Cluster Contributions

Introduction to The Search for Founding Black Mothers

The Search for Founding Black Mothers is a Digital Humanities project that was born out of a journey into the digital archives and subsequent article by Logan-Washington and Rudham (“Redress and Restore: The Search for Founding Black Mothers”) and then reborn as the NEH-funded K-12 Summer Institute with 30 educators across the US. Hosted by The National Treasure, Morgan State University, the institute covered nine Founding Black Mothers (Ona Judge Staines, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Mary Shadd Cary, Mary Bowser, Mary Ellen Pleasant, Henriette Delille, and Harriet and Lulu Jacobs). Framed by “Womanism” (Walker), and in communion with caretakers (Vashti DuBois of The Colored Girls Museum) and custodial guides (Angela Davis), The Search illuminated misrecognitions (Harris-Perry) and erasure in a process of restoration and reclamation. Using digital media tools and platforms to virtually travel to places connected to Founding Black Mothers (FBM), educators met scholars of The Search and FBM experts. The culmination of the 4-week institute was a Digital Repository of lesson plans, units, and projects planned by educators and a short documentary film about the project.

A Digital Invitation to The Search for Founding Black Mothers

Gretchen Rudham

For some, an invitation to The Search for Founding Black Mothers is an invite from a friend to join you on a research journey, a conversation with an archivist that unlocks another realm, or a question from your child coming home from school. For others, an invitation to The Search is less direct, stumbled upon while reading between lines, wondering about glaring absences in your own education, or pursuing unanswered questions from a gap in your family history. The Search is more than research, curiosity, or following a line of inquiry. Many who have been on The Search describe it as a beckoning, a calling, which once on the other side, feels like a hole torn in your previously known universe. Seeing the United States of America (“America”) anew through the eyes of Founding Black Mothers (FBM) will irrevocably change you.

Searching for FBM is like digging up a tree and realizing just how far spread the root system is that remained invisible to you: all the while you walked on, and benefitted from, the fruits of that same garden every day. The Search digs deep into America’s untold origin stories wherein Founding Black Mothers are found at the roots. Growing. Nourishing. Entangled with all that remains hidden, unsaid, or unseen. Bearing the weight of. Birthing literally and figuratively, America. Like roots, oftentimes in twisted and gnarled circumstances, Black women forged the birth and growth of a nation. And like roots, they remain buried by a nation that did not and has not nourished them back. Or even recognized them as Mothers.

Tracing the underground root system of FBM, crucial to the existence and continued flowering of generations, shifts the way you see the American garden, too. You move differently along American topsoil after The Search. This reclamation project has you sifting through blood-soaked soils (and archives), burnt-down houses, disappeared towns, and separated families, encountering dehumanization, death, and the root shock of violence—like tainted tendrils that you can trace directly to your family, town, or your small plot of the American garden. As FBM Mary Ellen Pleasant claimed in her unpublished autobiography, “I don’t want to be carried up to victory on flower beds of ease, I like to go through bloody scenes.” While The Search is more bloody scenes than beds of ease, it also unearths unparalleled love and devotion to family, community, and moments of beauty, joy, connection, solidarity, genius, and strength. It spotlights Founding Mothers’ intellect, talent, wit, knowledge, creativity, humour, gravitas, longing, and many complexities of the human experience. It illuminates the bravery, strategy, consistent resistance, insurgency, and interconnectedness of FBM—–a vast network like an undiscovered, intricate root system.

The Search is equal parts severance and reverence. It is a severance, full of haunting grief and loss, severing of family, culture, language, as well as a severing of myths, lies, illusions, and half-truths. It is also a reverence for the strength and brilliance of FBM to claim, live, and continually seek freedom in the face of inhumanity and violent erasure. The Search allows you to reclaim and reconstruct a three-dimensional humanity of Black women which are often eerily propped up (if they are covered at all) in textbooks like cardboard cutouts. Propped up to sell a flattened fiction of American mythologies. Deceptively glossy while being glossed over, set up with flimsy logic which can be easily debunked, discredited, and dismantled using The Search as praxis.

