Freedom On The Move - Incite at Columbia University

Accessing primary source documents about the experiences of people enslaved from the Early National Period through the Civil War has presented major challenges for Black, Indigenous, South Asian, and other people of color in the United States as research spaces are sometimes distant from communities of color or share or act upon implicit biases that create negative experiences for researchers of color.

Freedom On The Move (FOTM) is a database of the stories of self-emancipators, fugitives from North American slavery. Members of the FOTM collective, with the authorization and assistance of archival repositories, mine archival data about men, women, and children from eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers to make the data public facing and accessible to all researchers. 

With support from the Left Field Fund, Eric Gaither from FOTM will conduct a documented, two-week data mining session involving five digital archiving assistants which will potentially add between 1,000 to 5,000 runaway slave ads to the free, publicly accessible FOTM website, a one-stop point containing approximately 40,000 advertisements about men, women, and children self-emancipators. 

In doing so, the FOTM initiative would assist people in finding their ancestors in advertisements, thus, sharing and catalyzing conversations around those lives of self-emancipators and freedom seekers. In addition, FOTM hopes to inspire generative art, written scholarship, and other forms of creativity and academic work sourced from the advertisements to “upend archival silence and erasure and acknowledge the value of lives where self agency and license had been usurped and stripped away.”