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Description: This past summer in the U.S., the world witnessed a racial reckoning: activists protesting the removal of Confederate monuments, the changing of schools and military base names that honor former enslavers, questioning the history of famous figures who had connections to slavery and white supremacy, and the changing of racially problematic names of certain sports teams, businesses, and musical groups. The work of our five panelists responds to and builds out from this racial reckoning. A panel of PhD students, librarians, and professors at George Mason University, researching about and across Richmond, Fairfax, and Washington, D.C., we seek to answer the question of how digital humanities and historical knowledge can contribute to the current political and cultural moment in the Chesapeake area. In group and individual presentations, we will discuss the research, ethical, and methodological issues we face when collecting and contextualizing racial legacies and protests through our work with the Center for Mason Legacies (CML) and Divided Union. The Center for Mason Legacies, created out of initial undergraduate interest, has encountered a number of research and pedagogical queries when contextualizing the university’s namesake George Mason’s legacies with slavery. CML’s Racial Reckoning project is an Omeka-based site that collects and preserves the social justice protests against racial subordination in Northern Virginia, including Washington, DC, and faced particular ethical questions about user-generated content and anonymity. Our PhD students who created Divided Union, a recent digital project based in ArcGIS StoryMaps, encountered both research and digital methodological issues with mapping Confederate statues’ effects on space and researching the historical complexities of Ulysses S. Grant. Together, we offer insight into the ways that digital methods and historical knowledge can contribute to current national and cultural debates around racial legacies, racial inequities, social justice movements, and online activism.