LiberatedAfricans.org is framed around inclusive and reparative scholarship about historical slavery and related themes in a global perspective. According to the United Nations, slavery is a crime against humanity and has resulted in transgenerational traumas that shaped modern society resulting in racism, discrimination, persecution, physical injury, and death. This digital resource is committed to documenting and preserving the stories of enslaved people from Africa and their forced migrations in a respectful, humane, and ethical framework.
As the UN Decade for People of African Descent approaches its milestone in 2024, the strategy follows UNESCO’s goals to combat racism, discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, while informing policies of equity, diversity and inclusion. Using historical and computational interdisciplinary methods, the strategy is to digitize, curate, and exhibit historical experiences of vulnerable people in facing discrimination and survival. The topic forms one part of much larger paradigms of prejudice embedded within various legal precedents.
Historical materials about slavery and colonialism often render enslaved people nameless and silenced. The suppression of the African slave trade resulted in the involuntary indenture or conscription of hundreds of thousands of people - many of whom had detailed biographical information documented into large bound registers. Such primary sources identify the silenced but still reflect skewed perspectives that support racist ideologies stemming from the ownership of human beings. This resource strives to read against the grain of dehumanizing biases found within the documentation stemming from larger systems of power imbalances.
Transparency in research activities is paramount. International grants and institutional funding support faculty and student salaries, technological logistics, and primary resource acquisitions. Digital training and skills development are integral components to this project. The presentation of materials in this website follow the guidelines of the Digital Accessibility Programs as per the Americans with Disabilities Act. For elsewhere in the world with unstable internet connectivity, this project strives to develop low-weight HTML, responsive versions for increased accessibility and usability. This initiative monitors and credits individual scholarly contributions, especially among students and emerging scholars. Whenever possible, members of this research group collaborate with descendent communities, archives, libraries, and regional experts to obtain permissions for hosting and disseminating historical information and imagery.
If there are any questions, concerns, and recommendations to improve our ethical principles, access materials, or learn about our team, please reach out to the project team.
Acknowledging that we reside on the homelands of indigenous peoples recognizes the history of the original stewards of lands upon which academic research is being conducted today. To recognize the land is an expression of gratitude and appreciation of the history of indigenous populations whose territory we now work and live on. We honor these lands through a profound dedication to learning with a strong commitment to truth and reconciliation.
The Digital Slavery Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. Further, there are 48 contemporary tribal nations historically tied to the lands that comprise what is now called Colorado. In what is known as Toronto, Ontario, Walk With Web Inc. is on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Huron-Wendat, Seneca, and Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island.
We are grateful to have the opportunity to work on these lands. We pledge to leverage our many privileges that have brought this project into the public sphere in order to make our society a more affirming, equitable place for all indigenous peoples around the world.
LiberatedAfricans.org is an open- and crowd-sourced digital history project intended for educational purposes in the public domain. All digitized materials displayed and reorganized through this website derive from primary sources compiled before 1920. LibertedAfricans.org operates under the terms of those awards and for educational purposes, which follow “fair use” doctrines of various copyright laws and policies of various archives located around the world. Some archives do not allow the re-distribution of digital resources, which must be respected while permissions are being obtained. All regenerated identities herein are intended as open source, although we honor the wishes of descendant communities who may or may not wish to have these digital materials to be freely and openly shared.
All data and digital content are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows users to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material in LiberatedAfricans.org in any medium or format. The license also requests to cite LiberatedAfricans.org and indicate any changes. These materials are not for commercial purposes. In terms of source code made in connection with Liberated Africans, Walk With Web Inc. guarantees that technological innovations will be released under the General Public License Version 3.0 (GPLv3). Code, metadata and objects will be distributed as versioned datasets via GitHub and Figshare.