The mission of the Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA) is to gather the papers and ephemera of 19th- and 20th-century Black female activists and intellectuals. The digital and community-centered archive includes the papers of four extraordinary women—Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—from archives and repositories across the United States and Canada.

BWOA originated with the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project (AJCDP) in 2017. Shirley Moody-Turner, now faculty director of BWOA and an associate professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, explained that she had been doing scholarly work on Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), a writer, educator, and activist who wrote A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892). She wanted to learn more about what Cooper was and was not able to publish, given the racial and gender prejudices of her day. “I was really interested in just looking beyond the book. That meant going to the archives,” she said.

In 2015, Moody-Turner was working in the Anna Julia Cooper Collection at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC), which Regia Bronson, Cooper’s grandniece, had donated in 1971. The MSRC archive includes Cooper’s manuscripts and poetry, personal papers such as correspondence, financial records, pictures, and memorabilia from DC-based Frelinghuysen University, where Cooper served as president towards the end of her life.

While she was exploring the archive, Moody-Turner recalled holding an envelope in the collection that was browning and starting to deteriorate at the edges. She realized how fragile these papers were and how precarious the archive was, even preserved at MSRC.

That realization sparked the formation of the AJCDP, which aimed to digitize and share Cooper’s work and other ephemera at MSRC. As Founding Director, Moody-Turner also applied for a grant from Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information to support the partnership with MSRC to digitize Cooper’s papers.

In 2018, when the archives were fully digitized, Lopez Matthews, Digital Project Manager at MSRC, organized a symposium at Howard, Undisputed Dignity: Preserving Black Women's History and Material Culture, to formally launch the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Collection.

At the symposium, Moody-Turner met Jim Casey, one of the founders of Douglass Day, which celebrates the birthday of Frederick Douglass with a day of collective action for Black history. He suggested that the Douglass Day team and its community volunteers could take the entire digitized collection and transcribe it in a single day at a future Douglass Day event.

Two years later, after much planning and preparation, 650 volunteers gathered, including students, community members, and Black sororities such as Alpha Kappa Alpha, and they transcribed all of the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Collection on February 14, 2020.

After that event, members of the project began thinking about how they could expand the work beyond Cooper’s documents. The project and the partnership with MSRC “served as a model for the formation and launch of BWOA in 2020,” Moody-Turner noted, with the AJCDP serving as the seed. Since its inception, BWOA has expanded to include the archives of three additional women: Shadd Cary in 2021, Terrell in 2022, and Harper in 2023.

BWOA is one of three projects of Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research, founded in 2020. The others include Douglass Day and the Colored Conventions Projects (CCP), which focuses on developing a digital archive of materials related to large national organizations of African Americans from the 1830s through the Civil War. CCP was originally begun by Gabrielle Foreman, who cofounded and codirected the project at University of Delaware before moving it to Penn State in 2019.

BRINGING THE PIECES TOGETHER

Anna Julia Cooper's Scrapbook Courtesy of the Black Women Organizing Archives

Community engagement and collaboration were a central part of the Cooper project and BWOA. Beyond digitizing the records, the structure and format of the archives called for thoughtful consideration.The physical materials in the AJCP archive stayed at Howard, with the digitized archives housed at the MSRC website. Other materials about the four women were also digitized and housed on the websites of their source institutions with BWOA serving as a portal to the various collections.

The key challenge for BWOA was gathering as much material as possible from the four women, which is scattered across 70 (so far) institutions in the United States and Canada. Sometimes their writings and works were collected with their male counterparts or dispersed among several collections; other works have not been archived or digitized. Even worse, sometimes their papers were thrown away or destroyed.

Sabrina Evans, co–project coordinator of BWOA and assistant professor of English at Howard University, found a wealth of information related to Cooper in other archives, including photographs of her from the Library Congress, New York Public Library, and Smithsonian; and correspondence between W.E.B. Du Bois and Cooper at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

Another challenge for BWOA was deciding which Black women activists and feminists to include in the archive. Co–project coordinator Yolanda Mackey pointed out that they could have focused on many. Of the four who were ultimately included, Mackey said BWOA decided to “go deep into their archives, as opposed to just finding some representative pieces for everybody.”

After the teams of volunteers and students completed the Anna Julia Cooper project, BWOA turned to Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–93), in part because CCP had already begun work on collecting Shadd Cary at University of Delaware and it seemed like a natural addition.

Shadd Cary was one of the first women delegates for the Colored Conventions, a series of national, regional, and state conventions held in the decades before and after the Civil War. When she lived in Canada, she was the first Black woman to publish a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, in 1853. Shadd Cary attended Howard University at 60 and in 1883 was one of the first Black women in the United States to earn a law degree .

In 2022, BWOA began work on the archives of Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), a founding president of the National Association of Colored Women and cofounder of Douglass Day in 1897. The most recent project focuses on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) a Black activist, writer, poet, and teacher. She also served as a mentor to Shadd Cary and Ida B. Wells.

