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Hammonton, N.J. – The Douglass Day planning committee of Kramer Hall will host a transcribe-a-thon in honor of the bicentennial birthday of Mary Ann Shadd Cary on Feb. 14, both in person and streamed live on YouTube.

The and Kramer Hall will lead ������Ƶ students, professors and community members in transcribing an unprecedented collection of digitized papers* left by Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an iconic figure in Black women’s history. The event will run from 12-3 p.m. and pre-registration is encouraged.

The transcribe-a-thon will bring together thousands of participants at more than 100 simultaneous events around the world. The transcribing will be done on , a citizen science platform.

Douglass Day is an annual holiday celebrated on Feb. 14, the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Influential activist Mary Church Terrell proposed the holiday after Douglass’s passing in 1895, and it soon served as inspiration for the creation of Black History Month. In 2017, a group at the University of Delaware revived the holiday as an annual event to preserve Black history through collective actions, such as creating new resources for teaching and learning about Black history. 

Few people in history have broken more barriers than Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893), who was an activist, journalist, teacher, intellectual and lawyer. After being raised in strong Black communities across Delaware and Philadelphia, Shadd Cary became a trailblazer who 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. As she wrote in an 1849 letter to Frederick Douglass, “in anything relating to our people, I am insensible of boundaries.”

 

*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.