Black activists held national conventions to build political capacity while excluded from official politics

Evidence

On July 6, 1853, more than one hundred delegates took their seats in Corinthian Hall, the grandest meeting place in Rochester, New York. They had made their way from ten states—Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont—for that year’s Colored National Convention. Excluded from political parties, statehouses, and Congress, Black activists found, in the convention’s three days of deliberation and discussion, a place for developing ideas, honing strategies, and demonstrating a capacity for full citizenship. The proceedings were models of political debate, organized by republican principles of representation and run along parliamentary-style rules of order. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 684

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the chapter’s infrastructure thesis: these conventions function as counter-institutions where excluded citizens exercise civic capacity. Ties to the origin-stories-as-infrastructure framing the reader is charting. — connects to: White Baptist exclusion over slavery drove black Baptists to form their own national convention — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 44