Why we think this project is worth doing:
a. Between 1706 and 1865, enslavers placed hundreds of thousands of newspaper ads describing African and African-American people who were attempting to free themselves from slavery. We estimate that over 200,000 ads survive. We are trying to collect and make available all of them. Some were placed by enslavers seeking to enlist other Americans to recapture self-liberators, or by jailors who wanted to inform enslavers that someone had been recaptured and was being held in a local lockup.
b. Black self-liberation is a key theme in US history. So is racialized policing. These ads show us both, in action.
c. We digitize original images where possible.
d. Our long-term goal is to locate and make available all surviving ads published in North American newspapers.
e. While some may view this project as historical “big data” that could be abstracted, we believe that it is actually an effort to preserve and make available an enormous number of individual stories. Although the ads exist “at scale” compared to so many other historical sources on Black life during US slavery, the more important fact is that they describe each person as an individual. While they are described from the enslaver’s vantage point, the self-liberator brought this piece of the historical record into existence through their own action. No enslaver wanted to write these ads, which acknowledged that they had lost control. In this way, self-liberating people helped create an archive of Black resistance.
f. In most cases, these ads are the only surviving record of those specific people. They lived and often died in conditions that they did not choose. But they risked everything to reshape those conditions and make themselves more free. There are few pre-1865 US sources that show us even the most basic demographic, relational, and descriptive detail about individual African-descended people. The ads form probably the largest set of such sources.
g. The larger complex of historical documentation and archiving before 1865, and much of the history produced from it, has in most cases suppressed the record of Black life, resistance, and freedom-making. We believe that collecting, making available, and contributing to the work of contextualizing these sources helps to undermine that suppression.
h. As documents, these ads contain racist and violent language, reflecting trauma, abuse, and enslavers’ efforts to dehumanize enslaved people. At the same time the ads documents reveal concrete evidence documenting thousands of acts of Black self-liberation. Specific freedom-seekers forced the creation of these ads by attempting to seize their own freedom. We recognize both aspects of these documents as important. While we acknowledge the capacity of this language to induce trauma in contemporary readers, we also preserve the ads as evidence of Black people’s resistance and desires for freedom.
i. Those who read pre-emancipation newspapers will find other sources that speak to the long history of fugitivity and Black resistance. These sources have been and are very useful to the interpretation and analysis of history. Our project is not specifically collecting these sources, because we have so much work to do just to find, digitize, and archive the ads themselves. We encourage people to study these other sources as well, but archiving those sources is not our project.
j. We enhance the readability and usefulness of the ads in two ways. First, we work with both paid specialists and the larger public to generate transcripts. Second, we use a crowdsourcing process, guided by the interface and the accompanying embedded instructions and context, to create an array of metadata variables to help people to search and analyze the ads.
k. The relational database in which we store the data and metadata was designed to focus on the individual freedom-seeker as the key historical protagonist of this process. We chose a relational database for its stability, combined with its flexibility. Joined tables allow the interlinked storage of the many different kinds of information contained in the text of individual ads, and their storage in proper relationship.
How we plan to use the data, along with the site’s users:
a. We make the ads and the database available for download, in part or whole.
b. We cannot control the use of these sources and/or metadata. We do ask that users follow the terms of our specific Creative Commons license level. This asks people who use or publish the data to acknowledge both the original source, and Freedom on the Move.
c. We provide contextualization and guidance throughout the website. Users can work through the initial “how-to” screens. As they work through ads, they can click on the “I” buttons for more information. Expectations/assumptions about how structured/intrusive this guidance tends to be in digital history projects have changed and may continue to change, and we may at some point change how we present such material.
Our relationship to source materials and archival repositories.
a. Whenever possible, we credit the original repositories that have archived and protected original documents.
b. When fellow scholars and/or their projects have shared reproductions/transcriptions with us, we credit them and their institutions.
c. We do not transform original data in the process of producing transcriptions, even where the language may be violent and/or racist.
d. Where original data includes factual error, we do not transform it.
e. We strive not to transform original data as we generate metadata.
f. Some metadata will emerge from interpretation, analysis, and judgement, but here too the data model has been designed to attempt to reduce transformation.
g. We will make available all data and metadata that we possess as soon as we can navigate the technical processes required to add information to the database. No data will be hidden or altered in the process of storage.
h. As noted above, we add interpretive accompanying information for some metadata fields in order to acknowledge and contextualize historical uses of racist terminology, and to remind the reader that enslavers used these ads as tools of violence and coercion.
Public engagement
a. While we cannot participate actively in all possible public, historical, artistic, or other interpretations and engagements with the sources in the FOTM archive, we encourage and will, where possible, support such projects.
b. Where we are invited to participate, we strive to build non-hierarchical partnerships with public history and other projects that want to engage with this history.
c. We believe that no one owns the ads.
d. We believe that no one should make profit from them.
e. On funded projects, we pay people to work, in recognition of the value of their labor.
Where does the money come from?
a. We do not accept funding that comes with ideological strings, or that impairs the freedom of inquiry necessary to carry out legitimate historical work.
b. One of the major impediments to the development of this archive has been the extractive behavior of for-profit corporations that digitize historic newspapers. They charge enormous fees to university libraries who want to have access to this database. They have blocked the use of their database for projects like ours. They have attempted to extract additional money for the public and/or scholarly use of these ads. We are making these ads free in particular because we refuse this effort to extract still more money from ads that paid newspaper publishers, professional slave-catchers, jailors, and other actors in the system of racialized and capitalist slavery.
c. We welcome support from entities and individuals who support the goal of naming, learning, and honoring those who sought freedom.