Penn State University Professor Receives Award For Work Getting Black History Remembered

Penn State University Professor, P. Gabrielle Foreman, is among this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows for her dedication to ensuring “unremembered” Black history.

The co-director of Penn’s Center for Black Digital Research was awarded the fellowship for her work “uncovering histories of African American organizing that are still relevant and resonant today,” NBC News reports.

“I just could not be more honored,” Foreman said.

Foreman serves as the founding director of the Colored Conventions Project, a research initiative dedicated to preserving the history of Black people’s fight for civil rights dating back to the 1830s. It’s Black history that Foreman says has been erased from academic studies and mainstream conversations.

“We knew about the anti-slavery movement; we knew about abolition,” Foreman said.

“But the very same African Americans that were involved with those were advocating for the very same things that are on the table today.”

The Colored Conventions were started in the 19th century and were a safe space where Black people could come to discuss equality, the political, and socioeconomic demands they had. Most records of the conventions were buried inside private libraries.

“We’ve got a movement that is so resonant with today’s political issues, and yet, we didn’t know about it,” she said.

Jim Casey, an assistant professor at Penn State and Foreman’s partner in developing the Colored Conventions Project, says it’s their goal to rediscover the Conventions’ efforts and share them with the masses.

“The Colored Conventions movement helps us to understand a history full of possibilities,” Casey said.

“The Colored Conventions movement shows us democracy in action, and where we might hope to go.”

Currently, the project has expanded to include an interactive online archive and helped in the inspiration of the book “The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century.”

“Most people, when they think about Black history, they think that African American history started with slavery,” Denise Burgher, a doctoral student at the University of Delaware and co-chair of the project’s curriculum committee, said. “That’s not true.”