Virtual Book Party and Discussion

Celebrating the release of The Colored Conventions Movement:
Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

Monday, March 22 from 3:00 – 4:15pm ET

On March 22, 2021, #DigBlk hosted a virtual book party to celebrate the release of the Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century.

Join Colored Convention Project co-directors P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey, along with volume contributors, Carla Peterson and Andre E. Johnson, in a celebration of the book’s release and a discussion of its significance. Lenwood Sloan and Dorothy Berry are featured guests and the discussion was moderated by Martha Jones.

This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century’s longest campaign for Black civil rights, in which tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism.  The book has already been listed on Ms. Magazine‘s most anticipated books of 2021, and the Library Journal has awarded the book with its “highest recommendation” calling it “a must for all students, researchers, and general readers with an interest in Black lives.”

Read more about the book, related exhibits, and where to purchase a copy at coloredconventions.org/about/book/.

Sponsored by the Department of English, Department of History, Department of African American Studies, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, and the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk

VIDEO: Collective Celebration of the Movement: Then and Now

Speaker Bios

P. Gabrielle Foreman is the Colored Convention Project’s founding faculty director and an award-winning teacher and scholar of nineteenth-century Black literary history and culture. She is the author of four books and editions, and is known for her widely taught essays. Gabrielle is a Professor of English, African American Studies and History at Penn State University where she holds the Paterno Chair in Liberal Arts and is the founding co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research, #DigBlk, housed in the PSU University Libraries. Gabrielle remains a Senior Library Research Fellow at the University of Delaware where CCP was founded and she once held the Ned B. Allen Professorship of English.

Jim Casey is an assistant research professor of African American Studies at Penn State University, and the managing director of the Center for Black Digital Research, #DigBlk. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Delaware and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. Jim was part of the inaugural group that launched the Colored Conventions Project and since then has been involved in all aspects of the project, including Transcribe Minutes, Digital Archives, the Convention Database, exhibits, curriculum, grants, project management, public outreach, campus talks, and CCP’s social media. Dedicated to collaborative scholarship, his work spans current and emerging areas of Black digital humanities and public humanities. Recent publications and ongoing projects focus on critical data studies, archives, and crowdsourcing.

Carla L. Peterson is professor emerita in the Department of English, University of Maryland.  Her field of expertise is nineteenth-century African American literature, history, and culture.  She has published numerous essays and two books: “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880 (Oxford, 1995) and Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale, 2011), which was awarded the 2011 prize for the best book on New York History by the New York Society Library and was a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman 2011 Frederick Douglass Prize.  With a fellowship from the Guggenheim fellowship, she is currently at work on a new project, “All Things are Becoming New: Taste and the Making of African American Modernity in Antebellum New York and Philadelphia.

Andre E. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Communication and the Scholar in Residence at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis. In addition to his work with the Colored Conventions Project, he is the author of The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (Lexington Books, 2012) the co-author (with Amanda Nell Edgar, Ph.D.) of The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (Lexington Books, 2018), and the author of No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

Dorothy Berry is the inaugural Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University, where she is currently leading a year-long project titled Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library. In high demand as a speaker and writer around issues around the archival field and African American Special Collections, Berry has given keynotes for the Digital Public Library of America, Society of North Carolina Archivists, and the Society of Georgia Archivists. She has upcoming publications on the history, digital discovery, and access of African American special collections materials in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, the Public Domain Review, and JSTOR Daily.

Lenwood (Leni) Sloan is well known across the U.S. as a catalytic agent, animator, and facilitator of cultural and heritage programs. For the past 40 years, Mr. Sloan has provided inspiration, leadership and technical assistance both in the public and private sector. Currently, Mr. Sloan serves as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Monument Project which preserves, conserves, and rededicates historic and cultural monuments throughout the state. In that capacity, he is spearheading the placement of the first monument dedicated to the 15th and 19th amendments in the United States at Pennsylvania’s Capitol. Additionally, he serves as Pennsylvania Governor Wolf’s appointee to the Commonwealth Capitol Preservation Committee (CPC), Pennsylvania’s coordinator for the International Institute for Peace Through Tourism (IIPT), as well as a board member for The African American Irish Diaspora Network (AAIDN), Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MAAFA, Pennsylvania Downtown Association, Lancaster (Pa.) Heritage Society (LHS), and Lancaster (Pa.) Public Arts Program.

Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018),  All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay. Professor Jones is a public historian, writing for broader audiences at the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France).