Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, well, there isn't a super specific hook here, if I'm being honest, because this episode

we're really looking at a series of events that took place in the mid 1800s, starting in 1830,

and then ongoing through the Civil War into the years after

we're talking about what came to be known as the Colored Conventions Movement.

This was a series of events in which already free and once captive black people came together in state and

national political meetings conventions a critical space in which they found political

and economic power and really set the stage for what would come after emancipation and the Civil War.

Many of the first conventions took place in Philadelphia, but then others took place in New York,

Albany, Pittsburgh, eventually more than 200 state and national colored conventions were held between

1830 and all the way actually into the 1890s.

So here to talk about the colored convention movement and how they tracked the evolution of

black thought and black power in this moment are as always Nicole Hammer of

Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello Jody. Hey there. I have such a silly note to start on here

but in reading about these they feel like conventions like like boring conferences sometimes like people get on a train and they go to like a church in Philly and like I haven't seen any reference to like you know a lousy buffet menu or whatever but like it just feels like you know on the one hand is this

wonderful space of empowerment or whatever in the other hand I'm like I could see people be like

oh man there's a yeah I got I got there's one in Albany next week and then two weeks from after that it's like I'm on the circuit

Demothesis Such a silly place to start but it is but it is true to just paint a picture that there is this like

milieu of thought and people who are all sort of committed to a cause and getting together to talk and meet and move forward and they have competing agendas and of Yeah, I mean, I have to credit the colored commitments because there's probably not very much of a force and freedom without them.

I mean, I used this resource so much for my own work to get a pulse or an idea of like what black leaders

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