History of Blackpast.org (2004- )

BlackPast.org (www.blackpast.org) began in January 2004 as an online reference center in African American history when Quintard Taylor, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, and his graduate assistant, George Tamblyn, placed on his faculty website various reference materials which described historical figures and events discussed in Taylor’s class lectures. Soon afterwards they added a bibliography, a timeline, and links to other internet sites that presented or discussed various aspects of the black historical experience.

In December 2004, Jamila Taylor became the third member of the website "team" when she agreed to redesign the site and incorporate a new architecture to make it easier to navigate and manage.

The following summer Quintard Taylor received an email from Anna Griffiths, a New Zealand high school student writing a paper on African American history. She posed ten questions about African Americans and in particular the civil rights movement in the 1960s. With that email Taylor realized that the ungated website was now availabe to visitors far beyond the University of Washington campus.

Later that summer Dr. Taylor received a U.S. State Department-arranged invitation to visit the Russian cities of Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Tyumen, Ishim, and Surgut to give lectures at various universities and institutes. That 13 day tour was initiated by the discovery of the faculty website by students at Urals State University in Yekaterinburg, Siberia.

The contacts from New Zealand and the State Department indicated that the website had the enormous potential to extend the discussion of African American history beyond the University of Washington classrooms to a global audience. Our volunteer team, numbering five by October 1, 2005, expanded the website from a few vignettes into a comprehensive online encyclopedia. The timelines and bibliographies were enlarged and the staff now added new features including Major Speeches, Digital Archives, and Genealogy.

On January 1, 2006 the website team began to track visitors and hits through the webalizer program. That monitoring showed the website getting hundreds of visits and thousands of hits per day. With that knowledge a professional webdesign company, Grip Media of Portland, Oregon, was brought in to redesign and streamline the site. That redesign, crafted by Grip Media staffers Jerry Chrisman, Theresa Pridemore, and Elizabeth Boyd-Flynn among others, separated the online African American history reference sections from the University of Washington faculty website and placed those sections under an independent site called BlackPast.org. The "new" website, BlackPast.org, went live on February 1, 2007 with approximately 600 entries, 90 speeches, 80 full text primary documents, and seven major timelines.

BlackPast.org continues to grow. In 2007, BlackPast.org received 455,963 visits from over 100 nations around the world. By July 1, 2008, the number of visits so far for the calendar exceeded 500,000. There are over 250 contributors including more thah 130 academic historians from colleges and universities across the nation as well as graduate and undergraduate students and independent historians. The contributors have written over 1,500 entries with encyclopedia articles being added each day.

Our volunteer team has grown as well and now numbers 10. It includes Debbie McNally, webmaster; Catherine Foster, content and style editor; Casey Nichols, content specialist; Gail Ito, copy editor: Galen Schroeder, indexer; and two high school interns, Adam Tesch and Patrick Leahy, who post entries among other duties. These volunteers have spent countless hours meticulously honing the various features of the website. They, as much as our 250 article and encyclopedia entry contributors, are crucial to the success of BlackPast.org.

Many of BlackPast.org’s encyclopedia entries describe well-known individuals such as Harriett Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, and Barack Obama. The site also profiles little known but significant people in African American history such as Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to receive a medical degree (The New England Female Medical College, 1864), Edward Bouchet, the first African American student to receive a Ph.D. (Physics, Yale, 1876), and Elijah Abel, the last 19th Century black priest in the Mormon Church.

BlackPast.org now features timelines, bibliographies, the full text of well over 100 major speeches given by black leaders between 1789 and 2008, over 100 primary documents such as court decisions, government reports, executive orders, and laws, all of which help describe the African American past. It has four gateway pages with links to 50 digital archive collections, 75 African American museums and research centers, 12 genealogical research websites, and over 500 other resources on the internet. The Multimedia section features one minute “trailers” of important new video documentaries on the global African historical experience.

With the addition of a new section called Global African History the extensive reference information we have crafted for African American history and African American history in the West is now available for Africa as well as for people of African ancestry in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. There is no similar coverage on the internet. BlackPast.org is not gated, nor is there a fee for usage. This online reference center is available 24-7 to anyone who has access to a computer with internet capabilities.

BlackPast.org is ranked in top 1% of websites on the internet (in the top 700,000 out of 13 million websites on the internet) as of January 2008; its seven major timelines that illustrate the history of persons of African ancestry from 5,000 B.C.E. to today are ranked #1 by Google.com, that is, these are the most used resources on the Internet in that category.

With well over 2,000 pages of information, BlackPast.org is the most extensive online resource on African American history currently available. It brings the resources of African American history into every classroom in the world and makes every computer, regardless of its location, a classroom in African American history.

Now Available: