Race, Power, and Curation: Launching the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection

By DPLA, August 18, 2020.
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We are pleased to invite you to Race, Power, and Curation, a virtual event celebrating the launch of our Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection, on Tuesday, September 8, 2020, from 1-2:30 pm ET. 

The event will feature a keynote by Dorothy Berry, the Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University, on the importance of curating Black Collections and centering Black Stories intentionally during this transitory period of American history. In addition, Elaine L. Westbrooks, DPLA board member and Vice Provost of University Libraries and University Librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, will provide opening remarks on the impact of curatorial choices, and Yusef Omowale of the Southern California Digital Library will join us to talk about digitizing the Charlotta Bass papers. DPLA Community Manager Shaneé Yvette Murrain will discuss the process of building the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection and give a demonstration of the new website and members of DPLA’s Metadata Working Group will describe the creation of a Harmful Content Statement.

We’ve scheduled this event on September 8 in recognition of the date Alabama ratified the 19th Amendment in 1953 (more than 20 years before Mississippi became the last state to ratify the amendment in 1984) as a way to further highlight examples of under-researched moments in the suffrage movement and the history of denied and delayed rights. For more background on the creation of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection, and the importance of “lengthening the timeline and contextualizing how women’s suffrage fed into and continued to inspire Black women’s civic activism,” read this interview from Forbes featuring DPLA Community Manager Shaneé Yvette Murrain and historian Allison K. Lange. 

Please register here.

The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is powered by Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company founded by Melinda Gates.