The Colored Convention Movement: Black Organizing in the 19th Century

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About the Colored Conventions

National Colored Convention, Nashville, 1876, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 1876. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Over the course of seven decades, tens of thousands of Black men and women from different walks of life traveled to attend meetings publicly advertised as “Colored Conventions.” Held throughout the antebellum period and continuing for 30 years beyond the Civil War, these political gatherings offered opportunities for free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans to organize and strategize for racial justice.

The first Colored Convention was held in 1830 in response to Ohio’s 1829 exclusionary laws and a wave of anti-Black mob violence that had forced two thousand Black residents to flee the state. That first meeting brought Black leaders together to contest widespread discrimination against Black communities. Their gathering activated a movement.

Providing a powerful structure and platform for Black organizing, more than 200 state and national Colored Conventions were held between 1830 and the 1890s. Filling churches, city hall buildings, courthouses, lecture halls, and theaters, the well-attended Colored Conventions illustrate the diversity of cultural life and political thought among Black communities and their leaders. The meetings included the most prominent writers, organizers, church leaders, newspaper editors, educators, and entrepreneurs in the canon of early African American leadership—and tens of thousands more whose names went unrecorded. While most delegates were male, Black women participated through their newspaper work, entrepreneurial activism, political commitments, and especially their presence. They embodied the movement’s core values and challenged traditional beliefs about women’s place in public society.

The Colored Conventions reflect the long history of collective Black mobilization before, during, and long after the end of the Civil War. As empowering hubs of Black political thought and organizing, the Colored Conventions provided space for informed public audiences to develop political plans and community-building projects, celebrate racial unity and protest state violence, and work tirelessly to secure Black people’s civil rights.

Convention Records
View a list of conventions at our Digital Records site.

List of Conventions
The Colored Conventions Project
The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is an interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life. Mirroring the collective nature of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions, CCP uses innovative, inclusive partnerships to locate, transcribe, and archive the documentary record related to this nearly forgotten history and to curate engaging digital exhibits that highlight its significant events and themes

 

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The Early Negro Convention Movement
John W. Cromwell
1904

 

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1830


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These considerations have led us to the conclusion, that the formation of a settlement in the British province of Upper Canada, would be a great advantage to the people of colour. In accordance we pledge ourselves to aid each other by all honourable means, to plant and support one in that country, and therefore we earnestly and mostly feelingly appeal to our coloured brethren, and to all philanthropists here and elsewhere, to assist in this benevolent and important work.

To encourage our brethren earnestly to co-operate with us, we olfer the following, viz. 1st. Under that government no invidious distinction of colour is recognised, but there we shall be entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of other citizens. 2d. That the language, climate, soil, and productions are similar to those in this country, 3d. That land of the best quality can be purchased at the moderate price of one dollar and fifty cents per acre, by the one hundred acres. 4th. The market for different kinds of produce raised in that colony, is such as to render a

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suitable reward to the industrious farmer, equal in our opinion to that of the United States. And lastly, as the erection of buildings must necessarily claim the attention of the emigrants, we would invite the mechanics from our large cities to embark in the enterprise; the advancement of architecture depending much on their exertions, as they must consequently take with them the arts and improvements of our well regulated communities.

It will be much to the advantage of those who have large families, and desire to see them happy and respected, to locate themselves in a land where the laws and prejudices of society will have no elfect in retarding their advancement to the summit of civil and religious improvement. There the diligent student will have ample opportunity to reap the reward due to industry and perseverence; whilst those of moderate attainments, if properly nurtured, may be enabled to take their stand as men in the several offices and situations necessary to promote union, peace, order and tranquility. It is to these we must look for the strength and spirit of our future prosperity

 

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1831


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The plan proposed is, that a College be established at New-Haven, Conn., as soon as $20,000 are obtained, and to be on the Manual Labour System, by which, in connexion with a scientific education, they may also obtain a useful Mechanical or Agricultural profession, and, (they farther report, having received information,) that a benevolent individual has offered to subscribe one thousand dollars towards this object, provided, that a farther sum of nineteen thousand dollars can be obtained in one year.

After an interesting discussion; the above report was unanimously adopted; one of the inquiries by the Convention was, in regard to the place of location. On interrogating the gentlemen why New-Haven should be the place of location, they gave the following as their reasons:--

1st. The site is healthy and beautiful.

2d. Its inhabitants arc friendly, pious, generous, and humane.

3d. Its laws are salutary and protecting to all, without regard to complexion.

4th. Boarding is cheap and provisions are good.

5th. The situation is as central as any other that can be obtained with the same advantages.

6th. The town of New-Haven carries on an extensive West India trade, and many of the wealthy coloured residents in the Islands, would, no doubt, send their sons there to be educated, and thus a fresh tie of friendship would be formed, which might be productive of much real good in the end.

And Iast, though not the least, the literary and scientific character of New-Haven, renders it a very deisrable place for the location of the College.

 

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