Colored Convention Project Principles

At the core of CCP, we endeavor to incorporate these principles in all facets of our work.

Principle 1

CCP seeks to enact collective organizing principles and values that were modeled by the Colored Conventions Movement.

Principle 2

The Colored Conventions Project affirms Black women’s centrality to nineteenth-century Black organizing even as official records erase and anonymize the very contributions, labor and infrastructure that made the Colored Conventions movement possible. We pledge to account for Black women’s labor and leadership in our own historical work and in our own project practices.

Principle 3

Like the Colored Conventions Movement, our project aims to highlight and center Black lives. By this we mean Black communities, Black intellectual production, including Black scholars/hip and Black collections.

Principle 4

Mirroring the Colored Conventions’s focus on labor rights and Black economic health, our project seeks structures and support that honor the work members bring to the project through equitable compensation, acknowledgement, and attribution.

Principle 5

We affirm the role of Black people as data creators and elevate the ways in which Black conventions generated data and statistics to advance, affirm and advocate for Black economic and organizational success and access. We also recognize that data has long served in the processes and recording of the destruction and devaluation of Black lives and communities. We seek to avoid exploiting Black subjects as data and to account for the contexts out of which Black subjects as data arise. We seek to name Black people and communities as an affirmation of the Black humanity inherent in Black data/curation. We remind ourselves that all data and datasets are shaped by decisions about whose histories are recorded, remembered, and valued.

Genealogies and Incubation

The Colored Conventions Project principles were inspired by the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing created on December 8, 1996 and named after the Jemez pueblo in New Mexico where the meeting was held. We honor and thank these environmental justice activists and the many organizers of color who led this effort for their example and for their work. www.opalpdx.org/jemez_principles