UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — 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).
“We’re at a moment in which people say, ‘I’ve never heard of the Colored Conventions,’ while at the same time the records we make available are appearing in public conversations and legal decisions about current policy,” Foreman said. “It’s a tipping point made possible by over a decade of work by the many scholars, students, librarians and technologists who have worked with us, and by our painstaking efforts to not only find and compile these documents, but also to make them freely available.”
Foreman recently discussed Jackson’s ruling and the Colored Conventions Project’s ongoing work.
Q: Were you surprised that Justice Jackson cited the Colored Conventions in her concurrence?
Foreman: A year ago, in an important dissent, Justice Jackson cited the Colored Conventions movement and Slate magazine published a piece about the ways in which her historicizing the 14th Amendment turned on her use of expanding who was involved in political and constitutional meaning making. So, we knew Justice Jackson was attentive to this history. After the end of the 2025 Supreme Court season, reporters cited legal scholars and historians making the case that pointing to the conventions’ role in the creation of post-Civil War amendments was an astonishing corrective to the ways in which originalism was being used in conservative legal circles.
So, we weren’t surprised when Justice Jackson cited the conventions in the landmark birthright citizenship decision this term, but we were thrilled at the length and the depth of her concurrence. The conventions now seem to be entering into the ether, after all the research, scholarship and public engagement that the project has spearheaded over the last 14 years. We’re certainly gratified that our project, one that started in a graduate class I taught and has grown to be recognized internationally, has become so useful to so many.
Q: Were there specific areas of her concurrence that you found especially resonant?
Foreman: Justice Jackson asserts that the Colored Conventions provided the scaffolding for the 14th Amendment and the modern Civil Rights Movement. The concurrence is breathtaking, and its understanding of the importance of the convention movement took my breath away.
The conventions are full of extraordinary rhetoric that resonates in our current moment. The best and most interesting leaders of their time were at these multi-day meetings making extraordinary arguments for the defense of an expansive democracy. It is never surprising to those who know this history to hear the eloquence, the poignancy and the push toward democratic excellence that come out of the conventions. If you read them, what is surprising is the consistency of talent evidenced by such a wide range of speakers in these state and national conventions over decades and the ways in which their words speak to our own time. They were strategic defenders of democracy. As tacticians, they crafted and published separate addresses to white audiences and African American “citizens.” State conventions were often scheduled so they occurred directly before state legislators met; they timed their meetings so that their demands and addresses were in the news when decision makers convened. For decades, they demanded the equal rights, equal protection and suffrage rights that would cohere in the post-Civil War amendments. One of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper mottos was “All rights for all,” and you see this argument made over and again in the conventions movement by him and his colleagues.
Q: How is CBDR continuing to expand the reach of the Colored Conventions Project?
Foreman: We’re now in the process of adding close to 400 new conventions to the website, which will more than double what is already there and transform what we know about this movement and about challenges to structures of slavery, segregation and law in the 19th century. Thanks to an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, we’ve been able to bring together a multi-institutional research team of excellent interdisciplinary scholars, student leaders and librarians. Our current research teams have worked for three years to locate and catalog the details that allow us to digitize these important records. It’s an intensive, multi-pronged research project. Our graduate student leaders, particularly Eden Mekonen, our digital project manager and metadata coordinator, and Keon Burns, have become experts in digital scholarship, making connections and presenting to and with faculty across the country on this work.
The records and scholarship that have emerged from the Colored Conventions Project have helped change the questions that people can ask about the development and setbacks of creating an inclusive democracy, the history of political convening in the 19th century, and how the conventions served as the precursor to the Civil Rights Movement. This new release of records promises to make even more significant and transformative scholarly inquiry possible, particularly for post-Civil War conventions and those that spread like wildfire across the South. We will also gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which ordinary Americans came together to make an extraordinary document, the Constitution, real for all citizens — including those who had been explicitly denied the rights and privileges of others who were born here.
This is a collective effort that I’ve been delighted to be able to co-direct. I really need to sing the praises of our team, including our co-founder and co-director, Professor Jim Casey; our lead librarian, Carol Rudisell; and our newly appointed project co-directors, Professor Andre Johnson, Professor Selena Sanderfer Doss and Professor Jewon Woo. Their scholarship has been transformative.
Q: What keeps you and your team so engaged in this work?
Foreman: The scholars who work with the Colored Conventions Project believe the past has a great deal to say to and about the present. It is amazing to also have jurists who are so deeply engaged in the project of history with the depth and gravitas necessary to engage with historical questions and interpretation. Justice Jackson is challenging the court in their uses of history; she is saying to the other justices, quite explicitly, that if you want to use history, you must grapple with these issues by engaging with scholarship and primary documents in substantive ways. You can’t do so superficially and inconsistently. It is both gratifying and humbling to see our work at the center of the argument for history that she is making.