The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century ed. by P. Gabrielle Foreman et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century ed. by P. Gabrielle Foreman et al. Nicole Myers Turner (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. Pp. 392. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) The brilliant Black digital humanities project the Colored Conventions Project (www.coloredconventions.org) now has a print companion that both extends its work and demonstrates how the digitized Colored Conventions minutes can be used in new ways. Building on the now out-of-print archival and interpretive work of Howard Holman Bell, Philip S. Foner, and George E. Walker, as well as the many studies that have drawn on the antebellum and postbellum convention minutes, this volume advances arguments about nineteenth-century African American politics [End Page 393] and the Colored Conventions themselves. Specifically, pushing against what coeditor and author P. Gabrielle Foreman describes as an overemphasis on abolitionism as the core political project of Black people of the antebellum era, it nudges readers to consider the uniquely Black political projects that twinned the goals of abolition of slavery and full freedom for free Black people. Beyond these broad arguments, each essay is an argument about the nature, purpose, and operations of the Colored Conventions and invites readers and researchers to reevaluate the relationship between the national and local conventions (Carla L. Peterson), the significance of the conventions' record-keeping practices (Sarah Lynn Patterson), and the scope of Black convention culture—of which church conventions were a part. This book advances our understanding of conventions as a Black strategy of demonstrating political capacity and data gathering for political claims-making. The Colored Conventions Movement's seventeen essays are divided into four parts that highlight methods of reading the minutes, the operations and inner workings of the conventions, Black convention minutes as elements of Black print culture, and new analytical frameworks. Historians will recognize in part 1, "Critical Conventions, Methods, and Interventions," with essays by Foreman, Eric Gardner, Pysche Williams-Forson, and Peterson, suggestions for good historical methodology. Recommendations to triangulate sources will feel familiar—to look for Black women less so. As the essayists reveal, the latter may be accomplished by acknowledging the wives and daughters of the men or, as Williams-Forson does, by using a single acknowledgment of women's hospitality to explore Black women's contributions to commensality. These essays may be useful for introductory-level history courses, as they spell out a variety of approaches to historical research. Part 2, "Antebellum Debates: Citizenship Practices, Print Culture, and Women's Activism," features essays by Derrick R. Spires, Erica L. Ball, Joan L. Bryant, and Jewon Woo on the practices of the conventions. Together they highlight how the conventions excluded women (Woo) and addressed issues of participation (Ball) and racial identification (Bryant). In sum, they show the conventions as spaces of community making, a point that Spires reveals in his illuminating reading of how Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 "Address to the Enslaved" through its reprintings exemplified communal authoring practices. Additionally, Spires argues that Garnet's brief reference to his wife Julia Williams Garnet's agreement with his sentiments was a retort to a critic and indicated Williams's involvement in the larger community of Black activists. [End Page 394] Essays in part 3, "Out of Abolition's Shadow: Print, Education, and the Underground Railroad," by Benjamin Fagan, Patterson, Kabria Baumgartner, and Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, read the minutes serially, following key themes or issues through the conventions. All demonstrate how, because of the shifts in attendance and frequency of the meetings at the national level, attitudes changed toward creating a national Black press, Black women's education, gathering data about Black people, and participating in the Underground Railroad. All likewise underscore both the centrality of Black print culture in identity formation and the claim that the conventions were a uniquely Black political action. Essays in part 4, "Locating Conventions: Black Activism's Wide Reach and Unexpected Places," by Jim Casey, Selena R. Sanderfer, Andre E. Johnson, Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux, and Jean Pfaelzer, invite readers to...