Back-to-Africa Movement - The United States of America

The United States of America

In the early 19th century, the black population in the United States increased dramatically. Many of these African Americans were freed people seeking a better life. Many Southern freed blacks migrated to the industrial North to seek employment while others moved to surrounding Southern states. Their progress was sometimes met with hostility as many whites around that time were not used to so many blacks being free. Many did not believe that free Africans had a place in America and thought the very existence of free blacks undermined the system of slavery and encouraged slaves to revolt. In the North, whites feared that they would lose jobs to free African Americans, while other whites did not like the idea of blacks integrating with whites. Riots swept the nation in waves, usually in urban areas where there had been recent migration of blacks from the South. During the height of these riots in 1819, there were twenty five recorded riots, with many killed and injured. The back-to-Africa movement was seen as the solution to these problems.

The idea of a Back to Africa Movement, however, started long before 1848. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by Charles Fenton Mercer, was made up of two groups: "philanthropists, clergy and abolitionist who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to return to Africa. The other group was the slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America." In 1811, Paul Cuffee, "a black man who was a wealthy man of property, a petitioner for equal rights for blacks" began to explore the idea of black people returning to their native land as he was convinced that "opportunities for the advancement of for black people were limited in America, and he became interested in African colonization." With the help of some Quakers in Philadelphia he was able to transport thirty eight blacks to Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1815. It was the American Colonization Society, however, that made the most progress with the Back to Africa Movement.

According to the Encyclopedia of Georgia History and Culture, "as early as 1820, black Americans had begun to return to their ancestral homeland through the auspices of the American Colonization Society" and by 1847, the American Colonization Society founded Liberia and designated it as the land to be colonized by all black people returning from the United States of America. By the decline of the Back to Africa Movement, the American Colonization Society migrated over 13,000 blacks back to Africa.