This Valentine’s Day, we lovingly invite our readers to join the international celebration of Frederick Douglass Day on February 14. Each year, thousands of people from around the world celebrate the legacy of Frederick Douglass through a virtual transcribe-a-thon of rare books, pamphlets, and manuscripts related to African American history. Transcription, the act of typing the textual content of items such as handwritten letters and early printed books, makes primary sources more searchable and readable. This year’s Douglass Day transcribe-a-thon highlights the African American Perspectives Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress.
This historic collection has been part of the Library’s holdings for over a century and features hundreds of pamphlets written by Black authors in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The collection was largely gathered by Daniel A. P. Murray (1852-1925), a Black scholar who worked for the Library for over fifty years beginning in 1871. Transcription of these materials on Douglass Day will make these resources more discoverable online, more easily searchable, and more accessible for all.
This is the third year of collaboration between “By the People,” the Library of Congress’s virtual transcription program, and Douglass Day organizers at the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University. Since 2017, Douglass Day volunteers, including school classes, book clubs, and interested individuals, come together virtually on Frederick Douglass’s chosen birthday, February 14, to help transcribe and learn about an online collection of Black history and culture. In addition to the all-day virtual transcribe-a-thon, Douglass Day includes a livestreamed event with transcription tips and expert speakers.
Daniel Murray, a legendary figure in the history of the Library of Congress, believed that “every nation is estimated largely by its literature, and justly so, since it is the only means by which distant people can properly judge.” In order to assemble a comprehensive body of African American literature, Murray conducted a national search for relevant items and offered to pay the cost of shipping to the Library. His mission? To “secure a copy of every book and pamphlet in existence by a Negro author.” In gathering together an unprecedented collection of African American writing, Murray sought to facilitate his people’s ability to define themselves in their own words. By illuminating the prolific literary culture of the Black community, Murray’s collection of over 2,000 titles disproved false claims that such a Black literary culture did not exist. When Murray presented his bibliography as part of an exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition, over 50 million people from around the globe passed through and saw the largest and most comprehensive collection of Afrocentric writing ever assembled.
In the United States, pamphleteering emerged as an effective mode of communication during the American Revolution and proved useful as a mode of communication that was cheap, quickly produced, and easily distributed. Crucially, the operation of a printing press was included among the industrial skills taught at Black colleges such as Tuskegee and Hampton – and even at high schools such as Armstrong in Washington, D. C. These trained Black printers provided the African American literary community with publishing outlets that could circumvent the mainstream media.
Many of the pamphlets included in the African American Perspectives Collection were published in the 1860s and 1870s and directly address the debates, issues, and initiatives of the emancipation era. The pamphlets tend to range between ten and thirty pages long and address topics including education, civil rights, racial progress, the concerns of black women, suffrage, and debates over proposals for colonizing Liberia with emancipated people.
Some of these pamphlets serve as practical handbooks, such as one providing a summary of voting laws in each of the Southern states. Many pamphlets present political committee reports or the text of speeches and sermons delivered by prominent leaders. Some pamphlets contain data that may be of interest to researchers, such as an 1867 report on education detailing the number of Black students, teachers, and schools in each state. Some reproduce the correspondence and negotiations between activists and government bureaucrats.
For decades, the Library has prioritized the preservation of these historic primary sources. As noted above, these pamphlets were cheaply made on thin paper and with weak binding, which was expedient at the time of production but poses issues for the long-term conservation of these materials. In order to ensure the survival of these pamphlets, the Library applied conservation treatments to the full collection in 1990; each pamphlet was disbound, and the pages were deacidified and repaired as needed. The individual pages were then encased in thin, archival-grade plastic sleeves, which are bound together so that the pamphlets can be navigated and read in their original format. The pamphlets are stored in acid-free boxes.
In addition to these preservation efforts, the Library has also provided access to these materials to off-site readers and researchers, first by microfilming this collection in 1990 so that it could be shared with other libraries via CD-ROM. Later that decade, the pamphlets were scanned in grayscale and included in the National Digital Library. In 2016, the full collection was digitized in high-resolution color images for online access. Recently, in an effort to make the collection more easily navigable, the Collections Manager for RBSCD, Monica Varner, created a comprehensive list of the pamphlets that can be searched by author, date, title, and publisher and that contains hyperlinks to each pamphlet in digital form.
Frederick Douglass himself, whose figure and writings feature prominently within the Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, envisioned that “wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, [will] study the lesson of our history in the United States.” The upcoming Douglass Day transcribe-a-thon will support the ongoing realization of his vision by making these historic materials more accessible for readers and researchers for years and decades to come.
Learn more about how you can participate in Douglass Day by clicking here and join in the celebration on February 14 with By the People!
Sources and Further Reading:
Burkett, R. (2005). “Review of African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection.” History Matters. George Mason University.
Goldsby, J. and McGill, M. L. (2022). “What is ‘Black’ about Black Bibliography?” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Vol. 116, no. 2.
Walker, Billie E. (2005). “Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925): Forgotten Librarian, Bibliographer, and Historian.” Libraries & Culture, Vol. 40, no. 1.
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