Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, a place where politics meets up with religion, art, nature, and life. Come in, take a cuppa and a cookie (or three!), and join us. This is another in a series of diaries about crowdsourced data.
We’re into Black History Month. It is, or should be, more than just four weeks where we put up a picture of Dr. King in a classroom, or print carefully selected quotes from speeches in a newsletter. Black history is American history, and that means it’s part of my history, too.
There are two new and wonderful Black history resources that you can access for free. Check them out. You can scroll through Freedom On The Move, a collaboration of several major universities, to read about the movements of enslaved/formerly enslaved people through advertisements for escaped or captured people. I just found it two days ago so I haven’t explored the whole site, but I strongly suggest you try it, whether you are looking for family history, wanting to know more history than your schoolbooks gave you, or wanting a general flavor of the times.
There is a section for K-12 educators if you want lessons, in collaboration with The Hard History Project, another newer, wonderful free resource.
I’ve noted before in diaries that I have gone through old newspapers to record the deaths and burials of Black people. Most of my work has been done through newspapers in Little Rock, Arkansas, because I had access and they were easy to research. (This is something anyone can do.) But a remark in another diary earlier this week reminded me that there is other information in those newspapers that may also be important to someone. When I went back far enough, into the 1850s, I found a good number of notices of escaped slaves, either missing and looking for them or found and waiting for someone to claim them.
It’s possible you may just want to browse. Or you may want to look for information about a family. It’s difficult, with surnames in flux, but it’s been a help for many people.
If you are looking for a way to contribute, check out those sites for opportunities in transcribing and adding information. But whatever you do, please look at the information. It’s part of history for all of us.
If this is your area of interest or expertise, check it out.