Leaving Home

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leaving Home ◽  
New Developments ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Back To Africa

In late 1852, twenty-four year old Church Vaughan boarded a ship bound for Liberia. The vessel had been chartered by the American Colonization Society, an organization founded by white philanthropists and politicians to send African Americans “back” to Africa. As this chapter details, the Society’s mission and efforts were fraught with racist condescension. Since its beginning, African Americans and their allies were repelled by the white supremacy inherent in the Society’s mission and its kowtowing to slaveholders, and relatively few enrolled in the emigration scheme. By the early 1850s, however, new developments pushed increasing numbers of African Americans, like Vaughan, to look toward the continent of their ancestors. As sectional divisions tore at the United States, southern politicians devised new laws to limit free black people’s mobility, inhibit their ability to make a living, and generally equate them with slaves. As Church reached adulthood, predatory officials threatened his family’s livelihood, while the old ties of patronage that had protected them in an earlier era disappeared. Even if emigration did offer a chance for a new life where black people governed themselves, it was a hard bargain to make. This chapter includes an account of some of Church Vaughan’s Liberia-bound shipmates, who chose to leave the United States only under terrible duress. Church Vaughan almost did not leave either.

The Optics of Liberian Emigration

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.

Slavery and the Troublesome Question

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-13
Author(s):  
Susan E. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Freed Slaves

Chapter 2 establishes the background and context for the colonization movement, examines motives of supporters and opponents, and examines the establishment of the Liberian colony. For ninety-three years, the American Colonization Society supports emigration of freed slaves and freeborn black people from the United States to Liberia, ultimately transporting 16,000 people across the ocean. It is the largest out-migration in American history.

William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Welch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The Law ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Case Basis

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

The Great Migrations and Black Urban Life in the United States, 1914–1970

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyina Steptoe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Agricultural Areas

During the 20th century, the black population of the United States transitioned from largely rural to mostly urban. In the early 1900s the majority of African Americans lived in rural, agricultural areas. Depictions of black people in popular culture often focused on pastoral settings, like the cotton fields of the rural South. But a dramatic shift occurred during the Great Migrations (1914–1930 and 1941–1970) when millions of rural black southerners relocated to US cities. Motivated by economic opportunities in urban industrial areas during World Wars I and II, African Americans opted to move to southern cities as well as to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. New communities emerged that contained black social and cultural institutions, and musical and literary expressions flourished. Black migrants who left the South exercised voting rights, sending the first black representatives to Congress in the 20th century. Migrants often referred to themselves as “New Negroes,” pointing to their social, political, and cultural achievements, as well as their use of armed self-defense during violent racial confrontations, as evidence of their new stance on race.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

It Looks Much Like Abandoned Land

2018 ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Property A ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Abandoned Land ◽  
The Many

This chapter examines the many ways in which loyalty became part of a struggle for property, a struggle that would have profound consequences for the shape of Reconstruction in the Mississippi Valley. The chapter examines how state-sponsored emancipation worked in lockstep with the wartime seizure of property to create an environment within which loyalty to the United States gave worthy individuals claim to their possessions and left disloyal traitors with the flimsiest of holds over their land, their homes, and the black laborers many once owned. African Americans seized on the language of loyalty to claim a meaningful freedom for themselves and knit their families together again. The twinned power of allegiance and property nearly proved the undoing of white supremacy in the state. In the claims and counterclaims of black and white alike, what emerged was potentially the most radical edge of American emancipation: a bold attempt to give to former slaves the property of their disloyal former owners. In this, the collective stepping back from the most revolutionary of Reconstruction measures also spelled the slow erosion of loyalty, leaving former slaves without the means to claim anything more than political rights.

Conclusion

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
African American Religion

African Americans are generally more religious than other groups in the United States. But African American religion is much more than a description of how deeply religious African Americans are. The phrase helps to differentiate a particular set of religious practices from others that are invested in whiteness; it invokes a particular cultural inheritance that marks the unique journey of African Americans in the United States. African American religion is rooted in the sociopolitical realities that shape the experiences of black people in America, but this is not static or fixed. The ‘Conclusion’ suggests that African American religious life remains a powerful site for creative imaginings in a world still organized by race.

Liberty Brought Us Here

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
True Story ◽  
Nonfiction Book ◽  
The People ◽  
The Republic

Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia is a narrative nonfiction book that tells the compelling story of four adults and twelve children from southwestern Kentucky who, after being freed from slavery, migrated to Liberia. It is also the tale of Ben Major, the white man who freed them. The Majors and their former neighbors, the Harlans, were sixteen of the 16,000 black people who left the United States under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. It was the largest out-migration in the country’s history. The emigrants were of African ancestry, but they were not Africans, and were unprepared for the deprivation, disease, and disasters that awaited them. Unlike many former slave owners, Ben stayed in touch with the people he had freed. He sent them much-needed items, such as seeds, tools, books, medicine, and other supplies to help them survive and flourish. In return, they sent coffee, peanuts, and other items to Ben. Liberty Brought Us Here explores this unusual relationship between former slaves and their former owner in the context of the debate over slavery, the controversial colonization movement, and the establishment of the Republic of Liberia.

scholarly journals Afrocentrism and the Peopling of the Americas

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Gabriel Haslip-Viera
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Peopling Of The Americas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This essay focuses on a theory of human development that has been promoted aggressively by a group of Afrocentrists in recent years - that the Western Hemisphere was first populated by “Africoids” or “Black” people who came to the Americas by way of Asia and the Bering Straits with little or no change in their physical or racial characteristics. As discussed in this article, the theory has no support in the evidence collected by scientists in various fields. The essay focuses on the basic claims and methods used by the Afrocentrists to support their theory, including their misuse or misinterpretation of mostly outdated scholarship produced in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A brief concluding section makes reference to the potential repercussions of this theory on relations between African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos of Native American and part Native American background.

A Prudent Alternative or a Dangerous Diversion?

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-317
Author(s):  
Paul J. Polgar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Direct Threat

The emergence of colonization as a potential antislavery tool drove a wedge between competing factions among abolition societies. a long and at times divisive debate that fractured the abolition societies and signaled the rising influence of colonization among white reformers as an answer to ending slavery. With their claims to American citizenship under direct threat from the ideology of the American Colonization Society, black abolitionists more readily distinguished colonization from emancipation. People of color and the abolition societies of the Mid-Atlantic had jointly discredited the ACS soon after its founding. But by the beginning of the 1830s, it was black activists who had become the foremost champions of first movement abolitionist values, advancing the cause of combating slavery by overturning white prejudice and improving the condition of African Americans within the United States.

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