Douglass Day Transcribe-A-Thon: Home

Since 2017, the Douglass Day organization has celebrated the life, work, and legacy of Frederick Douglass every February 14 with a nationwide transcribe-a-thon, a crowd-sourced effort to translate physical records of Black history into readily accessible digital documents, to preserve and remember Black history. Marquette University began participating in 2019, when Raynor Library and the Ott Memorial Writing Center collaborated to host the campus's first Douglass Day transcribe-a-thon, a tradition that has continued every year since then. 

The entire Marquette community is invited to participate, including students, faculty, staff, alumni, and our Milwaukee neighbors. Participants are invited to sign up in advance or can simply drop by. 

Transcribe-a-Thon 2025 Overview

In 2025, the Douglass Day Transcribe-A-Thon will focus on the African American Perspectives Collection from the Library of Congress. This collection gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture. It is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Most of the materials were written by African-American authors, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, Emanuel Love, Lydia Maria Child, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington, among others.

The 800 + titles in the collection include sermons on racial pride and political activism; annual reports of charitable, educational, and political organizations; and college catalogs and graduation orations from the Hampton Institute, Morgan College, and Wilberforce University. Also included are biographies, slave narratives, speeches by members of Congress, legal documents, poetry, playbills, dramas, and librettos. Other materials focus on segregation, voting rights, violence against African Americans, the colonization of Africa by freed slaves, anti-slavery organizations and investigative reports. Several of the items are illustrated with portraits of the authors.