Professor Foreman Answers Questions About the Colored Conventions Project and Justice Jackson’s Ruling

In the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold birthright citizenship, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent several pages of her concurring opinion discussing the Colored Conventions, a decades-long series of political gatherings organized by free-born and formerly enslaved Black men and women that influenced the passage of the Constitution’s 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and, as she put it, laid the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights Movement.

For more than a decade, the Colored Conventions Project has been devoted to digitally preserving the movement’s documents for scholarly and public consumption. It’s been housed at Penn State since 2019, when P. Gabrielle Foreman, Paterno Family Professor of American Literature and professor of African American studies and history, and Jim Casey co-launched the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR).