Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 65
A Radical Love for Black History: A Conversation with Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and Denise Burgher
Happy Friday!
I’m certain that many of you, like me, weren’t taught about Douglass Day growing up.
I sat down with Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and Denise Burgher for an article I am writing about the new ways in which Black history is being archived, but our conversation was so rich I had to transcribe it for everyone to see.
Dr. Foreman is the founding director of the Colored Conventions Project, an award-winning professor of English, African American Studies and History, and an endowed chair in Liberal Arts at Penn State University.
Denise Burgher is a Colored Conventions Project Fellow, a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Delaware, and co-director of the Douglass Day project.
Douglass Day was originally created by social activist and co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women, Mery Church Terrell, to celebrate the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass. Each year the Colored Conventions Project organizes people from around the world to transcribe an online collection of Black history and culture.
If you’re interested in participating, the event is this coming Monday, February 14th, from 12:00-3:00 pm ET. There are a few ways to get involved:
Head to the Hot Takes section to learn more about the history of Douglass Day, their annual transcribe-a-thon, and their thoughts about archiving Black history.
Here are some articles I’d recommend checking out today:
This Bloomberg CityLab article covers a new study that analyzes how Confederate street names bring down tCrain'se of houses in the area.
This Gothamist article covers the state of the reparations conversation in New York City.
This CNN article covers a new bill that would fine anyone who removed a Confederate monument.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Newsone: 40 Acres And A Mule: What Are Reparations And Why Is The Concept So Polarizing?
New York Times: The Uneasy Alliance Between Frederick Douglass and White Abolitionists
CBS: How a phone app aims to narrow the racial wealth gap
CBS: How the U.S. tax code disadvantages Black Americans
CNBC: First-generation Black wealth builders must embrace their success and put themselves first
Bloomberg: Confederate Street Names Bring Lower Home Prices
Now This News: 4 Black Philanthropists Dedicated to Reclaiming Ownership and Giving Back to the Community
CLASP: How Abolishing Critical Race Theory Preserves White PowerÂ
Slate: What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s a Vivid Example.
Slate: Why Grammarly’s New Suggestions for Writing About Slavery Were Always Going to Miss the Mark
Philanthropy Roundtable: Three Black Philanthropists Who Helped Fund the Fight to End Slavery
MSNBC: To move past the pandemic, we need to talk about Covid reparations
Global Citizen: Why Are Reparations Essential for Climate Justice?
KPFA: Race, Slavery, and the Origins of Police
Nonprofit Quarterly: I’m Rooting for Everybody Black: Black Solidarity, Black World Building and Black Love
New York Times: Fashion Is Getting an Inclusion Rider
Regional News
The Gothamist: The case for reparations in New York City
WNYC: Supporters of reparations say it's New York's turn
CNN: Proposed Alabama bills would protect Confederate monuments and raise fines if they're removed
WHYY: N.J. lawmakers (again) push bills to study reparations, school desegregation
Citizen-Times: Who applied for Asheville's historic reparations commission? Council to select 5 members
The ChicI'm Maroon: A Community-Led Approach to Reparations at UChicago
Crain’s Chicago Business: We need to hack appraisal-based lending
Dallas Morning News: How two Black parents in Plano took action after feeling ignored in the ‘critical race theory’ fight
WYPR: La. Senate candidate Gary Chambers burns a Confederate flag in his new campaign ad
International News
Reuters: Iraq pays last chunk of $52.4 billion Gulf War reparations
New York Times: Court Orders Uganda to Pay $325 Million in Reparations to Congo
Washington Post: Iran and 4 countries clash over reparations for 2020 crash
Events
Penn State: Reconsidering Reparations
University of Houston: Race, Racism, & Ameit'sn Media
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trevor: Thank you both for joining! Tell me about yourself. Who are you, and why do you do what you do?
Dr. Foreman: Sure, I started the Colored Conventions Project with a group of graduate students in a class that I was teaching as a co-collaborator and director, and it allowed us to begin archiving 70 years of early Black organizing.
Then, I was able to recruit some of the most fabulous people in the world, one of which is sitting in the room with us today, and she and Jim Casey, our Associate Director, founded Douglass Day, which is a global transcribe-a-thon, which she’ll talk about in a moment.
Then we joined forces with Shirley Moody Turner to begin the Center for Black Digital Research, which we call #DigBlk. I’m a literary historian, a scholar of Black women’s cultural production, and more recently of poetry, art, and artists as co-collaborators in the project of memory and narrative in how history has been scattered. I’m very interested in the ways in which our cultural workers are history makers.
Denise Berger: So, I am a Colored Conventions Project Fellow, which feels like the most important place to start because it as a consequence of me becoming a fellow that I was able to pursue my graduate work at the University of Delaware, where I am completing my dissertation in English Literature.
I am the director of two committees within the Conventions Project, community engagement, and curriculum. I work with fellow graduate students and undergraduate students to bring as many people as possible into productive interaction with our archives.
Whether it’s with transcribing or through working with the curricula we produce — ranging from teacher education to unit plans to lesson plans, to bring people into interaction with our archives. I am one of the co-directors of Douglass Day, with Dr. Jim Casey, the founder of Douglass Day because he had the idea of resurrecting it as a holiday.
