It was created in response to the race-motivated violence in Charleston, South Carolina on the evening of June 17, 2015, when Dylann Roof opened fire during a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, killing 9 people.
"[4] Twitter campaigns utilizing hashtags to generate crowdsourced lists of information sources widely excluded from academic canons emerged throughout 2014 and 2015.
[7] Historians Keisha N. Blain, Kidada Williams, and others helped to circulate the hashtag and #CharlestonSyllabus started trending on Twitter by the evening of June 19, 2015.
[2][8] With the assistance of librarians Melissa Morrone, Ryan P. Randall, and Cecily Walker, Blain compiled and organized the reading list on the website of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS).
Librarians across the nation assisted in culling and categorizing suggestions made via Twitter, also tagging the entries in WorldCat, a web resource for locating materials at nearby libraries, on the AAIHS website.