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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century ed. by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson Xiomara Santamarina (bio) The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century p. gabrielle foreman, jim casey, and sarah lynn patterson, editors University of North Carolina Press, 2021 364 pp. This exciting volume, and its accompanying digital collections and interpretive exhibits (see https://coloredconventions.org/), stems from the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), a composite print and digital archival [End Page 262] collaboration that originated in undergraduate and graduate coursework and a 2015 symposium at the University of Delaware. As an ongoing collective sustained by multiple groups of undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars from many fields, the project serves as a brilliant example of scholarly crowdsourcing, modeling itself explicitly after the collaborative blueprint inaugurated by Colored Conventions, the antebellum civic meetings organized by African American activists at national and state levels. If it is at all possible to redress the gaps in antebellum archives about African American communal life, beyond the epistemic violence and deficits common to period debates about slavery and antislavery, CCP suggests how we may do so. In both its print and digital incarnations, CCP displays an extraordinary range of topics and methods, making it a truly standout achievement. It is challenging to offer a sense of its immense scholarly and pedagogical potential; it is fair to say that it is as difficult to render a comprehensively accurate description of the entire project as it is to navigate its entirety. To date, most nineteenth-century African American and American studies scholars' familiarity with the many conventions—inaugurated in 1830, there were twelve national and forty-five state conventions—is largely limited to a few landmark speeches, like Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 "Address to the Slaves," and debates concerned with emigration, education, or manual labor. Until recently, the principal print sources consisted of a 1969 reprint of Howard Holman Bell's 1953 dissertation on twelve national conventions and Philip Foner and George Walker's two-volume set covering forty-five state conventions. CCP dramatically expands timelines along with geographic scope, covering antebellum, postbellum and post-Reconstruction conventions as well as conventions in the West and South, ranging outside the customarily circumscribed orbit of the Northeast US. This exciting recontextualization of nineteenth-century Black activism relocates the role of slavery/abolition in African American history within an epistemologically broader historical context, offering valuable insights into the participatory politics enacted by free Black folks who refused the unfreedom to which a racist nation consigned them. The volume's sixteen essays are organized in four sections that straddle regions, time periods, methods, and debates. The CCP's expansive focus on the entire orbit of the various conventions allows us to engage anew with familiar and less familiar archives: along with already available minutes and committee reports, the essays and related exhibits offer a bigger [End Page 263] picture of the print footprint of the conventions as well as paratextual print materials that flesh out the social experiences of delegates and hosting communities. Casting this larger net makes clear that the collaborative enterprise of nineteenth-century African American political organizing challenges dominant elite and masculinist narratives about civil rights activism: as such a collectivizing and community-based enterprise, Colored Conventions were only possible through the participation and contributions of men and women hailing from virtually every domain of African American life. The volume's introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman, one of the project's principal editors, offers a critical and generative consideration of how this composite project revises our "genealogies of reform" ("Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship: The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement" 24). By simultaneously reconceptualizing nineteenth-century activism around a combination of abolition and Colored Conventions as practices of "parallel politics," Foreman encourages us to reframe our understandings of Black agency and print culture (23). CCP's conceptual framework allows us to explore "the committee alongside the singular figure: the eloquent preacher, lecturer, or editor, the exceptional author, or the heroic protagonist"; and it illuminates the ways these convention spaces demonstrated that "part of recognizing Black humanity was understanding complexity rather than...