Back-to-Africa movement

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The Back-to-Africa movement, was also known as the Colonization movement, originated in the United States in the 19th century, and encouraged those of African descent to return to the African homelands of their ancestors. This movement would eventually inspire other movements ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement.

The United States of America

In the early 19th century, the black population in the United States increased dramatically. Many of these black people were free people seeking a better life. Many Southern freed blacks migrated to the industrial North to seek employment while others moved to surrounding Southern states.^[1] But their progress was sometimes met with hostility as many whites around that time were not used to so many blacks being free. Many did not believe that free Africans had a place in America and thought the very existence of free blacks undermined the system of slavery and encouraged slaves to revolt.^[2] In the North, whites feared that they would lose jobs to free blacks, while other whites did not like the idea of blacks integrating with whites. Riots swept the nation in waves, usually in urban areas where there been recent migration of blacks from the South. During the height of these riots in 1819, there were twenty five recorded riots, with many killed and injured.^[3] The back-to-Africa movement was seen as the solution to these problems.

The idea of a Back to Africa Movement was great, however, started long before 1848. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by Charles Fenton Mercer, was made up of two groups: “philanthropists, clergy and abolitionist who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to return to Africa. The other group was the slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America.”^[4] In 1811, Paul Cuffee, “a black man who was a wealthy man of property, a petitioner for equal rights for blacks” ^[5] began to explore the idea of black people returning to their native land as he was convinced that “opportunities for the advancement of for black people were limited in America, and he became interested in African colonization.” ^[6] With the help of some Quakers in Philadelphia he was able to transport thirty eight blacks to Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1815.^[7] It was the American Colonization Society, however, that made the most progress with the Back to Africa Movement.

According to the Encyclopedia of Georgia History and Culture, “as early as 1820, black Americans had begun to return to their ancestral homeland through the auspices of the American Colonization Society” and by 1847, the American Colonization Society founded Liberia and designated it as the land to be colonized by all black people returning from the United States of America.^[8] By the decline of the Back to Africa Movement, the American Colonization Society migrated over 13,000 blacks back to Africa.

Post-Emancipation

The back-to-Africa movement began to decline but revived again in 1877 at the end of the Reconstruction as many blacks in the South faced violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.^[9] Interest among the South's black population in African emigration peaked during the 1890s, a time when racism reached its peak and the greatest number of lynchings in American history took place.^[10]

The continued experience of segregation and discrimination of African Americans after emancipation and the belief that they would never achieve true equality attracted many African Americans to a Pan-African emancipation in their mother land.

Soon thereafter, the movement declined following many hoax and fraudulent activities associated with the movement. According to Crumin, however, the most important reason for the decline in the back-to-Africa movement was that the “vast majority of those who were meant to colonize did not wish to leave. Most free blacks simply did not want to go "home" to a place from which they were generations removed. America, not Africa, was their home and they had little desire to migrate to a strange and forbidding land not their own.” ^[11]

The eventual disillusionment of those who migrated to the North and frustrations of struggling to cope with urban life set the scene for the back-to-Africa movement of the 1920s, initiated by Marcus Garvey.^[12] Those who migrated to the Northern States from the South, found that although they were financially better off, they remained at the bottom both economically and socially.^[13]

Liberia

The History of Liberia (after the arrival of Europeans) is unique in Africa as it started neither as a native state nor as a European colony, but began in 1821 when private societies began founding colonies for free blacks from the United States on the coast of West Africa. The first American ships were very uncertain of where they were heading. Their plan was to follow the paths that the British had taken beforehand, or simply take a chance on where they would land. At first, they followed the previous routes of the British and reached the coast of Sierra Leone. After leaving Sierra Leone, the Americans slowly reached the southern part of the African coastline. Eventually, the Americans found what they were looking for, what the British called, the Grain Coast. This region was called the Grain Coast because of the type of ginger spice used for medicine flavoring that it provided, which was called, aframomum meleguete. In the Grain Coast, local African chiefs willingly gave the Americans tracts of land. It took the Americans the next twenty years to gain a series of fragmented settlements across the Liberia’s barely settled beach. Along with the difficulty of gaining enough land, life was not easy for these early settlers. Disease was rampant, along with the lack of food. Hostile tribes presented the settlers with great struggle, destroying some of their new land settlements. Almost half of the new settlers had died over the first twenty years since their arrival in Liberia. ^[14] Liberia gained independence on 26 July 1847.^[15] With an elected black government and the offer of free land to African American settlers, Liberia became the most common destination of emigrating African Americans during the 19th century.^[16]

Blacks’ interest in Liberia emigration emerged when the Civil War promised the end of slavery and meaningful change to the status of Black Americans. 7,000 slaves were freed by their masters, so at that point those free African Americans left the U.S. to escape racism and have more opportunities. Mainly because they had lost all hope of achievement. In the 1830’s, the movement became increasingly dominated by slave owners who wanted Liberia to absorb the free blacks of the South. Slaves freed from slave ships were sent here instead of their country of origin. The emigration of free blacks to Liberia particularly increased after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. Middle class blacks were more resolved to live as black Americans, many rural poor folks gave up on the United States and looked to Liberia to construct a better life. Liberia provided freedom and equality; it also represented a chance for a better life for the South’s black farmers. The Liberian government promised 25 acres of free land for each immigrant family, 10 acres for a single adult, who came to the Black Republic. In the early 19th century, Liberia evoked mixed images in the minds of black Americans. At that point Liberia was packed to the brim with black families who left the United States in search of a better way of life, only to later return to their ancestral homeland of Africa. Page text.<Kenneth C. Barnes="journey of hope"> <pages 2-9 />

References

External links

• http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/march1/colonize-030106.html
• Back to Africa: The Colonization Movement
• African American Nation Radio

Bibliography

• Barnes, Kenneth C. Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Campbell, James. Middle Passage: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
• Clegg III, Claude A. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Jenkins, David. Black Zion: The Return of Afro-Americans and West Indians to Africa. London: Wildwood House, 1975.
• Weisbord, Robert G. Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans, and the Afro-American. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1973.