Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 53

Efforts to move Africans and people of African descent in the United States back to Africa began in the early part of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. Fostered by news and rumors of planned revolts, white Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to see free black people and newly freed slaves as a problem. Some white Americans believed, as did many African Americans, that black people could not achieve equality in the United States. While the majority of free African American leaders in the nineteenth century were against a movement back to Africa—also known as colonization—there were some African Americans in favor of emigration and the establishment of a new black homeland. The most prominent advocate of these efforts in the early nineteenth century was Paul Cuffe. A wealthy businessman, Cuffe transported 38 Africans from the United States to Liberia. In 1817 he met with an untimely death; this was the same year the American Colonization Society was established. This society was established by white Americans in an effort to solve the “problem” of the free black presence through the establishment of a Liberian settlement. The most well-known champion of the back to Africa movement was black nationalist Marcus Garvey, a twentieth-century advocate. Garvey, like other proponents of the back to Africa movement, believed black people could not achieve equality in the United States. He claimed that all people should have their own homeland, and Africa belonged to black people. He hoped that his organizations, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Star Shipping Line, would help to make the dream of a mass emigration to Africa possible. However, once deported from the United States, his plans for the movement were never realized.

Rebecca S. Dixon