Digitizing a movement
In the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of petitions were sent to the Massachusetts Legislature asking lawmakers to abolish slavery and end segregation, and urging them to refuse to cooperate with the federal Fugitive Slave Act. The petitions — signed and circulated by abolitionists and former slaves, as well as members of the literary and social elite — help to paint a clearer picture of the lives of African-Americans in the young United States. A project undertaken by the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University is cataloging, transcribing, and digitizing 4,000 to 6,000 of the petitions housed at the Massachusetts State Archives, making them accessible to scholars around the world. “These are some of the first petitions prepared, signed, and circulated by African-Americans in North American history,” said Daniel Carpenter, the center’s director and leader of the project. Although Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, the petitions show that passage of the...