Expanded Douglass Day Involves Community in History
At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, celebrating Black history lifts the topic out of the textbook, highlights current scholarship on campus, and engages the community in further research.
The activities are very much in the spirit of “sankofa,” a word from the African Twi language that refers to looking to the past to inform the future, explained Shaina Anderson, humanities librarian at the John C. Hodges Library, who chaired the 2025 Frederick Douglass Day committee.
The week leading up to Frederick Douglass Day, observed on Feb. 14, offered multiple activities, and dovetailed with the UT Libraries Love Data Week.
“We’re progressing into more data-driven scholarship, so It’s important for us to make sure that we are making things accessible,” Anderson said.
History Comes to Life
This marked the eighth year that more than 100 people have gathered at UT to join virtually with the national Douglass Day transcribe-a-thon. Logging in to the African American Perspectives Collection at the Library of Congress, they created text transcripts of historic documents, making them more accessible for research.
Until attending the transcribe-a-thon, many students may not realize that they can be part of history. “To them, history is something that’s in a textbook, not something that they do,” Anderson said. “When they see that they can actually do something to affect history, they really get into it.”
Through the transcribe-a-thon, students also see the writings of real people, observed Professor Susan Lawrence, head of the Department of History. “History is not abstract anymore.”
While the event typically draws UT students, faculty, alumni and more from the Knoxville community, for the first time in 2025 about two dozen Fulton High School students were part of the event at UT’s Frieson Black Cultural Center.
First, however, they stopped at UT’s Hodges Library and its pop-up exhibit for Frederick Douglass Day and Black History Month.
Fulton High School’s Douglas Graves, who teaches African American literature, said students were able to see first editions of works they read in his class, including a signed copy of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and works by Knoxville-born poet Nikki Giovanni.
During the transcribe-a-thon Fulton senior Cameron Anthony was struck by how simple items can become part of the historical record, like the Memphis store receipt he transcribed from 1864, and he noted differences in how words were used in the 19th century.
Among the current UT students participating this year was senior English major Petra White, who plans to continue her studies in library science. “I’m passionate about public access to information,” she said.
Scholarship and Community
Eliza Alexander Wilcox, a PhD candidate in English, was drawn to the event a few years ago by the community aspect. “I see the collaboration happening in real time,” Wilcox said, with people working together to make a difference in the span of just a few hours.
The honored guest, Alcoa Mayor Tanya Martin, was among the first Black students in 1963 to integrate the Tennessee city’s high school.
Humanities scholar and oral historian Jayme N. Canty-Williams, a professor at Clark Atlanta University, also attended the transcribe-a-thon. She had delivered this year’s plenary talk, “From Silence to Reconciliation: Black Queer Perspectives and Voices of the Black South.”
Scholarship at UT also was highlighted during the week, with the first Black History Month Lightning Talks planned as part of the annual celebration. Hayley Wilson, who is writing her dissertation on dramatists of the New Negro Renaissance, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, discussed renowned Black performers Bert Williams and George Walker. Kiana Rubish, a doctoral candidate studying the connections between the Black family, emotions, and Black conservatism presented research into family scrapbooks, and Assistant Professor Robert Bland, from the Department of History, discussed Reconstruction and the writing of Black history.
In March, visitors to Hodges Library can view a blanket created this year as part of the Douglass Day celebration, in a collaboration with the library’s Medbery Makerspace. Students were given fabric panels on which to write answers to questions such as what freedom means to them and what they might ask a Black historical figure. Then those pieces were sewn together.
“We like to innovate; we like to be as creative as possible,” Anderson said. “People don’t know that they love history until they get to participate.”
UT’s Frederick Douglass Day events are sponsored by the Departments of English, History and Africana Studies; the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts, UT Libraries, UT Special Collections, and the Pride Center.
Douglass Day events are part of a larger effort at UT to recognize Black History Month.
By Amy Beth Miller
