The Making of a Social Movement: The Oratorical and Rhetorical Legacies of the Colored Convention Movement

Hybrid Symposium • Oct. 18–19, 2022

The Colored Conventions Project at the Center for Black Digital Research will host a hybrid symposium that will focus on the rhetorical artistry and dynamism that made up the Colored Conventions and Black nineteenth-century America. This event builds on the first scholarly gathering on the Colored Conventions in 2015 and the subsequent volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press).

As both the digital project and edited collection remind us, the “Colored Conventions reflect the long history of collective Black mobilization before, during, and long after the end of the Civil War. As empowering hubs of Black political thought and organizing, the Colored Conventions provided space for informed public audiences to develop political plans and community-building projects, celebrate racial unity and protest state violence, and work tirelessly to secure Black people’s civil rights.” As Richard Allen in his address at the very first convention held in Philadelphia in 1830, one of the main reasons they met was to “obviate these evils.” It is this understanding of the Colored Conventions that makes them prime sites for the study of rhetoric.

Knowing that the convention minutes did not include speeches by women, as we did before, we also want to “highlight the organizational work of Black women who have been largely erased from convention minutes and hope to account for the crucial work done by women in the broader social networks that made these conventions possible.”

Program At-a-Glance

All times in EST. See full program.

Recording: Oct. 18, 2022

Recording: Oct. 19, 2022

Convener & Keynote Speaker

Andre E. Johnson

CBDR/Just Transformation Mellon Visiting Fellow
Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at University of Memphis

Featured Respondents

Anthea Butler

Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought, and chair of the department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

Kirt H. Wilson

Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University

Panelists

Denise Burgher

Denise Burgher is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English with a MA in African American Studies from UCLA and a BA in American studies with a minor in Women’s Studies from Trinity College, in Hartford, CT. She is co-director of the global transcribe-a-thon, Douglass Day, and is the long-term director of community engagement for the Colored Convention Project where she also directs the curriculum committee. Her essay “Recovering Black Women in the Colored Conventions Movement” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 36.2, 2019, 256-262 is widely taught. It is the only essay, for example, written by a graduate student to be assigned in this year’s History of the Book in America Seminar at the American Antiquarian Society (you can find that draft syllabus here). Her publications also include a widely adopted digital essay/exhibit “Before Garvey! Henry McNeal Turner and the Fight for Reparations, Emigration and Black Rights,” which she co-authored and curated. Her work has a visibility that is particularly rare for graduate students and early career scholars. In addition to invited talks and conference presentations, she has been asked to give keynote addresses at conferences at institutions such as Washington University, University of Pennsylvania, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and UC Irvine, among others. Denise is also a stand-out teacher and mentor with a particular commitment to first-generation, immigrant, and students of color. She consistently receives evaluations that place her among or above the most highly regarded professors in the department in which she’s teaching and has been the teacher of record for both upper- and lower-division classes at several colleges and universities. Her dissertation is entitled Redeeming the Banished Spirit: Naming the Theological Praxis in Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Writing.

datejie cheko green

datejie cheko green is an award-winning critical media scholar and freelance journalist with a track record leading organizational change to advance marginalized storytellers. Her vision is to build effective pathways to meaningful, life-affirming news production by, for, about or affecting Black, Indigenous and racialized peoples that will transform how news is understood by knowledge producers and decision makers.

Starting as a community radio broadcaster in Toronto, datejie consolidated her love for Black transnational journalism at CBC National Current Affairs and as a freelancer journeying to the US, southern Sudan, Eritrea and Jamaica.

The Sankofa principle of looking back to build forward guides all aspects of datejie’s work. Since 2017 she has contributed to Douglass Day as a remote member of the Colored Conventions Project team while learning about the foundations laid by nineteenth century Black intellectual organizers.

In 2022 datejie participated in the inaugural “Black Print, Black Activism, Black Study” seminar in the history of the book at the American Antiquarian Society, where she began locating primary sources of early print newsgathering to help advance her research.

Thanayi Jackson

Dr. Thanayi Jackson is an American historian with a focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her research examines political culture, specifically intersections of race and partisanship during the transition from slavery to citizenship. The San Jose, California native earned her PhD at the University of Maryland College Park where she held an assistantship at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. She is completing a book on the political culture of Black officeholding in Reconstruction Wilmington, North Carolina. Jackson has held positions at San José State University, Berea College, and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Sherita Johnson

Sherita L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she concentrates on nineteenth-century African American literature, Southern literature and cultural studies. The author of Black Women in New South Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2010), her current projects include tracking Frederick Douglass’ activism in the colored conventions movement and examining the works of African American writers during the Reconstruction era. Since 2011, Johnson has served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies at the University of Southern Mississippi.

DiArron M.

DiArron M. is a 3rd year Ph. D. student at the University of Memphis. His research examines Black resistance, rhetoric, and culture. These rich intersections have led him to publish on a plethora of topics that are of particular interest to Black resistance and culture, such as social movements and hip hop. He is currently examining the role of the secular in Black prophetic rhetoric.

Laura L. Mielke

Laura L. Mielke is Dean’s Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (2008) and Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum US (2019) and co-editor with Joshua David Bellin of Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832 (2011). Her essays and articles have appeared in a range of venues, her digital editions of nineteenth-century dramas co-edited with Martha Baldwin and Rachel Linnea Brown have appeared in Scholarly Editing, and she is one of the general editors for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature.

