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Douglass Day

Save the date for
Douglass Day 2020!

February 14, 2020

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Join us!

On Valentine’s Day 2020, we invite you to a birthday party for Frederick Douglass. Although Douglass was born into bondage, and never knew his birthdate, he chose to celebrate every year on February 14th. We celebrate this date as a moment for creating Black history together.

Douglass Day 2020

This year we will celebrate with a transcribe-a-thon and a read-a-thon on the life of the visionary writer, intellectual, activist and educator Anna Julia Cooper. Events will be video streamed online. We’ll get to work around the country and the world. Let’s create the long history of Black activism together!

Where does Douglass Day come from? 

Douglass Day is a holiday that began around the turn of the 20th century. After the passing of Frederick Douglass in 1895, Black communities across the U.S. gathered to celebrate his birthday every year on February 14th. They celebrated, remembered, and protested against the threat of racial violence and attacks on their civil rights. Douglass Day may have been one of the original inspirations for Black History Month, shaped by Mary Church Terrell and Carter G. Woodson. In 2017, the Colored Conventions Project revived Douglass Day. Since then, over 3,000 people have celebrated Douglass Day together!

See our Douglass Day pages for 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Douglass Day 2020 is presented by

The Colored Conventions Project, the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project, The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Princeton University Center for Digital Humanities, and the Penn State Center for Black Digital Studies. The transcribe-a-thon is made possible by training and generosity of the Zooniverse organization. We extend special thanks for support to the American Studies Association for a Community Partnership Grant.