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On a February morning, members of the University community sat down at their keyboards with a shared purpose: to pull the voices of history out of the archive and into the digital age—one keystroke at a time.

Gathering at the on Feb. 13 to mark Douglass Day 2026—the annual national celebration honoring abolitionist Frederick Douglass—faculty, staff and students spent the afternoon transcribing collected documents from the Colored Conventions, a Black political movement that spanned seven decades in the 1800s.

The large-scale nationwide transcription effort is a way to broaden digital access to historical documents for all who are interested—community members, educators and scholars.

“The Humanities Center is proud to participate in this shared project each year,” says , professor of women’s and gender studies in the and director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center. “In just a few short hours, we can all pitch in to make a rich trove of knowledge in Black historical materials widely available via digitization, rather than stored in hard-to-access archives or separated across the nation in different libraries.”

Illuminating How Social Change Unfolded

The documents included meeting minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts and images, drawn from both before and after the American Civil War.

“This nationwide, and now international, collective effort really makes a difference,” May says. “For instance, thanks to previous Douglass Day ‘transcribe-a-thons,’ today, we can easily access the Syracuse, New York, 1864 Colored Convention program, ‘.’ Reading the speeches and engaging with this program helps us understand how this movement for social change unfolded across the nation but also right here, in .”

Some students who participated were surprised to learn how many Black newspapers there were in the mid-1800s, and they could see the role of print journalism in getting people together to organize and advocate for civil rights, May says.

For example, with morning and evening editions of Black papers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it became obvious in transcribing different stories and announcements that newspapers were key to political organizing and functioned more like an Instagram post does today—getting the word out and bringing people together around a cause.

The University began partnering with Douglass Day and hosting an event to coincide with the national effort in 2020.

“We look forward to keeping up the annual tradition in honor of Frederick Douglass and Black History Month,” says Diane Drake, assistant director of the Humanities Center.

According to the , the political gatherings offered opportunities for free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans—both men and women—to organize and strategize for racial justice. The first Colored Convention was held in 1830 in response to Ohio’s 1829 exclusionary laws and a wave of anti-Black mob violence that had forced 2,000 Black residents to flee the state.

That first meeting brought Black leaders together to contest widespread discrimination against Black communities, and a movement was born. More than 600 Colored Conventions were held at the national and state levels from 1830 to the 1900s.

Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland as a young man and became a national leader in the abolitionist movement, renowned for his oratory skills, in Massachusetts and New York, and for his newspaper in Rochester, New York, The North Star, which was an important tool in abolishing slavery and advocating for women’s rights and civil rights. The paper’s motto summarizes Douglass’ inclusive approach to human rights nicely: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are Brethren.”

Common lore is that Douglass did not know the exact date he was born in 1818, so in emancipation he chose to celebrate his birth on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14. The Annual Douglass Day event is planned each year at that time.

for individuals to assist with the transcription from home.