Join us at Stockton Hammonton on Tuesday, February 14th from 12pm-3pm for a transcription event hosted by the Douglass Day Organization!
Douglass Day is proud to announce a transcribe-a-thon in honor of the bicentennial birthday of Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893).
The transcribe-a-thon will bring together thousands of participants at more than one hundred simultaneous events around the world. Students, teachers, and community members will help to transcribe an unprecedented collection of digitized papers left by Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an iconic figure in Black women’s history. These papers have been digitized and made available through collaborations facilitated by the Center for Black Digital Research with the Archives of Ontario, Libraries and Archives Canada, and the Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.
Few people in history have broken more barriers than Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893). She was an activist, journalist, teacher, intellectual, and lawyer. Shadd Cary was one of the earliest Black women to found and edit a newspaper, attend law school, and serve as a Civil War recruiter. She grew up in the strong Black communities of Delaware and Philadelphia before emigrating to Canada. After the US Civil War, she moved to Washington DC. Across all of these places, Shadd Cary worked endlessly to empower and educate Black people in the United States and Canada through her public writing and speaking, editing, suffrage activism, and community organizing. She was a fearless advocate for her causes. As she wrote in an 1849 letter to Frederick Douglass, “in anything relating to our people, I am insensible of boundaries.”
The Douglass Day transcribe-a-thon will be held on February 14, 2023 from 12-3 PM (Eastern) and will be streamed live on YouTube. The transcribing will be done on Zooniverse.org, a citizen science platform led by the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Ill. Douglass Day invites people from all backgrounds to join in this effort to make Shadd Cary’s papers more widely accessible and searchable.
