LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

limited opportunities for black economic advancement posed a serious dilemma” for Russwurm. Liberia, while tainted by the antiblack views held by many ACS members, still had potential. However, Russwurm was well aware that the decision to leave America for Liberia meant the loss of his esteem among black leaders in the United States. In the eyes of free blacks whose respect he had earned, he was abandoning not only America but also the community that had acknowledged his leadership. Soon, James Forten and others would claim that Russwurm’s support for colonization would add credence to the view of some white state officials that the colonization of free blacks in Liberia remained a viable and desirable plan.¹¹⁵

      The African American–led Haitian emigration movement of the 1820s illustrates several crucial points about early anticolonization agitation. First, it pioneered a tradition of African American internationalism as a feature of the struggle for black rights in the United States and against African colonization. Second, it showed the ACS that those few thousand blacks who wanted to leave had shown a preference for Haiti over Liberia. Through this Haitian emigration movement, black Americans forged a transnational alliance with venerated abolitionists willing to lend support. For the next three decades, black Americans would travel to Britain for a variety of causes, seeking support in their attempt to demonstrate that African-descended people were as capable as Europeans of building a great nation. This nation-building project sought to undermine one of the chief justifications—that is, black inferiority—for maintaining slavery in the U.S. South.

      The Haitian emigration movement also highlighted how far blacks would go to attain citizenship and live in a place where racial prejudice was not the central obstacle to personal advancement. While those free blacks who remained in America continued to fight against racial inequality, those who left for Haiti hoped they had finally found a way to transcend it. Over the next three decades, African American community leaders, activists, and journalists continued to regard the first black republic as a symbol of African-descended people’s potential, a symbol particularly potent for black Americans struggling against slavery and for equality in a nation that questioned their humanity and whether they had the prerequisite abilities ever to contribute to the nation equally with whites. Even for those with no intention of leaving for Haiti, the Caribbean nation continued to be a point of reference in their struggle for equal rights and against white supremacy in the United States.

      Although African Americans and white antislavery advocates failed to initiate a widespread movement to Haiti, the movement did present an alternative to colonization in Africa. When recruiters spoke in churches and halls to discuss the benefits of emigration to Haiti, they used this as an opportunity to condemn Liberia and to argue that the American Colonization Society posed a serious threat to black advancement in the United States. In a way, the Haitian emigration movement spread anticolonization ideology due in large part to the advocacy of its chief promoters, men such as Prince Saunders.

      However, the American Colonization Society would not give up in the face of this concerted challenge to their African project. When it came down to it, the ACS had the resources to provide a better alternative for black Americans who wanted to leave. John Russwurm remained the pro–Haitian emigration contingent’s greatest loss. Having spoken of Haiti in glorious terms, and having actually tried to raise funds for those who sought to leave for Haiti, John Russwurm chose instead to “quit America” and sail for Monrovia, Liberia, in the fall of 1829. This was obviously a major blow to anticolonizationists.

      Just as the Haitian emigration movement died out, a new brand of antislavery activism took root throughout the North. By the end of 1820, the majority of the American Convention’s antislavery activist members had come to embrace colonization. Yet a new sort of antislavery advocate emerged, making the anticolonization sentiments widely held in black communities throughout the nation a cornerstone of their ideology. These men and women heeded the argument that ending slavery was not enough. As David Walker explained in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, those who battled against slavery needed also to combat the “wretchedness in consequence of the colonizing plan” if they hoped for justice and equality in the United States. Soon the man most associated with the “immediatist” strain of antislavery advocacy, William Lloyd Garrison, would work to organize a regional and national antislavery society that called for the immediate end to slavery, equality for black Americans, and the destruction of the American Colonization Society.¹¹⁶

      2. “One of the Wildest Projects Ever”: Abolitionists and the Anticolonizationist Impulse, 1830–1840

      In February of 1833, Maria Stewart stood before a group of people gathered at the African Masonic Hall in Boston to condemn the ACS for its goal of “influencing us to go to Liberia.” Rather than donate money to fund black colonization in Liberia, these “real friends” of African Americans, Stewart urged, should use those funds “which they collect, in erecting a college to educate her injured ones in this land.” Stewart explained that the colonization movement was siphoning off funds to educate and care for free blacks in the North, while doing little to change the circumstances in this country that stifled black progress. “The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved land,” she argued, and then brought Africans to America, “made them bond-men and bond-women,” and now sought to “drive us to a strange land.” It is for this reason, as Stewart explained, that “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.”¹

      This was not the first time Stewart lectured on colonization, marshaling various arguments that were common among anticolonizationists in the early 1830s. Through these lectures Stewart demonstrated her intellectual merit, poetic gift, and ability to analyze the contradictions she found central to colonization ideology, which she also had published in the Liberator. “I observed a piece in The Liberator a few months since,” she explained, “stating that the colonizationists had published a work respecting us, asserting that we were lazy and idle.” This was simply untrue, she explained. Even if there were some in Boston “who never were and never will be serviceable to society,” she asked, “have you not a similar class yourselves?”² If whites had been placed under the burden of racial prejudice and slavery, they too would struggle to display qualities associated with Christian virtue and social respectability. This was not about African depravity, Stewart explained; this was about education and uplift.³

      From the Mid-Atlantic to New England, African Americans gathered in churches, halls, and public spaces to express their disapproval of the views of the ACS. In January 1831, for example, black leaders in New York City called a meeting in Prince Hall Mason’s Boyer Lodge (named after Jean-Pierre Boyer, the fourth president of Haiti) to express their outrage at the “proceedings of an association under the title, ‘New-York Colonization Society.’” Those in attendance condemned the organization for “vilifying us” and attempting to promulgate the notion that blacks represented a “difference of species.” Such notions were unfounded, they argued, because “Our structure and organization are the same, and not distinct from other men.” With this in mind, the group claimed to be “content to abide where we are,” rather than leave for Liberia as wards of the ACS. Although colonizationists attempted to convince the general public in the United States and Britain that racial distinctions presented an intractable barrier to free blacks seeking acceptance in American society, African Americans in New York asserted, “We do not believe that things will always continue the same,” arguing that the day would come when black Americans would be vindicated, and “when the rights of all shall be properly acknowledged and appreciated.”⁴

      As the antislavery movement shifted toward immediate abolition, black American leaders convinced white abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, that colonization undermined both the cause of ending slavery and free blacks’ efforts to gain rights in the North. Most importantly, Stewart showed, colonization became linked to antiblack policies, race riots, and employment discrimination in the states where slavery had been outlawed. Unfortunately for black abolitionists and anticolonizationists, white abolitionists often shared the same racialist attitudes as those most hostile to the cause, and the movement to end slavery needed to be linked with a movement for black equality and citizenship in the North.⁵ For this reason African Americans who worked against slavery and

Скачать книгу