During The Search, you encounter FBM in their full humanity—drawing a stark contrast between the stand-up cardboard fake and the fleshed out FBM. The distorted depictions of Black women serve to keep buried the truths that their stories reveal so that the tendrils cannot be traced back, accounted for, or acknowledged. The erasure and misrecognition (Harris-Perry) of FBM forces a confrontation with the following contours (Painter):

Why you learn about Harriet Tubman as a handkerchief-clad, folksy older woman rather than the vibrant, brilliant orator, skilled naturalist, navigator, and military general.
Why Sojourner Truth is remembered by a white woman reporter’s misquote “Ain’t I a Woman” when Truth was a legal trailblazer, deft orator, and very much in control of her image and brand.
Why Mary Ellen Pleasant (Bibbs) is reduced to Mammy in name and front-page news when she was the UGR Western Terminus and ingenious entrepreneur who integrated street cars and bankrolled John Brown’s raid.
Why you study Ann Frank’s Diary and not the autobiography of Harriet Jacob’s seven-years of captivity in an attic, escaping sexual assault and abuse, winning freedom for her children, and founding schools.
Why you do not hear of the mysteries of Mary Bowser, intrepid spy and insurgent during the Civil War who is rumoured to have taken down Jefferson Davis from inside his house, and then opened a Freedman School before vanishing without a trace.
Why you never learn about freedom-seeker Ona Judge Staines (Dunbar) and the tireless pursuit by her enslavers, President George and First Lady Martha Washington, using federal force and dollars.
Why Mary Shadd Cary (Yee) is a footnote in abolition’s history instead of a transnational (into Canada) freedom fighter, journalist, and educator, demolishing in debates.
And why you are never introduced to The Venerable Henriette Delille (Porche-Frilot) who claimed Black women as holy, sacred, and brilliant, founding a convent, school, and orphanage in New Orleans, the belly of the human-trafficking beast.

Digital storytelling is a welcome companion for such a search. It acts as an amplifier for truth seeking and for deepened understandings of humanity—both for the reclaimed legacy of the FBM as well as for you, the searcher. It allows you to interrogate the cardboard cutouts and imagine and render FBM anew. Filming, recording, and reflecting while on The Search allows the re-claiming of FBM’s rightful place in history—and your journey can be captured and then easily shared. The reflective power of visual diaries is central to the reclamation project.

Digital Humanities can leverage platforms and processes to help you reanimate, resuscitate, and fully humanize FBM while others virtually join you on The Search. As you cover the same ground and stand in their shoes, you can retrace the spot where they absconded from (Ona Judge Staines), tour the Confederate White House where they stole enemy secrets (Mary Bowser), take the measure of the attic they hid in for seven years (Harriet Jacobs), touch the moss freedom seekers used to navigate at night (Harriet Tubman), light a candle in the church where they found and founded sanctuary (Henriette Delille), stand amongst the eucalyptus trees that lined their mansion (Mary Ellen Pleasant), hear them ask from their gravestone, “Is God Dead?” (Sojourner Truth) and stand on the Washington Metro stop that your nation’s capital paved over their grave (Mary Shadd Cary). By digitally archiving your own search, you are extending an invitation to The Search to others.

The Search invitation is not usually a one-time encounter, but rather a repeat event, and for some, a lifelong endeavour. The captivating stories of FBM draw you in, prompting you to search for additional clues, more hidden codes or signs embedded in the American landscape. You realize that you can’t know The Underground Railroad (UGR) without highlighting Tubman’s strategic knowledge of waterways and military victories via the Maritime UGR (LaRoche), and you cannot laud Frederick Douglass or William Still without reverence for the transcontinental transnational, lifelong devotion to the cause of freedom of the three Marys: Mary Ellen Pleasant, Mary Bowser, and Mary Shadd Cary. You note the loud absence of founding educators like Harriet and Lulu Jacobs and Henriette Delille in discussions that often begin and end with Carter G. Woodson or Booker T. Washington. You hear echoes and dissonance in the mythmaking about Founding Fathers like Washington, knowing Founding Mothers like Ona Judge Staines are inextricably linked to their stories, and to the founding of America.