Tami Sawyer

Curtis Small

Curtis Small is a librarian and coordinator of public services for the Special Collections department at University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. In 2017, Curtis curated the exhibition Issues and Debates in African American Literature at UD Library. In 2019, he was a co-organizer of the Black Bibliographia conference, also at University of Delaware. Curtis is currently engaged in scholarly research on the print history of the Colored Conventions Movement and the importance of Haiti within the movement. He also works to increase diversity among in the fields of archives and Special Collections, and serves as an advisory board member for the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion and Cultural Heritage at Rare Book School, as well as the Chronicling Resistance project. He holds a PhD in French from New York University and an MLIS degree from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University.

Anthony Soliman

Anthony Soliman is a second year PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include nineteenth-century African American history in the Western United States and Black political thought and theory. Previously, Anthony completed a Master’s thesis at Cal Poly on the intersection of Indigenous erasure, legal challenges to enslavement and planter culture of Natchez, Mississippi during the early nineteenth century. He also published an article on how historians can historicize white supremacy in Cal Poly’s journal The Forum. His interest in Black political movements came from his tenure at the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University after obtaining his BA in Africana Studies from San Francisco State University in 2015. Anthony’s goal is to make history, and African American history specifically, more visible in public spaces.

Jewon Woo

Jewon Woo teaches African American literature, American literature, Women’s literature, fiction, humanities, and compositions at Lorain County Community College, Ohio. Her research includes topics about Black Print Culture, Black periodicals, performance, 19th-century American culture and literature, critical race theory, community-based pedagogy and pedagogy for under-represented students, and digital humanities. She recently published a digital project on 19th-century Black newspapers in Ohio with the support of NEH, Mellon, and ACLS.

Magdalena Zapędowska

Magdalena Zapędowska [za-pen-doff-ska] is a lecturer in English Language and Literature at Smith College, where she teaches first-year writing and supports faculty in teaching with writing. Her essays on nineteenth-century African American and American poetry and print culture have appeared in J19, Women’s Studies, the Emily Dickinson Journal, the edited collection Emily Dickinson in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013), and in Polish journals and edited volumes. Her first book project, Early Black Futurities: Speculative Thinking in African American Poetry and Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, asks how African American poets mobilized literary form, affect, and the materiality of print to see the future in the present. Her research has been supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Co-Organizers and Contributors

P. Gabrielle Foreman

Co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk and founding faculty director of the Colored Convention Project.

Jim Casey

Associate director of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk and co-director/founder of the Colored Convention Project.

Program

Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022

11:00 am – 11:15 am    Welcome

11:15 am – 12:45 pm   Panel #1 – Writing Ourselves in History: The Rhetoric and Role of the Black Press at the Colored Conventions

Respondent: Marlene Daut, University of Virginia

• datejie green, “The Journalists of the Colored Conventions Movement”
• Curtis Small, “Haitian Emigration and its Relation to Print in the Colored Conventions Movement”
• Caroline Wigginton, “Repossession Poetics: Colored Conventions and Southern Print in the 1860s”

12:45 pm – 1:00 pm     Break

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm      Panel #2 – Finding Voice: Establishing the Black Rhetorical Tradition at the Colored Conventions

Respondent: Kirt Wilson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Tami Sawyer, “White Violence, Black Male Suffrage, and the Freedman’s Bureau: Themes of the 1865 and 1866 Tennessee Colored Convention Movement ”
• Anthony Soliman, “Individuation and Martial Language in the 1870s Conventions”
• DiArron M., “The Hope of 1865”

2:30 pm – 3:00 pm      Break

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm    Panel #3 – Beyond Saving Souls: The Rhetoric and Role of the Black Church and Religion at the Colored Conventions

Respondent: Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania

• Denise Burgher, “The Black Church and the Colored Conventions Movement”
• Sherita Johnson, “Becoming Frederick Douglass in the Colored Conventions Movement, 1841-1855”
• Laura Mielke, “The Kansas Legacies of Charles H. Langston and Mary Leary Langston”

4:30 pm – 4:45 pm   Closing

Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022

11:00 am – 12:30 pm  Panel #4 – Hiding in Plain Sight: Absence, Silence, and Inclusion at the Colored Conventions

Respondent: Leslie Alexander, Arizona State University

• Jewon Woo, “In Our Own West of New York”: Making the Black Press at Colored Conventions”
• Thanayi Jackson, “Searching for Mary Ellen Pleasant in the California Colored Conventions”
• Magdalena Zapędowska, “Poetry and Song at the Colored Conventions”

12:30 pm – 1:00 pm    Break

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm      Keynote: Andre E. Johnson

2:00 pm – 2:15 pm      Break

2:15 pm – 3: 45pm     Closing Panel with Respondents

Moderators: Andre E. Johnson and P. Gabrielle Foreman

• Leslie Alexander, Arizona State University
• Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania
• Marlene Daut, University of Virginia
• Kirt Wilson, The Pennsylvania State University

Planning and Production Committee

Dr. Andre E. Johnson, Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Dr. Jim Casey, Lauren Cooper, and Gabrielle Sutherland.