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Research
The Colored Conventions Movement
This brief description comes from The Colored Conventions Movement Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, Sarah Lynn Patterson.
What were the Colored Conventions?
In the 1800s, long before the founding of the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national "Colored Conventions" across North America.
Over seven decades, Black conventions advocated for social justice and against slavery. They protested state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding their full share of voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. Colored Conventions took place in more than 34 states across the US and in Canada. They provided a way for Black communities to organize politically when they could not vote, serve on juries, or hold political office. Their collective efforts took a dizzying number of forms. People who attended the Colored Conventions came from many walks of life, representing the diversity of lives, experiences, and ideas held by African Americans.
Transcribe Conventions will help expand what we know about African American history. By transcribing and finding names, we can make these documents much easier to search, browse, and share on the website of the Colored Conventions Project.
Black women were often invisible—but always important
The official records from the conventions reflect the bias of their times. More than 98% of the known names in the rolls of the delegates were men.
New research on the Colored Conventions suggests a very different reality. We follow Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, who asks in her important essay: "What did they eat? Where did they stay?". There are thousands of pages left to examine for clues about women's roles, named or unnamed. Browse our field guide (located in a tab on the right of your screen) to see a small sample of the ways that women could be mentioned in the conventions for their roles in running closely related newspapers, boardinghouses, fundraising efforts, and much more.
We chose as our main theme the question "All Rights for All" to focus on two goals. First, we want to learn about Black women's roles in the long struggle for racial equality and civil rights. We also want to learn about the fascinating lives of these women who helped to effect social change.
By participating in Douglass Day 2026, you can be a part of a project to remember the heroic women and collective groups whose legacies are too often forgotten. You can help restore the names of the everyday people who fought for Black freedom and civil rights in the Colored Conventions.
Here's how that process will work. In the tasks for "Find the Names" you'll be asked to put brackets around any names that might be Black women. After all of the tasks are complete, our team of experts will compile the results. We will study everyone's suggestions. This information will help us greatly expand our current list of women in the conventions (see our web page on "Women in the Conventions".) This list provides teachers, students, and researchers with starting points for more detective work to learn about women who did extraordinary things in so many places.
After Douglass Day 2026, our team will begin collecting all of the contributions. We will post all of the results on our website, ColoredConventions.org. In the future, everyone will be able to access the transcribed documents and the data about the names for future study and exploration. Don't forget to follow the Colored Conventions Project on Bluesky for future announcements and releases @CCP-org.