Freedom School for Web Archiving

In the summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. In addition to voter education, COFO organized 41 Freedom Schools where Black children were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as Black history and culture.

In the winter of 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to whitewash American history. Federal agencies are deleting webpages.

In a memorandum, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Sean Parnell wrote:

By March 5, 2025, Components must take all practicable steps, consistent with records management requirements, to remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). All articles, photos, and videos removed from DoD websites and social media platforms must be archived and retained in accordance with applicable records management policies/

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Social Media Content: Components must remove and follow records management requirements for DEI content removed from all official DoD social media accounts. If Components cannot remove DEI content from DoD social media accounts by March 5, 2025, they must temporarily remove from public display all news articles, photos and videos published between January 20, 2021, and January 19, 2025, until the content is fully reviewed and DEI content removed. While DBI-related content outside of this date range must also be removed, articles, photos, and videos from the last four years are the immediate priority to align DoD communication with the current Administration.

Federal agencies plan to decommission hundreds of websites. We must be intentional and fight the erasure of webpages related to Black history and culture.

Inspired by the freedom schools of the Civil Rights Movement, Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) has organized the Freedom School for Web Archiving, a series of webinars that will train “new generations of memory workers to preserve and steward online content that reflects the Black experience… Participants will gain foundational skills in web archiving—whether for personal, community, or institutional use—and explore how this work resists erasure, disinformation, and historical revisionism.”