Thank you! ❤️

Thanks to everyone who made SUNY Geneseo’s first Douglass Day celebration a success!

On February 14, 2023, about 40-50 students, faculty (academic and professional), and administrators gathered in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Hunt Room to celebrate Black history and activism along with some 7,000 participants from across the U.S., Europe, and Africa.

Together we watched the live stream from the national Douglass Day organizers on YouTube.

As we watched, we helped transcribe the papers of activist, abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, writer, teacher, and lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893), the first Black woman in North America to edit a weekly newspaper. During intermissions, the Douglass Day playlist on Spotify served as background to our transcription work.

Described by its national organizers as a day of “collective action for Black history,” every year Douglass Day gives participants the opportunity to create communal spaces for remembering and preserving Black history with Black communities in ways that promote critical reflection and joy.

Each year, the Douglass Day organizers invite people everywhere to help transcribe digitized collections important to Black history. Previous Zooniverse transcribe-a-thons have focused on records from the Colored Conventions project and on the papers of Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell.

Watch this space for news of Douglass Day at Geneseo in 2024!

Photo credits: Frederick Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.