Transcribe 2026

Learn more about the Colored Conventions from these resources:

• The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson. All proceeds go to support student work on this projects.
• A short overview about the Colored Conventions Project.
• Browse the Digital Records of the Colored Conventions Project.

The Colored Conventions Project has created many online exhibits about the Conventions:

• Introduction to the Colored Conventions Movement
• The Meeting That Launched a Movement: The First National Convention
• Before Garvey! Henry McNeal Turner and the Fight for Reparations, Emigration and Black Rights
• Black Women’s Economic Power: Visualizing Domestic Spaces in the 1830s
• Colored Convention Heartland: Black Organizers, Women and the Ohio Movement
• The Colored Conventions and the Carceral States
• The “Conventions” of the Conventions: The Practices of Black Political Citizenship
• The Early Case for a National Black Press
• Equality Before the Law: California Black Convention Activism, 1855-65
• The Fight for Black Mobility: Traveling to Mid-Century Conventions
• Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves’” and its Colored Conventions Origins
• New York African Free Schools and Their Convention Legacies
• Prosperity and Politics: Taking Stock of Black Wealth and the 1843 Convention
• Stake Claim or Take Flight: The Birth of Southern Conventions after the Civil War
• To Stay Or To Go?: The 1854 National Emigration Convention
• What Did They Eat? Where Did They Stay? Black Boardinghouses and the Colored Conventions Movement
• Working for Higher Education: Advancing Black Women’s Rights in the 1850s