The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey and Sarah Lynn Patterson

Reviewed by: The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey and Sarah Lynn Patterson Judith Giesberg (bio) The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-5426-3. 392 pp., paper, $29.95. Kim Gallon has described Black Digital Humanities as “a technology of recovery characterized by efforts to bring forth the full humanity of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools” (Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2016], https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/fa10e2e1-0c3d-4519-a958-d823aac989eb#ch04). Since 2012, the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) has served as a model of how this work can and should be done. [End Page 108] The initiative began modestly as an effort to collect and digitize extant records of antebellum conventions; it has grown to include the records of hundreds of meetings held all over the country and in Canada in which attendees responded to the immediate racial crises of the day. The CCP has helped establish the conventions as the nation’s first civil rights movement. The CCP derives its five core operating principles from the conventions, including attendees’ commitment to centering Black voices and to the collective enterprise of racial justice; but the project seeks to go further in recovering “Black women’s labor and leadership.” Black women had crucial voices in the movement, and their organizational and intellectual labor made the conventions possible and sustained them over the decades. But women were erased from the convention records the CCP is collecting, digitizing, and transcribing. So, in this first collection that has emerged from the digital recovery project, the authors show how the story of the conventions changes once this error is corrected. They point to the infinite possibilities for telling a fuller, richer history of nineteenth-century civil rights activism once women are returned to their proper place in the movement. No one knows how many Colored Conventions were convened between the first one, held in Philadelphia in 1830, and the last ones seventy years later, but author and project codirector P. Gabrielle Foreman indicates that they have identified six hundred meetings (25). The conventions were unevenly documented; some attendees published and circulated official minutes. But many meetings have been identified only by fragmentary notices in the papers. Added to this was the silencing of women’s work—some of it affected by male leaders and others by the women, who sought to protect themselves from white critique by keeping their names out of the records. Jewon Woo suggests that self-silencing may have been “Black women’s performative strategy” to shield themselves from charges of being “unconventional, and therefore socially ‘less desirable,’ women with ‘loud’ voices in public.” Her essay shows, however, that male convention leaders often did the silencing, like at an Ohio meeting when they struck the word Daughters from the minutes or ignored Jane P. Merritt’s demand for women attendees to be given equal voice (181, 179). The authors in this volume committed to writing women back into this history. Doing so required that they think creatively about how to engage the CCP archive. Often it meant going beyond it, entirely. Among the former, Kabria Baumgartner describes a process of “serial reading” of the Colored Convention minutes regarding a proposed coeducational American Industrial School; this approach allowed her to uncover “debates on gender and American higher education” that reveal women’s contributions to Black education, as teachers and school administrators (231). Eric Gardner highlights how on rare occasions when women “actually took the podium,” as did feminist poet Frances Ellen Watkins [End Page 109] Harper and author and teacher Edmondia Goodelle Highgate in Syracuse in 1864, male leaders downplayed their participation; Gardner flips the script by piecing together their likely remarks from their biographies and newspaper accounts of speeches they gave elsewhere. Even when they did not speak, women were not passive. In the published minutes, Erica L. Ball reads the regular...

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