The Exodus from the United States
Meanwhile, as the final years of slavery in the United States approached, debates about relocating the future freed populations outside the United States persisted. In December 1861, during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln presented his first annual message as the sixteenth president of the United States to the US Senate and House of Representatives, he again evoked the possible acquisition of foreign territory to relocate the future freed population of the United States.
As it envisioned the end of slavery, the US government considered relocating free and freed Black populations, including enslaved people who had escaped from their Confederate owners to join the Union Army, in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, present-day Panama, Haiti, and Liberia. In their plans, US authorities even included Brazil.74 Confederate supporters such as Matthew Fontaine Maury promoted the project of creating a slaveholding colony in Amazonia, an enterprise that would allow slave owners to transport their human property to Brazil, while at the same time contributing to a decrease in the US Black population.75 Except for Haiti and Liberia, freedpeople from the United States never emigrated to most of these destinations. Only about 150 Black people based in Washington, DC, left from Alexandria, Virginia, to relocate in Haiti in June 1862.After the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, other waves of formerly enslaved people migrated to Liberia and other regions of West Africa as well. As freedpeople’s expectations to have access to land ownership and full citizenship in the United States gradually disappeared with the end of Reconstruction at the end of the nineteenth century, new projects to settle African Americans in exclusively Black territories within the United States and emigration to Africa reemerged.
Existing estimates suggest that between 1820 and 1867, the American Colonization Society relocated ten thousand to twelve thousand Black men, women, and children from the United States in Liberia.76After the closure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872 and the unfulfilled promise of land redistribution to freedpeople, Benjamin Singleton, a freedman from Tennessee, founded a company to acquire public land in Kansas, where he relocated thousands of African Americans between 1873 and 1881. But as racial hatred and suppression of civil rights continued to grow in the country in the following years, Singleton shifted to support the emigration of African Americans to Canada and Liberia. Echoing the ideals of such leaders as Henry McNeal Turner, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who advocated for relocation to Africa as the only solution for African Americans to escape racism and racial hatred, Singleton and his followers founded the United Transatlantic Society in 1885, with the goal of relocating African Americans to Africa. Yet, this initiative was not successful.77
The persisting hostility against Black Americans and segregation in the United States propelled the revival of new movements back to Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century through the leadership of Jamaican-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey.78 Although Garvey’s father was born during the apprenticeship period in Jamaica, his grandfather was an enslaved man.79 Garvey was already invested in becoming a political leader and orator in his twenties. By 1910, he moved to Costa Rica, where he worked for a small newspaper. During this period abroad, he also spent time in Belize, Honduras, and Panama before moving to Britain. Upon his return to Jamaica in 1914, Garvey cofounded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) along with Amy Ashwood, who also served as the organization’s first secretary and later became his first wife.80
By that time of UNIA’s creation, Garvey had been in contact with Booker T. Washington, with whom he discussed the possible creation of an industrial and agricultural school in Jamaica based on the model of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
In 1916, Garvey moved to the United States. He incorporated UNIA in New York City in 1918. But he quickly understood that his plans of uplifting Black people through professionalization as promoted by Washington would face great obstacles. Garvey arrived in the United States during the First World War and in an era of European colonial rule on most of the African continent. During the war, African American soldiers who had served in segregated units migrated to urban centers. But despite their role in the war, Black Americans continued to experience political and economic exclusion. Whether in the North or the South, anti-Black racism, segregation, and disenfranchisement not only persisted but continued to increase. In the United States, African Americans were denied the same civil rights and economic opportunities available to white Americans, and Black integration into white American society continued to be illusory.As Black and white integration remained out of reach, Garvey became the foremost advocate of Black nationalism. Promoting a program focusing on the empowerment of populations of African descent in the United States and in the African diaspora, Garvey advanced the Back to Africa movement as the response to the exclusion and racial violence faced by Black populations in the Americas. Most of UNIA’s chapters were in the United States, but there were also dozens of chapters in Canada, Central America, the West Indies, and English-speaking colonies in Africa. According to Garvey, at its peak UNIA attracted eleven million members worldwide, and even according to his own enemies, membership grew into the hundreds of thousands.81
Through UNIA’s auspices, Garvey led several initiatives, including the newspaper Negro World and the Universal Printing House. Moreover, he created the Black Star Line, a steamship company that facilitated commercial exchanges between Black populations in the United States, the West Indies, and Africa. Unlike previous organizations that promoted emigration to Africa, UNIA’s scope was transnational.
Garvey called the sons of Africa to return to the motherland, where he hoped that through UNIA’s initiative it would be possible to establish a Black territory in West Africa. His words also resonated among Africans who sought to liberate themselves from European rule.82 Consequently, because his ideas basically challenged colonialism, Garvey himself was never able to set foot in Africa.83 In the United States, he faced enormous opposition, was sent to prison over charges of fraud, and was eventually deported to Jamaica in 1927. Ultimately, despite being the largest Black mass movement of the early twentieth century, UNIA’s project to resettle its members in an African territory was unsuccessful.The Atlantic slave trade tragically intensified the connections among the shores of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Through this horrendous trade, enslaved Africans were forcibly transported from Africa to the Americas. Still, since the inception of this hideous trade, and regardless of their status as enslaved, freed, or free, Africans and their descendants traveled back and forth between the Americas and Africa. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic revolutions led to the long process of gradual emancipation. But white slaveholding elites could not envision a society in which Black and white populations lived together and thus planned the relocation of future freed populations outside the territories of British colonies in the Americas. But those plans were also never fully achieved.