To Denise Burgher, co-organizer of this weekend’s 2026 Colored Convention Conference, the attack on civil rights and Black history under President Donald Trump’s administration is chilling.
Among the most egregious, she said, were his attempts to repeal the 14th Amendment, the Reconstruction-era addition to the Constitution guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the United States. In June, the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship.
“The 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 ruling Black people — freed or enslaved — do not have the same rights as [their] white counterparts,” Burgher said. “Without that protection, Black Americans’ citizenship would be in question. Don’t think that could happen? We thought a woman’s right to chose was set in stone, too.”
Burgher went on: Last week Trump threatened to snatch the tax exempt status from private schools that give minority students access to scholarships and educational programs, including at historically Black colleges and universities like Howard and Hampton.
Add to that the dismal unemployment rate of college-educated Black women, who, according to D.C. think tank Economic Policy Institute, have lost more jobs in the public sector than Black men and white women in the last two years. Plus, the assault on Black history, including last week’s forced retirement of the Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie Bunch III, and the abrupt removal of memorials to enslaved souls at the President’s House site in Philadelphia.
It’s clear Black equality in this political climate is not guaranteed.
“We haven’t seen a threat like this on Black livelihood in this country since the post-Reconstruction era,” said Burgher, who is also the director of community engagement and curriculum development at Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research. “This part of American history was a part of our past, now, it is not so suddenly aggressively and nakedly a part of our present.”
A 19th-century America, she said, calls for 19th-century tactics.
This weekend, Mother Bethel AME will host the “2026 Colored Convention: Black Freedom Movements Here and Now,” a celebration of the first Colored Convention held almost 200 years ago at the church. Dozens of influential free Black clergymen, statesmen, and activists convened at the 1830 Colored Convention and laid the foundation for civil rights groups like the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.
These organizations agitated for civil rights through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and into the 1960s, said Carolyn C. Cavaness, Mother Bethel’s pastor who tapped Burgher and Derrick Spires, historian and associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, to reignite the Colored Convention’s legacy.
“To reclaim and be challenged by such a movement … is of much worth and esteem,” Cavaness said. “We are literally in a struggle now for equality and fairness of all people.”
This weekend’s Colored Convention will feature workshops on genealogy, activism, and the 18th- and 19th-century Black press. Philadelphia school children will attend Thursday for arts and crafts projects that will teach them about the history of the Colored Convention.
Andre E. Johnson, codirector of the Colored Conventions Project and professor at the University of Memphis, will deliver the keynote on the history of the Colored Convention and share how activists can apply 19th-century action plans to 21st-century technology to create a strategy to combat the present crisis.
“In this year of the Semiquincentennial, this is yet another opportunity for Philadelphians to pay attention to history,” Burgher said, “and look at strategies our ancestors used more than 100 years ago. I’m not going to say the same thing is happening, but the events sure do rhyme.”
The event will include a voter-registration drive, emphasizing the importance of voting in the midterms.
Richard Allen founded Mother Bethel in 1794, and by 1830, the church was the cornerstone of the largest free community of African Americans in the country.
In August of 1829, white mobs burned Black businesses and neighborhoods during the Cincinnati Race Riots. In response to the brutal loss of life and business, free man Hezekiah Grice wrote to Allen, asking the influential pastor to gather free Black intellectuals to strategize. His reasoning was, if white mobs could do this in Cincinnati, what’s to stop them from attacking Black communities everywhere else.
More than 2,000 Black people from Cincinnati moved to Canada. The first Colored Convention was held from Sept. 20 to Sept. 24 in 1830 at Mother Bethel, resulting in emissaries from Philadelphia asking the Canadian government to allow Black people to establish communities there.
The Colored Convention held annual meetings at Mother Bethel from 1831-85. By the turn of the 20th century, there were Colored Conventions regularly in nearly every major American city along the Northeast Corridor, in the Midwest, and along the West Coast.
Black leaders from every walk of life attended, among them Frederick Douglass — known as the Lion of the Convention because of his deep oratory voice and big, distinctive hair — poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, newspaperman T. Thomas Fortune, and Philadelphia educators Jacob C. White and Charles L. Reason.
Colored Conventions, Burgher said, became forums for Black leaders to discuss abolition, fugitive slave laws, voting rights, and education. Many Black institutions were born from these conventions, including the charters for Talladega University and Howard University Law School, established in 1865 and 1869, respectively.
The last Colored Convention on record was in 1972 in Newark, N.J., Burgher said.
“I hope this 2026 celebration will not only bring this history home,” Burgher said. “And I also hope it inspires Philly residents to respond to the current moment like history has taught us.”
2026 Colored Convention: Black Freedom Movements Here and Now will take place Thursday, Sept. 17 — Sunday, Sept. 20. Mother Bethel is located at 419 S. Sixth St. Admission is by donation.
