Long lost pieces of Chatham-Kent’s Black history will soon be collected and available to the public through an online digital archive.
The Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society and Black Mecca Museum is launching the archive online this weekend during the 2025 CK Black Health Symposium. The project, entitled ‘Freedom in Print,’ documents the intellectual activism of Black authors, printers, editors, and readers in 19th-century Chatham-Kent.
Museum Executive Director and Curator Doug Robbins said the digital archive will ensure these materials are preserved for generations to come.
“We’re really excited to take those books that are 100 years old or more into a digital setting so people can still have a connection with them,” he said. “To be able to keep those rare books alive and keep them around for another decade or century is really, really important.”
The collection will feature a digital map and database of abolitionist texts connected to the region, highlighting individual copies and their unique features of provenance, inscription, annotations, bindings, illustrations, and printing history.
Freedom in Print was developed through a collaboration between the museum and professors at the University of Guelph and Huron University College.
“Huron University discovered a warehouse of rooms full of books with abolitionist content in them and they started mapping them along with our help,” said Robbins. “There are hundreds of books written by slaves, abolitionists, freedom seekers [with] hand written stories, typed stories.”
The archive project was funded through a Partnership Engage Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, with additional financial support from Huron University College, the University of Guelph, the Huron Community History Centre, and the Municipality of Chatham-Kent.
Freedom in Print will officially launch on the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society website on Saturday during the CK Black Health Symposium at the W.I.S.H. Centre in Chatham.