“I’ve always wanted to transcribe historical documents,” said an excited Tina Finneran, as she pored over a transcription of the 1841 Supreme Court case United States v. The Amistad.
The Amistad, a Spanish slave ship, was headed to Cuba in 1839 when African captives staged an uprising. They were then imprisoned in the US, where their legal plight became a cause célèbre for the abolitionist movement. The US Supreme Court ended up ruling in the slaves’ favor, deciding they had been kidnapped and transported illegally. The affair was the inspiration for the 1997 movie Amistad directed by Steven Spielberg.
Finneran, who is senior vice president for institutional research, analytics, and consulting, was carefully studying images of the trial text, as archived in the Library of Congress. She was then transcribing them word-for-word, preserving the original spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The document will be uploaded, further edited, and finally published in a format that is more accessible for students and scholars.
Finneran was among thirty members of the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ community who dropped into Ladd House on February 14 to transcribe documents as part of an event called . It’s an annual program that marks the birth of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After he escaped his enslavers in Maryland, Douglass devoted his life to Black civil rights and became the most important Black activist of the nineteenth century. Douglass did not know his birthday but chose to celebrate it on February 14 because his mother, we are told, used to call him her “little Valentine.”
To mark the occasion, volunteers across the US offer their services—some gathering on campuses and libraries, some virtually—to transcribe various Black history-related documents held at the Library of Congress (most of them at Library's African American Perspectives Collection).
This year, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ joined that effort. “My hope is that we do this every year, and it becomes a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ tradition,” said Professor of Cinema Studies Tricia Welsch, who played a major role in bringing the event to campus. “We have fifteen departments and three offices cosponsoring the event. It doesn't take much. We have cake, we have stickers, and some loaner computers from IT. It’s pretty cool,” she added.
It's also a straightforward process, said Welsch. “You download a document from the Douglass Day website and transcribe it as best you can. Then you send your work along, and somebody else checks it. There are loads of documents out there—letters, memoirs, official records, court proceedings, and more—and the aim,” she explained, “is to digitize as many of them as possible so they are more easily accessible.”
As Welsch spoke, the room buzzed with activity and conversation as a stream of volunteers came and went and a livestream from the Douglass Day organizers was broadcast on a screen, giving advice and encouragement to all those involved across the country. Among the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ volunteers was Charlotte Carney ’28, who was working on transcribing pages from Fifty Years in Chains: Or, the Life of an American Slave, a memoir by Charles Ball, who was born into slavery around 1781 and later described much of the violence and inhumanity he and other slaves suffered.
Professor of Theater Davis Robinson was also reading about the horrors of slavery as he transcribed pages from a narrative written in the mid-nineteenth century by Henry Bibb, who was born a slave but went on to escape and found an abolitionist newspaper. “I mean it’s just brutal,” said Robinson, after transcribing a passage about the abuse suffered by Bibb’s wife and child at the hands of slave owners.
Not all the documents being worked with date from the era of slavery. Ievgen Borovenskyi ’27, for example, was transcribing from a work called The Negroes of Sandy Springs Maryland, a social study written around 1900. It’s part of the at the Library of Congress, which documents lives of African Americans, primarily in the late nineteenth century.
“I was excited to participate in this wonderful opportunity to contribute to the common good by helping make more voices from the past widely accessible,” said Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry Anne McBride. She had been working on The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, about a man who was born in West Africa, enslaved in childhood, then transported to the Americas as a slave. He eventually earned his freedom and became an abolitionist in the United Kingdom. “The feeling of being part of the Douglass Day community was palpable, both in the room and across much longer distances,” said McBride. For example, when she had finished transcribing one page from the book, the next available page was fifty pages further on. (The entire book was transcribed by the end of the event, McBride later found out.)
For film professor and event organizer Tricia Welsch, bringing Douglass Day to the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ campus was a rewarding experience that also repays something of a moral debt owed to Douglass by the local community. “He came to Brunswick in 1870 to give a lecture at Lemont Block—the building on the corner of Maine and Pleasant Street that’s still there. Afterward, he went to get dinner somewhere and was refused service. That really got to me. I thought ‘no, no, no, we can do better for you now.’”
Douglass Day efforts did not finish on February 14: Such was the volume of volunteers, many of them were asked to go back and continue their work in an effort to transcribe as much material as possible before the end of February (Black history month). By February 25, around 1,200 volunteers had transcribed almost 6,400 pages.