Each woman has a separate page on the BWOA website, with a short and a long biography and a page that lists all papers and other materials found across institutions.

However, the availability of information for each woman differs greatly. Cooper’s and Terrell’s materials were preserved and collected by archivists and historians. On the other hand, many of Harper’s papers were largely thrown out and destroyed; scholars have found individual items such as letters, poetry, and newspaper articles across the different archives. More information about Harper and the other three women may be unearthed as researchers continue to find new materials in other holdings.

The BWOA archival collections include a variety of materials, including published works, newspapers, diaries, photographs, and letters. Moody-Turner highlighted one of Cooper’s scrapbooks (1931–40), in which Cooper collected and preserved her own writings and pasted them on top of pages of F. Lawrence’s Babcock’s book The First Fifty, 1889–1939. “She overwrites the celebratory tale of rise of industrial capitalism that the base text relates with her own critiques of industrialization, racial capitalism, and rugged individualism,” the website entry notes. BWOA digitized the scrapbook in 2019, allowing users to change the transparency of Cooper’s pasted articles and notes to review the text underneath and compare and contrast her words with those in the book.

Moody-Turner and Mackey also highlight a 1952 recording of Terrell at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. In a recording of the radio program Americans All—hosted from 1946–62 by Tomlinson Todd, founder of the Institute on Race Relations—Terrell talked about how, after Frederick Douglass’s death, she realized that a day should be set aside for him in public schools in his honor; she lobbied the Washington, DC Board of Education in 1897 to establish the day.

BWOA IN THE WORLD

While much of BWOA’s work has involved identifying and digitizing materials, it also ensures that they are made available to students, scholars, and community members.

BWOA prioritized bringing community participants into the project from the beginning with the Douglass Day transcription projects. After the Cooper Douglass Day in 2020, BWOA held a Douglass Day event for Terrell in 2021 and another for Shadd Cary in 2023. Information about the three transcription events is also recorded on their website pages.

While Harper’s Douglass Day is in the planning stages, the Center for Black Digital Research and the Africana Research Center at Penn State will host the Harper at 200 symposium in September, to be led by Foreman of the CCP and Sherita Johnson, director of the College of the Liberal Arts' Africana Research Center.

The archives have been also incorporated into college classes at Penn State. In Moody-Turner’s 2018 graduate English class, “Black Women Writers and African American Print Cultures,” students picked items from the Cooper archive and wrote commentaries about them. She has continued engage students with the archives in her English classes and others, such as “Activist Archives.”

In 2021, the Center for the Black Digital Research held a virtual two-day symposium, Mary Ann Shadd Cary in the Here and Now, that explored Shadd Cary’s multifaceted life, including her feminist and anti-slavery advocacy work in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

BWOA is also working to get these materials into primary and secondary classrooms. Moody-Turner credits Denise Burgher, BWOA liaison and director of community and curricular engagement at the CCP, for developing the curriculum for two of the four women. The two spent time with BWOA’s teaching partners to create curricula for Philadelphia, DC, and Delaware schools. There’s a Cooper curriculum for Grades 5–8 as well as Grade 11; there is a K–12 curriculum for Terrell.

Currently, Moody-Turner and Mackey are coediting a special issue of Legacy, a Journal of American Women Writers about the archives, titled “The BWOA Forum: Digitization and the Scattered Archives of Nineteenth Century Black Women Organizers—A Collective Approach,” which will be released later this year. They have invited poets, artists and activists to contribute to the issue, along with scholars, graduate students, and archivists.

Moody-Turner edited the Penguin edition of The Portable Anna Julia Cooper (2022). Sherita Johnson will edit a collection on Harper, based on the 2025 symposium, in conjunction with the Center for Black Digital Resources.

In addition to the Cooper scrapbook, the BWOA team created a digital map showing the distribution of materials for each woman across the United States and Canada. People can use filters to focus on a single woman or a geographical area for information about the repository or archive that holds the women’s works.

“This fragmented geography speaks to the dispersed nature of their work and to the challenge of tracing their influence,” said Evans. “We wanted to create a way to visualize their foundation of work that didn’t just list locations on a page but helped us see the wide reach of their intellectual labor.”

While there are many published works and papers from the four women, BWOA does not have a robust collection of materials related to their interior or private lives. Sometimes archives are “cleaned up”—the women or their families may have chosen to hold on to or destroy items, often personal in nature, that they did not want made available to the world.

Moody-Turner stresses that identifying and digitizing the works of these women was the result of many people’s efforts, including graduate students, undergraduates, community members, and past archivists. “We can't ever represent everybody [who played a role in developing BWOA] in an interview or an article,” she said.

For more information, check out the BWOA website to learn more about these four incredible Black women intellectuals and activists.