_Departure_of_colored_emigrants_for_Liberia_-_The_Illustrated_American,_March_21,_1896.jpg) Departure of African Americans to Liberia, 1896 | |
| Location | Atlantic world |
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| Participants | Colonization societies |
| Outcome | Creation and settlement of Sierra Leone and Liberia |
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| Politics of the United States |
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The back-to-Africa movement was a political movement in the 19th and 20th centuries advocating for a return of the descendants of African American slaves to the African continent. The movement originated from a widespread belief among some European Americans in the 18th and 19th century United States that African Americans would want to return to the continent of Africa.[citation needed] In general, the political movement was an overwhelming failure; very few former slaves wanted to move to Africa. The small number of freed slaves who did settle in Africa—some under duress—initially faced brutal conditions, due to diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance.[1] As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s, it spawned and energized the radical abolitionist movement. In the 20th century, the Jamaican political activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, members of the Rastafari movement, and other African Americans supported the concept, but few actually left the United States.
In the late 18th century, thousands of Black Loyalists joined British military forces during the American Revolutionary War.[2] In 1787, the British Crown founded a settlement in Sierra Leone in what was called the "Province of Freedom", beginning a long process of settlement of formerly enslaved African Americans in Sierra Leone. During these same years, some African Americans launched their own initiatives to return to Africa, and by 1811, Paul Cuffee, a wealthy New England African-American/Native-American shipper, had transported some members of the group known as the "Free African Society" to Liberia. During these years, some free African Americans also relocated to Haiti, where a slave revolution had effected a free black state by 1800.[3] On 18 November 1803, Haiti became the first nation ever to successfully gain independence through a slave revolt. In the following years, Liberia was founded by free Africans from the United States. The emigration of African Americans both free and recently emancipated was funded and organized by the American Colonization Society (ACS), which hoped that slavery could be ended as an institution, without releasing millions of former slaves into American society.[1] The mortality rate of these settlers was high.[4][5] Of the 4,571 emigrants who arrived in Liberia between 1820 and 1843, only 1,819 survived.[6][7]
- ^ a b Sowell, Thomas (2005). Black rednecks and white liberals (1st ed.). San Francisco, Calif.: Encounter Books. p. 148. ISBN 1-59403-086-3. OCLC 57579375.
- ^ Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty, (Beacon Press, Boston, 2006); Graham Russell Hodges, Susan Hawkes Cook, Alan Edward Brown (eds), The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution (subscription required)
- ^ C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (Vintage Press, 1963) and Rosalind Wiggins, letters of Captain Paul Cuffee (Howard University Press, 1996).
- ^ McDaniel, Antonio (November 1992). "Extreme mortality in nineteenth-century Africa: the case of Liberian immigrants". Demography. 29 (4): 581–594. doi:10.2307/2061853. JSTOR 2061853. PMID 1483543. S2CID 46953564.
- ^ McDaniel, Antonio (April 1995). Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226557243.
- ^ Shick, Tom W. (January 1971). "A quantitative analysis of Liberian colonization from 1820 to 1843 with special reference to mortality". The Journal of African History. 12 (1): 45–59. doi:10.1017/S0021853700000062. PMID 11632218. S2CID 31153316.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Shick, Tom W. (1980). Behold the promised land: a history of Afro-American settler society in nineteenth-century Liberia. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801823091.