Conventions Records

The Colored Conventions Project’s Digital Records website features hundreds of primary sources from the long conventions movement. Primary sources include minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images. The digital collections are organized by year, type, and region. Many primary sources have been transcribed and are keyword searchable. Whenever possible, we provide images of the documents along with the transcriptions and relevant metadata.

Please note:

• Our collection is still growing. We began this work in 2012 with information on a mere 64 state and national conventions collected in the volumes of national and state conventions that historians had consulted for decades. Our current database provides access to documents from nearly 200 conventions. Building on that work, in 2023-2025 the CCP research teams located records for more than 600 conventions held across North America. Work is now underway to begin publishing the latest findings on the CCP Digital Records website alongside a new database of 15K+ names from across our growing digital collection. We look forward to sharing these vast additions to the digital collection and revisiting these histories.
• If you know about a document or a convention that we do not offer, please let us know through our Convention Records Submission Form. Learn more at our Submit Records page.
• We provide transcripts when possible, but we have not yet finished transcribing the entire collection.
• The documents in our collection come from multiple sources of varying quality. Please let us know if you have a better copy to share through our Convention Records Submission Form.
• Want to learn more about the conventions and their contexts? Please visit the CCP Exhibits.
• Some files are not provided because of licensing restrictions, but we do share any information about the sources. Please consult your local school, library, or institution.

Updated 02/12/2025