The Search is an inquiry tool that recalibrates and reorients you towards liberating unknown stories and contributions of Black women in the past and the present. It also draws your attention to the caricatures constructed in our telling and retelling of American history, therefore allowing you to more easily spot shallow or incomplete storytelling in other narratives. The Search offers you a process to follow, tracing the roots of Founding Black Mothers that you have (since) learned, reaches far and wide, and runs deep—all beneath the American consciousness, waiting to be unearthed.

Through the Looking Glass: Changing Focus with Digital Humanities

Victoria Moten

Look up at the night sky and you will see thousands of stars. But billions more exist beyond our ability to see. Now imagine that each star represents a historical figure, and that the constellations named for the stars that are recognizable are guiding the navigation of our own planet. However, this dialogue with the stars remains incomplete. It took the invention of the telescope during the Renaissance to reveal that not only were stars not fixed to the sky, but that there were more, a lot more, and they continue to help us navigate new ways of understanding the cosmos. The dawn of cosmic navigation helped us circle the globe, but the dawn of the digital era built the satellites that guide our paths. The digital humanities allow us to not only peer deeper into the abyss of long forgotten history, but also share these findings more widely. Every time we look up at the stars in the night sky, we are looking at the past. What are we missing when we don’t use the latest technology to engage in this discourse?

My participation in the Founding Black Mothers project in the summer 2022 was an eye-opening experience for several reasons. We met for lectures, Q&A sessions with scholars, and small discussion groups for four weeks via video conference still allowing for the diversity of thought which the NEH offers by including voices from all over the nation This program was unique because it ensured more equity for those who, like me, had barriers to travelling and staying on campus for four weeks. In addition, we were able to converse via Zoom or StreamYard with scholars all over the country on their expertise on Founding Black Mothers from the comfort of our homes while simultaneously being invited into their spaces. More importantly, we were able to access information that has gone largely unknown.

We expect our students to scale the high walls of academia’s private observatories to gain access to vital knowledge. Too often, the discourse that happens at the university level where there is access to this level of research, is sealed in their special collections (which, let’s be honest, is not easily accessible even to graduate students), graduate students’ dissertations, and scholarly journals, and as a result never makes it to the public-school realm, let alone public discourse. How astonished was I to discover that while it was true that Harriet Tubman helped hundreds escape slavery, that she also served as a general during the Civil War? This, unfortunately, isn’t even acknowledged at the African American Civil War Museum in Washington D.C. Or that unbeknownst to the public, Mary Ellen Pleasant financed one of the biggest revolts in history: John Brown’s Raid at Harpers Ferry? This is, again, not noted at any of Harpers Ferry’s many displays. I’d heard of Sally Heming’s story (Gordon-Reed), but not that of Ona Judge Staines and of Henry “Box” Brown’s heroic journey in a shipping container and not of Harriet Jacob’s seven years hiding in the attic as she waited to escape enslavement with her children.

The Founding Black Mothers program uncovered this lost history and encouraged us to share our knowledge in various ways. One method that helped me reflect on this experience was vlogging (video blogging). Like the lens on a Newtonian telescope, this act served as a mirror helping me focus and reflect on this new knowledge. I had to find the right music and visuals to match the message I had to offer and, even more importantly, found that using that platform made it very easy for me to share this information with my students and even friends via social media.

The COVID-19 crisis revealed plenty of failings in the distribution of information to the public and now we are being met with the spread of misinformation via artificial intelligence. However, this critical period of technological interdependence has also delivered new ways of sharing that information with larger and diverse audiences. With some states sponsoring anti-progressive curriculum and teaching methodologies, one way to combat that is to use the tools of social media, vlogging, and video conferencing to spread critical information not offered in all classrooms. While language is natural, literacy requires having the latest tools to not only decipher the message but preserve it. Even a stone and chisel helped conserve the history of forgotten civilizations for their descendants to excavate and analyze later. Why, in many of our schools, are we so resistant to using the latest technology? Our students are constantly reading online so why not make the information more accessible to them using the technology of the 21st-century?

