During the Victorian era, current events were copiously represented in newspapers and in popular entertainments of all genres: they recirculated through both media in mutually reinforcing ways. As Frederick Chesson polished his capacity to articulate performance critique and launched his journalistic career, George Cruikshanks comet-shaped illustration of the events of 1853 represents exactly how these conjoint realms were experienced by the Victorian public. As a political organiser, Chesson was initially allied with the Manchester School, opposing the Crimean War and promoting free trade. First on the Empire then the Star and Daily News, his journalism represents a broad engagement with liberal causes, Garrisonian abolitionism, opposition to imperialism, and advocacy for Indigenous peoples self-determination. His work epitomises activism nearly a century before the concept was coined. The ability to envision complex dramaturgies at work around him and at great distances from London enabled Chesson to advocate and remonstrate on behalf of the dispossessed and disadvantaged in forms of observational citizenship that align historical forces, human actions, and the imperative to care.

The Colored Conventions were an enduring part of Frederick Douglass’s life. He first attended a convention in 1843. Decades later, his voice defined the national Colored Convention of 1883 with a powerful speech on the value of Black activism, “Why Hold A Colored Convention?” Over the years, Douglass worked alongside tens of thousands of African Americans to build state, regional, and national coalitions. The challenges of forging a national coalition shaped many convention debates, reaching beyond slavery and freedom to focus on citizenship and Black civil, legal, educational, and voting rights. Before the Civil War, those debates helped push Douglass from a focus on the immorality of slavery to the political issues facing northern Black communities. During and after Reconstruction, he became the dean of Black activism, guiding attempts at national conventions in New York, Washington, DC, Louisiana, and Kentucky to mobilize the power of Black communities across the country.