A Collaborative Approach to Recovering 19th-Century Black Women's Lives through Their Friendship Albums

Over 150 years after the young black women Amy Matilda Cassey and Martina and Mary Anne Dickerson invited their abolitionist peers to add written and artistic contributions to their friendship albums, the cultural and political resonance of the contributions remains profound. Touched by the hands of Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, these rare artifacts of 19th-century popular culture document the elusive private and public worlds of the antebellum black woman, not only textually, but visually. Although most of the albums’ entries were not overtly activist in nature, the women’s adoption of the popular form of the friendship album was itself a political act that reflected racial cohesion among their network of black elites and demonstrated African Americans’ capacity for erudition and genteel manners.

In 2013 the curators of the library’s Visual Culture Program and Program in African American History embarked on a digital humanities project to make the albums more accessible to remote researchers as well as the general public. They will discuss the collaboration between library curators, students, professors, and digital specialists. The thread of sharing inherent to the creative content of the albums also suffused the process of making them accessible to their contemporary audience and to ours. The resulting website provides hi-res images of the digitized pages, transcriptions and annotations of entries, biographies of contributors, a timeline, and map. In creating this site, students and faculty discovered new possibilities for conducting original archival research into 19th-century black women’s lives.