Keywords for Black Louisiana Receives 2025 NHPRC Publishing Historical Records Grant
Cheers to another year bringing enslaved and free Black voices out of the archive and into the hands of descendants
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Keywords for Black Louisiana will receive $125,000 in funding from the NHPRC Publishing Historical Records program, a program dedicated to supporting projects documenting major historical figures and important eras and social movements.
Following the summer launch and celebration of K4BL’s digital collection of enslaved testimony from French- and Spanish-controlled Louisiana, Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL) will continue to add and develop an archive of stories of enslaved and free people of African descent along the Gulf Coast. In 2025, K4BL will continue to add to its existing dataset of transcriptions, translations, keywords, and stories while building out its K-12 curriculum in partnership with Xavier University of Louisiana. The Teaching Black History in Louisiana Project is led by Dr. Shearon Roberts (XULA) and Nyla Williams (XULA Class of ‘24). Our 2024-2025 XULA Curricula Advisors are Satiya Ewing-Boyd, Sheckinah Boswell, and Crysten Simien.
K4BL will also continue to meet the people where they are by sharing the project at conferences, on panels, at events, festivals, and workshops, thanks to our XULA K4BL Public History Fellows ("K4BL Street Team”) led by K4BL Community Engagement Fellow Cyntoya McCall (Tulane University). Our 2024-2025 Public History Fellows are Zanya Colbert, Angelina Stokes, and Harriet Banto. Our public history outreach also continues with the support and collaboration of the Keywords Community Circle and Advisory Board.
Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL, keywordsforblacklouisiana.org) is a collective of researchers creating digital projects highlighting the Black life and culture of the Gulf Coast. With continued support from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, K4BL is building a community-engaged digital edition of annotated, transcribed and translated manuscript documents from 18th century (French and Spanish) Louisiana. K4BL was first awarded an NHPRC grant in 2021.
Keywords for Black Louisiana began with the goal of creating a single digital edition of transcribed and translated documents (French and Spanish), drawn from the Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project hosted by the New Orleans Jazz Museum (a K4BL institutional partner). Over the years of the project and as a result of conversations with Black public historians, community partners who form the K4BL Community Circle and Advisory Board, the team made a collective decision to create a K4BL Document Site (focused on transcriptions/translation) and a K4BL Story Site (focused on narrativizing the lives and stories of the enslaved and free Black people and communities found in and across multiple documents).
In addition, in 2024, Keywords for Black Louisiana also launched its first microedition of edited and curated documents. This microedition is peer reviewed, hosted and published by Scholarly Editing in volume 41.
Read it here: https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/41/kinship-and-longing/
We are grateful to have an amazing team, support from our Community Circle and Advisory Board, and from K4BL institutional partners who also include the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Louisiana State Museum, JHU Sheridan Libraries, and the Amistad Research Center. Thank you, as always, to the team at NHPRC, especially Darrell Meadows and Julie Fisher, for their continued encouragement and support.
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources, created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States. The 2025 NHPRC cohort of funded projects also includes:
the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore,
the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition,
a digital edition of Los Angeles Issei Poetry,
the “Willie Jumper Stories” as part of the Digital Archive for Indigenous Language Persistence,
Slavery Law & Power: Debating Justice & Democracy in Early America and the British Empire
Keywords for Black Louisiana is part of the LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure ecosystem. Learn more at lifexcode.org.
Wepa. Congrats.