About This Case Study

From 1830 into the 1890s — through slavery, war, Reconstruction, and its overthrow — Black Americans convened state and national political meetings across the country: the Colored Conventions. Delegates gathered, elected officers, debated resolutions, and published their proceedings: minutes, addresses, petitions, and demands on citizenship, suffrage, education, labor, and emigration. The Colored Conventions Project, a collaborative digital-humanities effort founded by the scholar P. Gabrielle Foreman and now sustained by teams of researchers, teachers, and volunteers, has recovered these records into an open archive with curated exhibits. The puzzle the archive presents is the one this unit turns on. In an era when the official record wrote Black Americans out — or wrote about them, as problem, property, or statistic — the conventions wrote themselves in: a people authoring its own political record decades before the nation granted it standing. And the archive is a second act of the same kind: recovery, transcription, and exhibit-making as the continuation of the conventions' own project of making the record say we were here, and this is what we said.

The historian Robin D. G. Kelley supplies the case study's frame. Black radical movements, he argues, should be judged not only by what they won but by what they dared to imagine, because imagination is where political possibility is manufactured — he calls these freedom dreams. The conventions are freedom dreams in institutional form: parliamentary procedure, committee reports, and resolutions performed by people the law refused, claiming in advance the citizenship the documents' form already enacted. The analytical move is to read the proceedings as an instrument: to ask what work the document did — for the delegates who voted it, for the readers it addressed, for the record it entered — and what its self-narration claims. This is the unit's origin-story question asked from the other end: not who is licensed to tell the national story, but what it looks like when a community licenses itself. You will choose one convention, close-read its proceedings, set them against one of the project's exhibits, and analyze the record as political storytelling.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Colored Conventions Project — you will use both the convention records and the curated exhibits. Explore the archive.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on the language: Nineteenth-century documents use the terminology of their era, including terms now dated or offensive; the project's own name preserves the conventions' historical usage. Read the language as part of the evidence — how the delegates named themselves is one of the things you are analyzing.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Think of a group you belong to that keeps its own record — meeting minutes, a group chat, a family archive. What does that record hold that an outsider's account of you would miss?
• Can a people write itself into a nation's story before the nation grants it standing? What would the writing have to do?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Choose Your Convention (10–12 minutes)

Browse the project's convention records and choose one convention — any state or national meeting, any decade — to carry through the exercise. Log the basics: when and where it met, who convened it, and what occasioned it (a law, an election, a crisis, an anniversary). Note also the state of the record itself: full published minutes, a partial transcript, a newspaper account? What survives, and in what form, is data — the archive's gaps are part of its story.

For groups: Each member chooses a different convention, ideally from different decades, and states in one sentence why theirs belongs in the group's set.

Phase 2: The Proceedings (20–25 minutes)

Close-read your convention's proceedings:

1. The demands. What do the delegates ask for, and from whom — a legislature, the public, each other? Rank the top three demands by the space and heat the document gives them, and note which are rights, which resources, which recognition.
2. The self-narration. How do the delegates name and describe themselves — citizens, freemen, colored Americans? What history do they invoke and what future do they claim? Mark where the document addresses white readers and where it speaks to Black communities — the shifts in address are arguments.
3. The form. Officers elected, committees appointed, resolutions moved and carried: the document performs an institution. What does the parliamentary form itself argue that no single resolution says outright?
4. The absences. Who was present but not recorded? Minutes smooth over debate and often omit those — including women organizing food, lodging, and funds — whose labor made the meeting possible. Note one absence your document suggests; the project's exhibits often recover exactly these.

For groups: Work Phase 2 individually on your own conventions; you will compare in Phase 3.

Phase 3: The Exhibit (12–15 minutes)

Now read one of the project's curated exhibits — choose one related to your convention, its region, or its themes — and work through:

• What does curation add to the raw record — context, biography, maps, the recovered labor of women and organizers the minutes underplay? Name two things you now see in your proceedings that you did not see before.
• Where does the exhibit's story diverge from the impression the minutes alone gave you? Divergence is not error; it is the difference between a record and its interpretation — say what your exhibit's interpretive choices are.
• The archive as second act: recovery, transcription, exhibit-building — in what sense is the project itself continuing the conventions' own work? Who is the "we" of the archive, and who is its audience?

For groups: Reconvene here. Each member briefs their convention and exhibit in two minutes; the group logs what changes across decades — demands, self-naming, tone — as a running list.

Phase 4: Freedom Dreams — and the Strain (10–12 minutes)

Bring Kelley's frame to your document:

• List three things your convention dared to claim or imagine: one demand eventually realized, one still unrealized, and one that reads as pure horizon — imagination outrunning any available politics. Date the realized one; the gap between the demand and its realization is a finding.
• The strain test. Where does "self-authored history" strain? Be honest about the record: proceedings were also performances for white audiences and a hostile press; minutes smooth conflict into unanimity; the authored record excludes — women's names, dissenters, the unlettered. Name what your document's self-narration cannot be trusted to show, and how you would check it.
• Now carry the strain forward: if every self-authored record curates itself — the conventions' minutes and the modern origin-story projects this unit studies alike — what distinguishes storytelling that claims power from storytelling that abuses it? Propose one test, and apply it to your convention.
• Close with the bridge, in one sentence: if the national story opened with records like yours, what would it explain differently?

For groups: Build the freedom-dreams list across all chosen conventions — realized, unrealized, horizon — then run the strain test and the one-sentence bridges as a closing round.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The convention I chose surprised me by __________. Reading the record as self-authored storytelling changed __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the document did, exactly what the frame revealed, and exactly where the record's own curation showed.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order with one convention and one exhibit. The two artifacts to keep are your ranked demands and your freedom-dreams list — together they record what the delegates asked, what they imagined, and how far each has traveled.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phases 1 and 2 are individual with different conventions across decades; Phases 3 and 4 are comparative and collaborative, ending in the one-sentence bridges read aloud. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The frame in full: Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002 (20th anniversary ed. 2022). Publisher page. The argument that movements should be judged by what they dared to imagine; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The modern origin story to set beside the conventions: Hannah-Jones, Nikole, ed., with Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: One World, 2021. Book site. A present-day re-authoring of the national record, with its revisions visible; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The same inheritance in audio: 1619 (podcast). Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, 2019–2020. Listen to the series. First-person narration of history as inheritance — the register the conventions' addresses pioneered; it appears in the unit's Open Educational Resources.