Black women have long been architects in building and organizing communities, but despite their significant contributions, their work has frequently been eclipsed. In the case of Black women organizers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, their work has often been overshadowed by the narratives of prominent Black men or white abolitionists and reformers. This historical oversight has contributed to the scattering, fragmentation, or loss of these women’s valuable archives over time.
The Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA) is actively working to reposition Black women’s contributions at the center of historical community organizing by foregrounding the work of women like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Key insights from the BWOA’s conceptualization and development were shared in a presentation at eLaboratories on Tuesday, April 29, 2025. Shirley Moody-Turner (Penn State University), Sabrina Evans (Howard University), and Takina Walker (Penn State University) discussed the initiative’s origins, core values, and partnerships.
Born, in part, from the community efforts of the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project and Douglass Day – Transcribe Cooper, the BWOA is redefining the concept of a historical archive and its users. It actively encourages communities of scholars, students, educators, artists, poets, and digital humanists to engage with the intellectual contributions and legacies of Black women organizers by encouraging collaborative storytelling and inviting the public’s participation in the work of the archive. The effectiveness of this participatory approach is evident in the 100% completion rate for Anna Julia Cooper’s papers during a community transcription event like Douglass Day 2020, demonstrating the public demand for participation in knowledge generation.
Additionally, the fragmented and dispersed nature of Black women’s historical archives has prompted the BWOA team to devise innovative solutions for promoting engagement with these materials. The team’s emphasis on accessibility and discoverability is evidenced by key project features:
- Map Visualizations: Locating the papers of Black women organizers has been a constant challenge in developing a comprehensive digital archive, as their documents are often held in institutions across geographical locations or by private collectors. This very dispersal led to the creation of map visualizations to illustrate where documents have been found. What began as an internal “Paper Locator Directory” has evolved into a publicly accessible tool for exploring these materials. As Takina Walker describes, this dynamic map does more than list locations: it visually narrates the wide-reaching yet often fragmented intellectual labor of these Black women organizers.
- Course Curricula: Beyond its digital presence, the BWOA is committed to bringing history into local communities, partnering with educational institutions to integrate these narratives into student learning. In collaboration with its sister project, Douglass Day — one of the flagship initiatives of the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University, alongside the Colored Conventions Project — the project team developed course curricula for the Douglass Day annual event. These materials continue to be shared on the BWOA website to ensure their accessibility to the public. Designed to meet the needs of institutions such as D.C. Public Schools, these available resources offer educators and learners engaging, accessible content that highlights Black women’s intellectual contributions and activism. BWOA’s efforts to move beyond traditional research outputs underscore its commitment to making history tangible, relevant, and impactful for future generations.
- Digital Scrapbook: Anna Julia Cooper herself meticulously collected and preserved her own writings, even pasting articles into books. The BWOA is actively exploring how digital technologies can recreate the experience of discovering these physical materials. They are currently in the process of web publishing a digital scrapbook that allows users to adjust the transparency of text, enabling them to see Cooper’s articles and annotations layered onto existing publications. This intentional development of digital experiences honors the specific ways Black women organized their own intellectual output, while leveraging existing technologies to enhance accessibility and deepen engagement with materials.
BWOA demonstrates how community-based initiatives can transform the practice of public and digital humanities. It moves beyond simply being a repository for historical documents to actively generating new knowledge for community engagement and a deeper understanding of Black and feminist history. Instead of viewing the accessibility challenges of Black women’s archives as roadblocks, the team views them as opportunities to push the boundaries of digital archiving, fostering new technologies and methods that empower the community and unapologetically illuminate these stories in a powerful new light.