I’d grown tired of asking my students to imagine they were writing texts for the real world, but the Founding Black Mothers digital humanities project inspired me to have my students engage with an external audience. First, they participated in the Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon where they were able to read and help transcribe the documents of Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Like citizen scientists, students were able to both contribute and learn more about the life of a Founding Black Mother. As they sifted through her texts, some in her eloquent handwriting, they traveled back in time. Engaging with primary texts is a rarity for my students who often rely on history textbooks which only offer broad strokes to illustrate our past. As they dialogued with a luminary who had been virtually erased from history books, it shined a light on how much history was lost or misinterpreted. Here they were, transcribing newspapers owned by a Black woman from the late-19th century when their prior understanding was that Black people were illiterate and that women owned nothing. Furthermore, they were changing the course of history by making texts available to the public that would have remained in some corner of the university archives. Later, I had students create documentaries about an unsung hero in our community, thus having them engage in the multimodal rhetorical style of the 21st century. It was a joy to watch my students engage in the same research journey I’d embarked on just the summer before. They were digging into the archives of their grandparents’ attics and interviewing people who made major contributions to their community but had otherwise gone unnoticed. At the screening, they were empowered to learn from each other, and I invited community members, which gave them a public platform. In our little observatory of a classroom, I watched as they named their own constellations, taking pride in their first personal archive.

As we stare up at the night sky, and see the stars seemingly affixed there, let’s not forget about the infinite amount of matter and energy whirling all about. And these, sometimes colliding, celestial bodies have enough force to change the tide. Change is the only constant. Encouraging more digital humanities projects will help our students learn to swim in the vast and ever-changing current of the digital information era, with the formerly hidden constellations guiding their way.

Between Binaries in The Search

Nicholas Kennedy

In The Search, we frequently speak of that which Shirley Moody-Turner refers to as “the gaps, silences, and fissures that often haunt the archives of Black women” (xxii). But to what extent does a silence reverberate? How does an absence signal a presence; a gap, an engulfment; or a hole, a haunting? It is this paradoxical phenomenon that undergirds The Search, stretching our normative tendency to organize our practices as educators and practitioners through binary thinking. The Search lives in a liminal space, betraying binaries and defying divisions in ways that engender accessible points of entry for all who make the conscious commitment to inquire more about America’s Founding Black Mothers.

The Search Exists Between “Virtual” and “Physical”

In this manner, from the proximity of my studio apartment on California’s Central Coast, I can conduct a Search through digital archives for source material pertaining to heirlooms that speak to the lives and legacies of such Founding Black Mothers as Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks. Alternatively, I may choose to travel by plane and car to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, travelling the topography of the Tubman Byway for vestiges of the iconic Conductor of the Underground Railroad, alongside a partner in The Search. I might collaborate on a phone call conversation with a co-participant on The Search Team regarding Search pedagogy, or I might join a Zoom meeting with my Pedagogy Pod in order to bind and loosen threads in my own Search process. While the mode of reorienting our understanding of these Founding Black Mothers shape-shifts, the method of this pedagogy as an interdisciplinary, recovery and reclamation project remains resolute.

The Search Exists Between “Local” and “(Inter)national”

The traces and treads of our Founding Black Mothers can be found locally, nationally, and globally, in correlation to the expansive range of physical and psychic space traversed by these forerunners. As those of us who are on The Search recognize that our Founding Black Mothers were embodied persons who inhabited distinct terrain, while simultaneously occupying mental, sociopolitical, and metaphysical space, we recognize that excavating erasure is not limited to the physical domain. Thus, encountering assumptions, attitudes, and misconceptions upheld by the polity and affixed within the minds of individuals within our communities is a vital part of The Search.