Trevor: Well, it’s amazing to meet you both, and I’m excited about this conversation. I’d love to hear a little bit more about the history of the Colored Conventions Project. What were some of the earlier projects that you all engaged in? What’s the story behind the birth of these ideas?
Dr. Foreman: We were at Harpers Ferry on a graduate student trip. We decided that this small assignment was to use a social network plug-in that Facebook had available that allowed people to see how their networks were connected visually. I was using that plug-in to illustrate how Black people were connected to Black people in the 19th century. So people were creating fake profiles of Black activists involved in convention meetings and then plugging in their close friends and creating a network analysis.
Jim Casey asked why we were using a capitalist and commercial site to do work that we can do in other ways, and Sarah Patterson, who was also a co-founder, asked why we aren’t we using women and ensuring that they aren’t being erased again?
I said aṣẹ to both of those things and the whole class voted to create social change principles.
These principles were part of our founding. We decided that we were going to make this a part of the class and we went on from there. Very early on we realized we knew that this couldn’t be an academic project and we needed community partners that were deep. A lot of these relationships were held in churches, and we wanted to move from collecting them to transcribing them, we realized we needed someone with the bandwidth and vision to work with Black communities. We reached out to Denise and asked her to come in to run a transcribing effort that took off because she partnered with the AME church.
Denise: Yes, Dr. Foreman did ask me that question, and I said sure, what exactly do you want? The parameters were broad at first. What I was able to do with that broad structure was to create a partnership with the national AME. So, what we ended up having was hundreds of church members across the United States join a coordinated effort to transcribe all of the records that were generated in AME churches in our archives. We had historic churches where the Colored Conventions actually took place and had people transcribe those records.
Dr. Foreman: And Douglass day really came from that! Once we figured out that we could do transcribing and include communities, we decided that we wanted to do that collectively, and Frederick Douglass’ chosen birthday is February 14th.
Denise: Yes, so it worked really well, and we realized we were capable of organizing a transcribing event where we could invite people from all over the world to participate in this day of radical love for Black History.
We expanded and alternate the archives we transcribe. One year we do our archives and then the following year we do an outside archive about African-Americans or African-American women activists. This year we are doing our own archive and focusing on the participation of women in the Colored Conventions Movement and inviting our transcribers to not annotate this year. We are inviting folks to parse the records that have already been transcribed to look for mentions about women. This will allow us to examine the records in such a way as to identify the presence of women and where they are absent. As we already know, though women aren’t absent from the archive, they are reduced in their presence.
Trevor: That’s amazing. You mentioned that Douglass Day was an official holiday at one point. Can you talk more about that?
Denise: Sure, so Mary Church Terrell who considered Frederick Douglass one of their mentors, lived near Douglass and spent a lot of time together. She, therefore, had a more complete picture of his presence and his legacy.
Following his death in 1895, she was concerned that children wouldn’t know the incredible contributions he had made to statesmanship, to freedom, to abolition, and in an effort to prevent that from happening she created a holiday called Douglass Day. It first began with African American schoolchildren in Washington D.C., and they would learn and perform his speeches and celebrate his life. For a while it caught on across D.C., we’ve seen newspaper clippings that talk about Douglass day, and then gradually began to wane, until it fell out of practice.
Dr. Foreman: Then Carter G. Woodson built Black History Week, which of course is the foundation for Black History Month, around Douglass Day. Woodson was building on Mary Church Terrell, so what we have here is Black women being erased from the creation of Black History Month. So, we really wanted to make sure that we were actively engaged in preserving Black history during Black History Month. This isn’t just a moment to celebrate Black history, but collectively do the work.
What the Colored Conventions do is show that Black labor justice, equitable political rights, voting rights, and freedom from state sanctioned violence are things that Black people have been organizing for and against in the 19th century.
We always talk about abolitionists, but Black people weren’t just organizing around Black freedom as a negative, as freedom from slavery. We wanted full and complete citizenship rights and we were organizing for seven decades for the very same things that are still on the table.
It’s a very powerful indictment against the fact that people have been organizing and articulating the principles of Black freedom in multi-day conventions. We’re not just asking for inclusion, we are asking for freedom, for justice, and you might say, Trevor, for reparations. This is the work we are trying to do.
Not only preserve the history but to enliven the real connections between the movement for Black freedom that started in the 1830s and has been uninterrupted through the Harlem Rennaisance, through the civil rights movement, to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Trevor: So where is Black archiving now and where do you want to see it go in the future?
Dr. Foreman: So we think Black archiving needs to be connected to Black communities and Black cultural makers. As much as we acknowledge and appreciate the cross-racial collaborations and partnerships for freedoms struggles and archival work. Our principles state that Black people need to be actively involved in resurrecting the work of our own histories. Projects that don’t have Black communities involved, that arent engaged in fair labor practices, aren’t thinking about partnerships in responsible ways, and aren’t engaging the people on the ground who aren’t in the academy, fall short of honoring the movements that we are resurrecting.
All of us fall short. We want to see moving forward not only Black history being resurrected, but Black communities being invested in, and Black education being honored.
So these freedom struggles need to be connected to real freedom struggles. Black archival resonates to us when it is done within the spirit of Black freedom. That is where we join many other archiving projects as we seek to move forward to marry those things equitably.
I clipped the last part of the interview because Dr. Foreman and Denise spoke with such vigor that a transcription would not have done it justice.