Douglass Day

Thanks to running across a post on BlueSky this afternoon, I ended up doing a bit of crowdsourced history this afternoon. When Frederick Douglass passed away in 1895, an activist named Mary Church Terrell led a effort to create a holiday celebrating Douglass’s birthday every February 14th. This holiday eventually grew into Black History Month. Starting in 2017, Douglass Day was revived as a way to bring participation into the Colored Conventions Project, a collaborative effort to surface the 19th century history of Black political organizing conventions.

One of the ways this effort is participatory is by running transcribe-a-thons of documents from the Colored Conventions during Douglass Day. This years’ effort was coordinated by the UC Santa Barbara Department of English and the UCSB Library. They are running this effort through Zooniverse, which is a platform famous for hosting crowdsourced research projects. As of this writing they’ve had 964 volunteers for the 2026 effort. I signed up on Zooniverse and transcribed five documents this afternoon. I’ll be doing more over the rest of this month.