In my own community, I have been on The Search for Mary Ellen Pleasant, an illustrious FBM who has been regarded as the Western Terminus of the Underground Railroad. Each month, Lefty’s Coffee Shop—a local favourite in Los Olivos, California—posts a picture of an underappreciated hero on their “Hero of the Month” Board. Customers attempt to identify this icon based on one image that is firmly affixed to the centre of the board. When Laura Newman, owner of Lefty’s, presented me with the opportunity to select one of the Founding Black Mothers for Lefty’s “Hero of the Month” Board, I knew instantly that Pleasant would be the perfect pick. Pleasant, a generous financier of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, spent much of her life championing the abolitionist cause and civil liberties in San Francisco, California, less than three hundred miles north of Los Olivos. Sadly, not one customer was able to properly identify Pleasant—she who has been hailed as the Mother of Civil Rights in California—further exemplifying the erasure of Black women’s contributions to both local and American history, and demonstrating the value of The Search as a framework that meets locals as members of a national body politic, all for the sake of unearthing our Founding Black Mothers.

The Search Exists Between “Generative” and “Recursive”

The Search is both recursive and generative in nature. When mapping The Search for one Founding Black Mother, practitioners will often encounter remnants of additional Founding Black Mothers—some of whom are Founding Black Mothers for whom the practitioner has already begun to map The Search—a testament to the interlocking social bonds and intricate communal networks sustained through Black women’s ingenuity and intentionality as sustainers of their own stories, often beholden unto one another.

Conversely, due to that which Melissa Harris-Perry refers to as “the problem of misrecognition” (Harris-Perry 42) in her seminal text, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Black women’s experiences and identities are often amalgamated into a singular liminal space, whereby a multiplicity of experiences and contributions of individuals are misconstrued as belonging to one and the same. Therefore, the work of correctly attributing words, ideas, and images to specific Founding Black Mothers is key to The Search.

For example, in my digital Search for Sarah Mapps Douglass, I discovered that a portrait of Nannie Helen Burroughs was misidentified as a photo of Sarah Mapps Douglass, appearing in several Google Image searches, and situated alongside Mapps Douglass’s Wikipedia page. That these two Founding Black Mothers—Nannie Helen Burroughs and Sarah Mapps Douglass—were both radical educators whose respective praxes are worthy of our time and attention is beside the point. The cobwebs of misrecognition threaten to obfuscate their distinct histories and, thereby, threaten to jeopardize the perpetuation of their individual legacies as key players in America’s history.

While the vast domain of the digital humanities might seem like an infinite graveyard filled with an endless assortment of unmarked graves, digital humanists in The Search are uniquely positioned to exhume bodies, to confirm and affirm formerly mistaken or overlooked identities, and to rectify legacies that deserve our recognition.

The Search is a “Threading” and a “Loosening”

If the social consciousness of the American body politic can be compared—through trite metaphor—to a tapestry, then our Search endeavors both fasten the filaments and untwine the fibres that undergird our collective understanding of our Founding Black Mothers.

During our summer institute experience, our Search cohort had the opportunity to preview the five-segment Rooted Wisdom film series project, narrated by historian Anthony Cohen and produced by both Adkins Arboretum and Schoolhouse Farmhouse Studio. In Rooted Wisdom, Cohen leads viewers through an exploration of the flora and fauna that comprise the rich landscape of Adkins Arboretum, four hundred acres that stretch across Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In particular, Cohen’s narration guides viewers through an investigation of the exact physical terrain that Tubman expertly navigated in leading formerly enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad.

Across America’s collective tapestry, Tubman’s physicality is often overlooked in favour of a supernatural, hagiographic portraiture of Mother Moses (aka Tubman) and her courage. Whereas the divine inspiration of her faith-formed convictions spurred her forth, Tubman’s success is also a reflection of her keen knowledge of the natural world. For example, that Tubman, as a skilled naturalist, may have read moss patterns on trees—with an eye trained through ecological wisdom—is not largely represented in our tapestry. Shifting our paradigmatic conceptions of Tubman, therefore, represents a threading, a weaving of strands that allow us to see Tubman as both a towering, holy-like presence and as a way finder, finely attuned to the interlocking ebbs and flows of her physical surroundings.

