[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]
On a few layers to
the fraught founding of a West African settlement and nation.
On January 7th, 1822, a ship
carrying a small cohort of African Americans arrived at Cape Mesurado
on the West African coast, where they established a new settlement they named
Christopolis. The land on which they founded that settlement was part of a
60-mile area of the coastline that had been purchased
by the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization of white
Americans dedicated to the goal of both freeing enslaved African Americans and (especially,
as the organization’s name suggests) sending as many African Americans as
possible (those freed and those already free alike) “back to Africa.” One
of the most prominent supporters of that organization and goal was then-President
James Monroe, and two years later the burgeoning settlement would be renamed
Monrovia, and would become the capital of the new nation of Liberia (which
endures in West Africa to this day, with Monrovia
by far its most populous city).
The connection to
and support of none other than the President of the United States helps us
remember an important point: that the ACS connected to countless individuals
and threads in Early Republic America. It was only while researching “The
Star-Spangled Banner” for Of
Thee I Sing, for example, that I learned that the anthem’s author, the Maryland
lawyer Francis Scott Key, was a co-founder
of the ACS. As that last hyperlinked article notes, Key was also a lifelong
slave-owner—a status he inherited but also expanded upon by purchasing
enslaved people—and that detail illustrates another layer to the ACS: the
central role played by slave-owners in its founding and efforts. It’s true that
some of the ACS’s founding figures and most active members were Quaker
abolitionists who believed that African Americans had the best chance to
live full and happy lives outside of the United States. But many others, like
Key, were themselves slave-owners, pursuing colonization out of a combination
of anti-Black prejudice and (perhaps even more tellingly) practical fears of
slave revolts.
There’s no way
to separate the founding of Monrovia/Liberia from that organization and those
(at best) troubling views and goals. But neither should we limit our perspective
on the community and nation to the worst of those origins. After all, the
African American community in the United States began with enslavement and all
its attendant horrors; while we cannot forgot nor minimize all those histories
(both of which remain in danger of happening in our ongoing
education debates), no one would argue that they mean that all of African
American identity since is or should be defined solely or centrally by them. Moreover,
the settlers who founded Monrovia and Liberia were, whatever the fraught means
by which they arrived in that place, not enslaved, were instead a community of
free people establishing a city and nation that have survived and grown into
the 21st century. That’s an origin and history worth commemorating,
and indeed worth separating from the worst of those who played a part in those
histories.
Next anniversary
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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