Gabrielle Foreman, Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of Black American Studies & History at The University of Delaware, will present “Colored Conventions and the Long History of Black Activism: Digital Organizing and Collective Recovery,” Monday, November 6, 4-5:30pm, at The University of Iowa Main Library Gallery.

For more than half a century, nineteenth-century Black Americans advocated for justice in state and national “Colored Conventions.” Why is such a continuous history of Black-led organizing and protest, one that features the most prominent writers, newspaper editors, speakers, church leaders, educators and entrepreneurs in the canon of early African American leadership known to so few? This talk by the faculty director of the Colored Conventions Project outlines the collective digital humanities work that has made the records and history of this movement freely available. It examines 19th century collective assertions for freedom and elucidates convention participants collective will to make real the self-evident: that Black education, Black voting and legal rights, Black employment, and Black claims to equal rights mattered then as they do now.