1 Jan 1816 Jahr - American Colonization Society Founded

Beschreibung:

AKA: The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America

A group established in 1816 by Robert Finley of New Jersey to encourage and support the migration of free African Americans to the continent of Africa. In 1821–1822, the society helped to found settlements on the Pepper Coast of West Africa, as a place for free-born or manumitted (but not fugitive) American blacks. This was adjacent to Sierra Leone, the already existing British colony for former slaves and free blacks. Black activist James Forten immediately rejected the ACS, writing in 1817 that "we have no wish to separate from our present homes for any purpose whatever"

Many white people at first believed that the ACS had started out as a beneficent enterprise, with the goal of helping freed slaves, giving them opportunities they could not have in the U.S., and solving with kindness and creativity a major social problem. However, in the 1820s a reaction started forming to the ACS, which broke into open disdain and rebellion in the 1830s, as many of its former supporters concluded that they had been deceived: that the ACS, rather than being anti-slavery, was helping to preserve it.

While claiming to aid African Americans, in some cases, to stimulate emigration, it made conditions for them worse. For example, "the Society assumed the task of resuscitating the Ohio Black Codes of 1804 and 1807. ...Between 1,000 and 1,200 free blacks were forced from Cincinnati."

While "return to the continent you came from, where everyone is black" had an abstract appeal, in most cases American slaves had lived for generations in the United States, knew very little about Africa, and weren't very interested in it. Most were Christians. African-American leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William G. Allen, William Wells Brown, James Forten, and David Walker strongly opposed the colonization movement. To them, it respected slavery rather than calling for its abolition, and its biggest supporters, including most of its presidents, were Southern slave owners. They wanted to get rid of free blacks, many of whom had been in the United States for generations, because they were a threat to slaveowners' property (slaves), encouraging and assisting slaves to escape, and depressing their value. No one attempted to actually return slaves to the African regions they had come from, which would have been more expensive; Liberia was founded where it was because it was the closest available place in Africa, and therefore the cheapest African place to reach from the United States.

Tropical diseases were a major problem for the settlers, and the new immigrants to Liberia suffered the highest mortality rates since accurate record-keeping began. Of the 4,571 emigrants who arrived in Liberia between 1820 to 1843, only 1,819 were alive in 1843. This horrible reality was all but ignored by the ACS, which continued to send more free blacks.

The ACS was founded by groups otherwise opposed to each other on the issue of slavery, being a coalition made up mostly of evangelicals and Quakers who supported abolition of slavery and believed blacks would face better chances for freedom in Africa than in the United States — they were immigrants, anything but welcome in the North — and some slaveholders (in the Maryland branch and elsewhere) who believed that repatriation was a way to remove free blacks from slave societies and avoid slave rebellions. The two opposed groups found common ground in support of so-called "repatriation". By 1867, the ACS had assisted in the immigration of more than 13,000 Americans to Liberia.

After 1919, the society essentially ended, but it did not formally dissolve until 1964 when it transferred its papers to the Library of Congress.

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