Consultant, Telling Our Own Story: Black History, Iowa PBS Documentary (2022)
Johnson County Committee to Designate New Eponym:
The Iowa Colored Conventions Project (2018-Present)
The Iowa Colored Conventions Digital History Project is designed to overcome two misperceptions about Black history in Iowa. Iowa history is generally characterized by the experience of its majority white population; many Iowans and Americans mistakenly assume that no important or significant historical developments have been created by and within Iowa’s historic Black population. Secondly, Iowa’s idealized identity as a white, racially progressive and accepting state has led to an erasure of a long and significant history of Black activism and leadership around issued of racial discrimination and Black opportunity in Iowa.
Iowa’s nineteenth-century, state-wide Colored Conventions (numbering eighteen that we have recently uncovered, held between 1857 and 1896) offer an important and useful window into the history of Midwestern black communities and their racial justice activism, and these conventions are a subject ripe for the development of publicly-engaged scholarship and teaching. The Iowa Colored Conventions Project, as the first regional satellite of the national Colored Conventions Project (CCP), is working to create accessible (digital) archives and interpretive exhibits on Midwestern black history; connect these archives and exhibits with several of Iowa’s historical black communities; advance scholarship on the nineteenth-century black Midwest; and create new courses, curriculum, and teaching opportunities using the CCP-Iowa material.
Part of this project is directed at recuperating, digitizing, studying, and teaching the record of Iowa’s documented conventions and the activists who made them possible. But this project is also about embedding the history of Iowa’s black convention movement in the context of African American communities and activism in Iowa, and in turn, in Iowa state history. Our research goals include working to understand, interpret, and make visible the roles and work of African American women, who are only faintly represented in the convention proceedings themselves; and uncovering the networks and genealogies of black activism in Iowa which represent the social and political legacies of the convention movement. Our long-term goals, and the core purpose of the project, are to make that history accessible, compelling, and useful to African American and white Iowans and to the history teachers towards whom our work will also be targeted.
Leslie Schwalm is one of several co-founders of this project and along with members at Northwestern University, University of North Alabama, University of Iowa, and citizen researchers, we continue research and develop digital resources on the history of this important movement.
Press releases on the Iowa Colored Conventions Project:
https://coloredconventions.org/tag/iowa/
Collaborator with Margot Connolly, MFA, Iowa Playwrights Workshop for University of Iowa Arts Share, “Cross-Examined,” original play based on the history of African American women in Iowa’s nineteenth-century civil rights movement. 2016 – 18.
https://engagement.uiowa.edu/news/2018/02/university-iowa-presents-cross-examined-cedar-rapids-honor-black-history-month
Guest Opinion: “Trust Iowans with the 1619 Project,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, 2/27/2021
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/trust-iowans-with-the-1619-projects-difficult-lessons/
Leslie Schwalm, historian 