Colonization Movement, African

Colonization Movement, African. Efforts to colonize African Americans to Africa began at the time of the Revolutionary War. In 1777, the Virginia legislature discussed Thomas Jefferson's proposal for the colonization of the state's free blacks. Proponents of colonization represented diverse interest groups, including blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, as well as proslavery advocates and antislavery leaders. Some colonization supporters believed that whites and African Americans could never live together peacefully in the United States and that African Americans should therefore return to Africa. A number ofslavery's advocates wished to relocate the southern free black population to Africa in order to create a southern society comprised exclusively of enslaved blacks and free whites. Some abolitionists supported the movement because they believed that colonization would result in the gradual emancipation of slaves by proving that African Americans were self‐reliant. Other colonization supporters argued that American blacks could go to Africa to spread the gospel as Christian missionaries.

The founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 by Robert Finley, a white clergyman, institutionalized the colonization effort. Finley wished to settle free blacks in Africa and hoped that colonization would hasten the end of slavery. The society garnered the support of prominent slaveowners eager to remove the free black population. At the same time, most free blacks opposed this movement, fearing that it would result in widespread deportation of free people of color. In 1822, the ACS founded a colony in Liberia on Africa's west coast, it attracted more than ten thousand colonists before 1865. The ACS appointed Liberia's agents and governors until the colony gained independence in 1847.

Interest in colonization among blacks increased with passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 as fears of kidnapping and enslavement escalated in northern states. Martin R. Delany (1812–1885), a northern black leader, developed his own colonization effort in the 1850s, arguing that African Americans could never attain equality in the United States. Delany hoped to create a self‐reliant nation along the African coast where free American blacks would farm their own land and establish trading networks. In spite of Delany's advocacy, most free blacks continued to oppose colonization. Frederick Douglass, a prominent African American leader, resisted colonization because he believed that blacks could eventually achieve equality with whites. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison also rejected the colonization effort, agitating instead for the immediate emancipation of American slaves. President Abraham Lincoln proposed a plan for the colonization of contraband slaves who fled to Union Army camps during the Civil War.

The postwar passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing African Americans' freedom and citizenship and granting African American men the vote, ended any widespread attempts to colonize American blacks. Colonization schemes were promoted in the 1890s by Bishop Henry M. Turner (1834–1915) of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and in the 1920s by the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, but without notable success.
See also Antebellum Era; Black Nationalism; Early Republic, Era of the; Missionary Movement.

Bibliography

P.J. Staundenraus , The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865, 1961.
Floyd John Miller , The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863, 1975.

Jane E. Dabel