Contrarily, The Search tends to loosen threads that form inaccurate images of our Founding Black Mothers, deleterious depictions that diminish Black women’s participation as crucial actors in America’s sociocultural, historical narrative. For example, Ona Judge Staines is often situated as tertiary, at best, in the framing of George Washington’s relationship with slavery. Judge Staines—an enslaved woman who was born at Mount Vernon and forced to serve as Martha Washington’s personal maid, prior to fleeing her captivity through self-liberation at the approximate age of twenty—is barely referenced in a webpage from Mount Vernon’s official website, downplaying the severity of the degradation enslaved individuals experienced at the hands of the Washingtons. That the daring departure of freedom-seeking Judge Staines was met by Washington’s unsuccessful attempt at recapturing her speaks to the reality of her presence as a true symbol of revolutionary radicalism.

Mapping The Search for Ona Judge Staines in Philadelphia begins near the nation’s initial executive mansion, now referred to as “the President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of the New Nation.” Whereas this outdoor, openair exhibit is intended to serve as a memorial to the enslaved people who toiled in this former presidential home of Washington (and eventually, Adams), the site does so in a way that further relegates Judge Staines to the fray of the fabric. At the site of “the President’s House,” an artistic rendering featuring the likeness of Staines clings to an exterior brick wall, perpendicular to Independence Hall. The briefest overview of her escape is glossed over with the notion that friends helped her, discrediting the calculated cunning of Staines, as well as overlooking her own investment in her liberation. That Staines, in the year 2023, is mildly memorialized at the margins of an exhibit that claims to centralize the experiences of formerly enslaved people speaks to the need for a loosening of the ties that bind us to the worn wool of a narrative that devalues this Founding Black Mother’s agency and innovation in favour of a sorely stitched pattern that frames the Founding Fathers as the harbingers of liberty’s legacy.

Much like the warping and wefting of the weaving process, The Search for Founding Black Mothers is both a threading and a loosening, seeking to strengthen the ties that bind our present and our future to the unique contributions of our Founding Black Mothers, while also undoing the defects in the fabric that result from a diminishment of Black women’s presence and lived experiences.

The Search Exists Between an Abundance of Binaries

The praxis for The Search is not limited to a specific set of Founding Black Mothers. Once scholars, practitioners, and students are versed in The Search, the framework and associated tenets can be applied to Founding Black Mothers in one’s own city, town, or locale. The malleable design of a framework that allows for a multiplicity of approaches results in a seemingly endless series of juxtapositions, as The Search exists between even more binaries, such as between “individual” and “collective,” between “novice” and “expert,” and between “past” and “present.” Those who choose to engage The Search quickly find that the tension between dualities is often where The Search yields the most comprehensive truths that speak to our Founding Black Mothers, their imprints, and their lasting impressions.

Excavating Erasure: The Curious Case of Carcerality in the Archives

Cortnie Belser

Grounding Prompt: Imagine an archive. Sketch it to your experience on a search. Who is the subject? What are the knowns and unknowns? Does this archive float in the smog of a digital cloud, or confined to a box in a basement aisle? Or, in the context of a social media archive—a slew of erased posts to no longer be known. Perhaps, none—yet. If the archive is lost, forgotten, missing, incomplete, or fully destroyed, has a crime been committed?

For Black women, the archive is a hollow cemetery. Shaped sharp with clandestine contours, it has cavernous holes, eroded with erasure. There are no bodies buried beneath the grave marks of Founding Black Mothers. America: the archive-to-grave robber, in daylight and shadows, has long before removed its remains.

