Laurel Coleman, who wants to create a Wikipedia entry for her mom, Dorothy Coleman. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Laurel Coleman sat at a long table, her hands hovering over a letter from her late mother, Dorothy. Blue letters looped across the lined paper, rough at the edges. Beside it, a newspaper clipping took it back to 1968, when the Ansonia-based group North End Community Action was just getting off the ground.
In the decades since, that history had been lost, Coleman said—and she was on a mission to get it back into the public record.
Saturday, Coleman joined over a dozen community members at the Stetson Branch Library for New Haven’s inaugural Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, an hours-long course in editing, correcting and creating Wikipedia entries as a way to expand public access to knowledge. Focused on “Unsung Women in Black History,” the event came to Stetson as a collaboration between the Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven (JCGNH) and AfroCrowd, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to increasing accurate information on Black history and the African diaspora in the public domain.
AfroCrowd, which started as a small initiative in the Brooklyn Public Library, stands for Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia. It was founded ten years ago by Alice Backer, a Haitian blogger, lawyer and Wikipedian who wanted to see more publicly accessible content—including in Haitian Creole and languages that were not just English—about Haiti on the internet.
A decade later, current Executive Director Sherry-Ann L. Antoine said that the hope is to grow communal knowledge through such events, including an annual “Wikimania” conference that this spring is in Nairobi, Kenya.
Attendee Jolyn Walker, who teaches Black History and African dance throughout the state, with AfroCrowd Executive Director Sherry-Ann L. Antoine.
“These are the roots and the branches,” Antoine said during an introduction to Wikipedia, pointing out footnotes and links on an entry on Fannie Lou Hamer. During her lifetime, Hamer became a fierce and vocal advocate of voting rights, civil rights, and more equitable access to women’s healthcare. “When you have roots and branches, those can help the tree to be viable, right?”
"I coordinated Saturday's event to highlight the need for researching for truth, which is the underlying reason why Juneteenth 1865 happened at all," Hameen added in an email afterwards. "The truth was hidden from hundreds of thousands of people who were not told the truth about their emancipation. Thus, the reason why Juneteenth Coalition organized this event. Wikipedia AfroCrowd is the perfect fit. Our Juneteenth Coalition theme for 2025 is Together in Truth."
Saturday, that began with a whirlwind course on how to edit, led by Antoine with a few AfroCrowd veterans in the audience. As attendees nibbled pizza, debated the merits of AI and opened their computers, Antoine walked them through the basics, from creating a Wikipedia username and password to adding information to an entry. She noted the importance of sources, from grassroots publications and archived Black newspapers to foreign newspapers that may be harder to find.
As if on cue, a neat sheet of paper peeked out beside each computer, listing the names of notable Black women from Henrietta Wood, Adjoa Asamoah and Amy Garvey to New Haven's own Jill Snyder, Lucy and Lois Tritton and Dr. Regina Warner. JCGNH organizer Iman Hameen, who compiled the list, explained that they were meant to guide attendees who hadn’t come with a specific person or Wikipedia page in mind.
“The community comes from different places for different reasons,” Antoine said, describing a global AfroCrowd community that has expanded from the U.S. to parts of the Caribbean and several countries in Africa. “Regardless of the reason you come in, it’s what you make of it.”
JCGNH Organizer Iman Hameen with Dr. Siobhan Carter-David, a professor of history at SCSU.
To show the process in real time, Antoine invited up attendee Jolyn Walker, clicking to a Wikipedia page on Cicely Tyson. Scrolling to a section on Tyson’s marriage to the trumpeter Miles Davis, she encouraged Walker to add a link for New York City, which reroutes a reader to a Wikipedia page on the city itself.
It may have been a small edit, Antoine said, but “it makes the article more viable.”
She wasn’t done, she added. Inviting Professor Siobhan Carter-David to take Walker’s place, she encouraged making an edit that added a new source or piece of information to the mix.
