Utilizing Digital Scholarship and Collaborative Public History to Reconstruct Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Activism

The CHI faculty fellowship will support the expansion of the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project into a major digital archive and teaching resource tentatively titled the Black Women’s Organizing Archive, with an initial focus on documenting black women’s activism from 1890s – 1920s, the critical decades surrounding the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC). Conceived as the first stage in a multi-year, multi-institutional project, the Cooper Digital Project will join with the Colored Conventions Project, Howard University, and Penn State University to build digital repositories and online resources documenting the complex and extended forms of black women’s activism. This initiative builds on the success of the Cooper Digital Project by utilizing community-based, digital and archival methods, as well as collaborative teams and partnerships to digitize and transcribe black women’s archives thereby helping us reconstruction a much more expansive social and intellectual history of nineteenth century black women’s writing and activism.