as well, and we encourage teachers to join us.
We encourage teachers to join us with their classes.
We have what we call a curriculum in a box so that teachers can pick and choose what elements they may or may not want to use.
But they are supported to join us with their classes to participate in transcription either on the day of or afterwards.
Not really before they can absolutely come and get curriculum and do whatever they want to do with it before,
but it's really set up so that it could be a fun,
interesting thing for classrooms to do with us, or a fun,
interesting thing for classrooms to do afterwards, because the information is always posted on our site.
Literally, there's a big button that says, if you're a teacher, click here. So it's super, super easy to do, and we are very, very accessible.
We're accessible via email. We're accessible via telephone. Please email, please email, please email.
We will respond to whatever way you reach out. It is not a problem and bad on the phone to you.
Absolutely, absolutely. Because we want people to be involved.
We want people to interact.
We want them to feel comfortable to get their questions answered and to come along and join us in the celebration of Love for Black History.
Thank you for listening to conventions, a podcast about the history of constitutions brought to you by the Quill project at Pembroke College Oxford.
I'm Grace Mallon, and I was talking to Denise Berger and Jim Casey from the Coloured Conventions project,
which can be found online at coloured conventions. Don't.