For many, Feb. 14 is a day centered around conversation hearts and boxes of chocolate, but to Jim Casey, it’s all about Frederick Douglass.  

Casey, a postdoctoral research associate for the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, has revived this day as Douglass Day, a celebration that began after Frederick Douglass’ death in 1895, each year on his birthday. Douglass Day helped lead to the creation of Black History Month, according to the Douglass Day website.   

On Douglass Day, which Casey co-founded, the celebration has participants transcribe written work by historical Black figures so that they can be preserved digitally. The Humanities Center at Syracuse University will be holding “Transcribe-a-Thon” in celebration of Douglass Day on Feb. 14 from noon to 3 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, 114 Bird Library, as a part of Black History Month.   

The event is beginner-friendly, and there is no prior transcribing experience needed in order to participate.   

“It’s really about giving people a chance to participate in the preservation and the recreation of Black history,” Casey said. “We get to see actually how this thing that we know in the abstract of history actually comes alive in archives and how is technology involved.”   

Volunteers participating in the “Transcribe-a-Thon” will be transcribing written works by Anna Julia Cooper, a Black feminist leader and activist who was born a slave and later became the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. The work that will be transcribed is provided by Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center archives and includes academic papers and  diary entries.  

Denise Burgher is the chair of historic churches and community engagement committee for the Colored Conventions Project, a research project founded at the University of Delaware that focuses on giving works by historical Black organizers a digital life.  

Learning about historical figures like Anna Julia Cooper and realizing that her life overlapped with some people’s grandparents allows students to see Cooper in context and realize that she was not fighting for rights too long ago, she said.  

“A lack of knowledge about people like Anna Julia Cooper and Frederick Douglass allows us to make wild assumptions about the racial history of the United States. We don’t understand how long and how passionately people have fought for justice and have fought for equality,” Burgher said.  

The event being held at SU will feature a livestream of speeches and performances from Howard University. There is a total of 2,800 people across the country participating in the Douglass Day “Transcribe-a-Thon” as of right now and 58 groups that are based out of colleges and universities, Casey said.  

Shirley Moody-Turner, an associate professor of English and African American studies at Penn State University and the co-organizer of Douglass Day, is the principal investigator for the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project at Penn State.  

Gaining historical context about the struggles Cooper and other historical Black figures faced helps people better understand why racist events are still occurring today and how to combat that racism, she said.  

“Having some historical context allows people to see that these are not isolated one-off events,” Moody-Turner said. “That there is a history and how you connect what is happening at Syracuse to larger institutional structural issues and how do you understand the history that they’re emerging out of.” 

The celebration of Douglass Day will continue throughout the month of March, Casey said. People who miss the official “Transcribe-a-Thon” can still transcribe Cooper’s works, as the website service will still be open to volunteers.  

The heart of the event is giving everyday people access to primary documents and creating a safe space to learn about Black leaders in history, Casey explained.  

“It gives us a different window into just how many people were interconnected, how many communities were involved,” he said. “And that it’s not just the one or two people that we often sort of get pulled out into our history textbooks or our Black History Month celebration.”  

Published on February 11, 2020 at 11:14 pm

Contact Sydney: sabergan@syr.edu