Centering Black History

In 2026, America celebrates its 250th anniversary, a historical moment with Philadelphia at its core. “Often, in these national commemorations, Black history isn’t the centerpiece,” says Jim Downs, C’95, Director of the Library Company’s Program in African American History. “We wanted a way to show the deep roots of Black people in Philadelphia.”

With centering community history as the motivation, the Library Company, in collaboration with Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and 1838 Black Metropolis, put on a three-day conference about Black Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th centuries. More than 500 people participated in sessions with community archivists and academics, historians, and even a group of middle- and high school students who spoke about a book they published on notable African Americans in history.

The seeds of the conference started about a year ago, when Downs was appointed to his current role. With the big United States anniversary on the horizon, Downs’ thoughts turned to the McNeil Center, a place he’d come to know—both as a College alum and now, as an academic—as the “national epicenter for the period around the Revolution,” with a “deep and profound commitment to issues around Black history.”

Downs, Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College, reached out Kathleen Brown, McNeil Center Interim Director and David Boies Professor of History, who immediately got behind the significance of such an event.

“In moments like this, the history of Black Philadelphia could easily get overlooked—and it shouldn’t,” she says. “At the beginning of the 19th century, Philadelphia is the city with the largest free Black population in the nation. It is the first place where we get the incorporating of a Black church. There are supports there; there’s a community there. The history is really rich and remarkable and so important for the eventual path toward Civil Rights.”

Brown teamed up with Downs and together they joined forces with 1838 Black Metropolis, an organization of community historians dedicated to reclaiming and restoring Black histories. The program that the three groups put on in late February included a host of sessions about politics and public history, geography and mobility, and much more.

William Sturkey, Associate Professor of History, for example, chaired a panel about living in the city. Nancy Bentley, Donald T. Regan Professor of English, led a session called “Black Arts and Letters” that highlighted a collection of one family’s papers—tickets to the orchestra and to see Marion Anderson, for instance—as well as a reconstruction of the literary sphere that poet and author Frances Harper likely inhabited in the mid-1800s.

Often, in these national commemorations, Black history isn’t the centerpiece. We wanted a way to show the deep roots of Black people in Philadelphia.

“It was a clandestine intellectual world unfolding in Philadelphia,” Downs says. “At that time, the Library Company was primarily the domain of white people.” Rather than attempt to gain access to the subscription-based library founded by Benjamin Franklin as the first Library of Congress, Harper—a 19th-century public figure widely known for her activism in the abolitionist, suffragist, and temperance movements in addition to her writing and teaching—instead exchanged books with people like Rebecca Crumpler, the first Black female physician in the country.

That panel was a full-circle moment personally for Downs, who’d taken the course Post-Reconstruction Novel with Bentley during his time at Penn—a class that discussed Harper. Downs also authored the book Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction that made mention of Crumpler. “Never did I know that she and Harper had met,” he says.

Such inspiring instances weren’t in short supply during the conference, according to the organizers. Here, Downs brings up the opening plenary, which included the former community archivist from Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which, according to the church, is “the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by African Americans in the U.S.” It held its first service in 1794.

Brown mentions the penultimate session featuring fifth through ninth graders discussing the Jubilee Voices Publishing House they created. “Think about it from their perspective: At this current moment, these young students get to talk to the community about what they’ve learned about Black history,” Brown says. “Projects like those can be really hard to turn into conference programming, but they’re just so important.”

What’s more, she adds, “they were amazing and their interest in Black historical figures is the hope for the future.”

Ultimately, Downs and Brown say their aim with the program was to bring together groups including students, community members, and academics to remember and celebrate Black Philadelphia at a crucial time in the history of the United States. “Resilience has, quite rightly, come under attack as a word that almost ends up justifying just surviving persistent attack—attack that shouldn’t be happening to begin with,” Brown says. “But there’s no question that this was really a remarkable, resilient community.”