The American archive is the grave robber. The archive rarely fills its own grave because it is fermented in democracy’s dirt. The archive in its most carceral state is curated to ignore court rooms as crime scenes, left unjudged, at unequal proportions for Black women. Until recently, the archival case of Sojourner Truth had been sentenced to silence at the hands of the New York State Archives system. In the landmark 1828 People v Solomon Gedney case, Truth is the first Black woman to sue a White man, and wins the emancipation of her son. A woman of numerous names and signatures of distinction, Isabella Bumfree (aka Sojourner Truth) rings an alarm: how is one of the nation’s biggest and most important archives not criminally negligent for this oversight? The archives of Black women are in the battleground of full birthright citizenship, as actors in the ideation of this country’s foundation, and have been destroyed or distorted, partly in protection of themselves during participation of what was seen as subversive for a (Black) woman’s role at that time. The criminality of the archive acts as an accessory to uphold the policing apparatus of social, political, and economic institutions, such as the schoolhouse, hospitals, banks, and national landmark preservation sites. Most often the archive imprisons Black women’s words and work because it evokes strategic thinking, innovation, and community building that misaligned with the racial gendered tropes, myths, and stereotypes about black women. America’s archive as an outlaw is at-large, in-charge, and vindicated.

The armour of the American archive is a riot shield—for the nation’s colonialist, imperialist, capitalist, exclusionary, and paternalistic character flaws. Erasure, as a product of this white gaze, utilizes data as a weapon and is an institutional technique of the recursive system. Erasure amplifies silencing as a systematic structure to cripple truth-seeking (Logan-Washington and Rudham). Erasure employs true history as a caricature enmeshed in misrecognition and immoral codes.

Excavation as a reclamation project incites pause to the perpetuation of institutional and systematic erasure. One of its primary functions is to draw new lines across, against, over, and beyond the existing contours. The methods of erasure excavation require communication, collaboration, and care. The locations of counsel are sometimes suddenly inserted in a moving conversation or shift from classrooms to checkout counters. It is important to follow a trace, be curious of what is not told or seen, and listen to what is spoken on the site of an excavation. Most extensive excavations require appointments, access passes, and privilege; in start, part, or full completion, excavating erasure aims to interrogate and release the gatekeeping of the archive. In the case of Mary Ellen Pleasant, as the “Harriet Tubman of San Francisco,” critical scholars are protective of private archives due to the misrecognition of Pleasant as witchy mammy rather than a self-made millionaire. As a reinforcement of erasure, misrecognition can be a deterrent or decoy to distract us from the emergence of a successful dig. With excavation tools such as Black feminist epistemologies and theory and digital humanities, the search can not only establish a new sacred ground for Founding Black Mothers, but also apply these lessons learned in community and curriculum as healing and justice spaces. It is through the Founding Black Mothers that the search as an interdisciplinary praxis can curtail the archive-to-grave robbing pipeline.

By shifting through scraps of primary and secondary sources while answering questions that technology now makes accessible, we can triage the archive, finding unidentified missing persons and preserving lessons learned in what was too long lost. On New Year’s Day in 1847, a year before she passed away as a free but fugitive woman in New Hampshire, an abolitionist newspaper earned the trust of Judge Staines to tell her story. Three years after signing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 declaring the right to retrieve a runaway slave across state lines, George Washington utilized the powers of democracy institutionalized in the first generation of the country’s founding. An inherited slave to First Lady Martha Washington, at 22 years old, Ona Judge Staines absconded from the Washingtons’ Philadelphia residence. Through newspaper advertisements and bounty-hunters, by bargaining traits of freedom and pleading—through a middleman—to return to slavery, the Washingtons enacted state-sanctioned policing and punishment to the fullest extent. It is through the tireless efforts of Black women, such as Erica Armstrong Dunbar, that Ona Judge Staines’ story can be retold in present-day to create a puzzle from scraps the Washingtons’ Mount Vernon Estate tour has only acknowledged in this last century.