From the back of the room, seasoned Wiki editor Linda Dabo suggested a footnote on B Michael’s MUSE: Cicely Tyson and Me: A Relationship Forged in Fashion, which the designer released two years after Tyson’s death in 2023. Since joining AfroCrowd, Dabo has added over 100 new entries "from scratch," including on New Haven-based artists. She has also added over 800 photos to Wikimedia Commons, where they live in the public domain. Saturday, she made the trip from New York City for the event.
Carter-David, who teaches history at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), clicked on an article from TheGrio that had followed Tyson’s death in 2021. Already, she’d watched Antoine carefully as she showed off entries on Hamer and Roberta Flack that could both use editing. Now, she was on a mission.
“Let’s see what’s being said,” she said as she scrolled and clicked, then looked at where she could add a footnote in Wikipedia.
As edits got underway, Hameen and Antoine also said that they also plan to add Wikipedia content about the Dixwell neighborhood, a once-self-sustaining Black business district and jazz hub that is going through something of an economic and cultural renaissance.
It gave attendees, many of whom had come with editing tasks and research topics already in mind, a sense of both how to work on the site and why the work is important. Coleman, who grew up in New Haven and now lives in Hamden, said she was grateful for the knowledge—which will help her make a public record for her mother, the late Dorothy Coleman.
Before the elder Coleman passed away in January 2020, she helped found and run Ansonia Community Action (formerly known as North End Community Action), dedicated to anti-poverty advocacy and family support in Ansonia. But her name and legacy—like so many Black women, who spend their lives in the service of others—are largely unknown. If a person Googles “Dorothy Coleman,” they won’t learn much about her or the organization.
“I’ve wanted to do this” for some time, Laurel Coleman said. Saturday afternoon, she came with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and carefully stored letters in her mother’s handwriting. The day’s “unsung” theme spoke to her on a local level: Coleman attends services just a block away from the Stetson Branch Library, at St. Martin de Porres Church. She used to work in Science Park. She’s part of the rich and storied fabric of the Dixwell community.
Nearby, Walker said she felt ready to add to an entry on Pearl Primus, a twentieth-century dancer who taught generations of artists. Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City—her parents immigrated when she was two—Primus fell into dance when she was 20, and she began working with the New Dance Group, part of the New Deal National Youth Administration.
Originally, Walker said animatedly, Primus’ plan had been to do medical research. But when racist policies kept her from getting the qualifications she needed, she turned to the then-novel Works Progress Administration for help. Initially, her role was behind the scenes in the costume shop, where she was expected to work on garments for dancers in the company.
But when one of her colleagues saw her abilities as a dancer, she ended up on the stage. Her work ultimately became part of the New York City Public Schools’ curriculum, which is how Walker first heard of her as a first grader in Harlem.
For Walker, who has danced for six decades, her technique was a revelation. So was her life story. While there is already a robust Wikipedia entry on Primus, Walker added, she hopes to add to it with information that has not been entered into the historical record.
“She used African dance to make a statement against Jim Crow, sharecropping, lynching,” Walker remembered. In 1943, Primus debuted a dance choreographed to Lewis Allan’s poem “Strange Fruit.” She traveled to Ghana and Senegal, and shared what she’d learned when she returned and continued to teach. If she saw injustice—and as a Black woman in the U.S., she did, often—she spoke out, seemingly unafraid of the fallout that would inevitably follow.
“Many times, she lost her job for speaking out,” Walker said. “But she always got another job. I think her tenacity and her courageousness is an example of what we need today.”
Now, when Walker teaches Black history, she keeps Primus’ story with her and tries to share it as widely as possible, whether it is on the dance floor or in a lesson at a public library. Recently, she visited the archives at the Schomburg Center “to dig up more information.” She holds Primus close when she walks into Grace Baptist Church, and folds West African rhythms into liturgical dance.
“African dance is a way of life for me,” Walker said. She had Primus to thank for that. Now, she hopes that more Wikipedia users will too.