Founding Black Mothers as subjects of erasure are also survivors. A whiff of grief, a haunting in a nap, or a delay of the search routinely detours to the souls whose scraps are just lost. These unidentified Black women, if damaged or demolished, can be given a small rendering: a slice of an honest portraiture. Founding Black Mothers are excavated from attics, dumpsters, laboratories, federal courts, couches, church pews, and peeled photographs, amongst other crevices. The recovery of the archive has adapted to today’s chat boxes, posts, social media threads, and digital preservation websites. During our 2022 summer institute, Bruce Purnell, founder of The Love More Movement and descendant of Shadd Cary, discussed how his family preserved the rich legacy of his abolitionist ancestors while the American archive erased and reduced these contributions to one archival feature: a discreet letter correspondence between Shadd Cary and Frederick Douglass. In February 2023, the invitation to transcribe the Shadd Cary Papers on Douglass Day, is a symbolic testament to the vast work still left to be done before she is a study in mainstream journalism curriculum.

To consider the case of carcerality in the archive, it is important to distinguish the intersections between abolitionist movements and the search discourse. Some on The Search, such as myself, will find and feel throughlines across and in praxis of The Search that connect us to the historic precedent of state violence established in the nation’s founding. The unconstitutional conditions of prisons and policing continue to be a pressing concern in collective organizing and abolition movements today. From political prisoners and everyday people imprisoned, on death row, and in solitary confinement to lives lost to human trafficking and child and migrant forced labour, we work in solidarity, and in scholarship of a new afterlife of slavery.

While radical reformers call to eradicate mass incarceration, the Black Lives Matter movement redirects public attention to the collective trauma witnessed in communities where police shoot, beat, and kill Black children, women, and men before, during, and after an arrest. In the case of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, the prison and the police are codependent in the carceral conspiracy to not protect Black women, a status quo convenient to the archive. On May 13, 2020, the archival record of Taylor’s address as an active location of interest was not investigated and a no-knock warrant resulted in her death. If not for Taylor’s mother and sister and the #SayHerName movement’s galvanizing and organizing efforts to sanction a safe space, the intersection of Black women and police brutality would not be in the American archive. The murder of Breonna Taylor is just one example of the intersection of the carceral state, police-led violence, and the institutional erasure as retribution for Black women’s contributions. In a place that claims to protect freedom, it is ironic and insidious that Black girls and women can be at the wrong place at the wrong time in their own home, in their own life.

Because the archive is an accomplice to the carceral state, it acts to cover-up democracy’s crimes, compensates concealment, and holds captive the corporeality of unidentified missing persons reports left unfiled. Three tools of excavation will begin to support excavating erasure in the archive’s current state: curiosity, courage, and community.

Curiosity—ask questions when there seems to be more room to the story; consider the presence of hauntings, detours, or binaries as a compass to direct your digging; listen to understand the complex historical and contemporary contexts and seek primary sources as credibility to connect old and new claims.
Courage—perseverance in the face of fear is a strength that will guide you through expeditions; engage in dominant archival spaces and consider non-conventional locations where Founding Black Mothers may be spoken to or about; there will be some who don’t understand why you can’t let it go. Keep going.
Community—do not do this work alone; situate places and spaces to discuss and digest; design new cups that do not overflow or leak the sustenance you need to be well; bring in those around you who can be your search-and-rescue team when there is loss and isolation; combine skills and foster ideation on how contours are reconfigured to protect the enclave of Founding Black Mothers.

The Search is back-bending work of intellectual labour with physical and emotional tolls to pay. The State underpays and undercuts efforts to excavate erasure because the political responsibility is an inherited debt that continues to incur interest charged to the American archive. The archive is armed with its own mob–curriculum, laws, and estates–all situated in the archive-to-grave robber’s pipeline. In the digital era, our collective defence of the reclamation of Founding Black Mothers will warrant others to seek the truths of The Search. To address the archive in a multiplicity of places, we must distinguish among its many fictitious faces and incinerate cases of cardboard cutout coffins that uphold the status quo of state-sanctioned erasure.

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The Search for Founding Black Mothers: Digital Humanities as Reclamation