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Emigration
By the 1840s, although the Negro convention and abolition movements grew more unified and influential, some black leaders despaired of African Americans achieving equality in America. "We have not addressed you as citizens—a term desired and ever cherished by us, because such you have never been," wrote Martin Delany, a free black who had been forced out of Harvard Medical School by whites and later became a major in the U.S. Army. Due to the "the improbability of realizing our desires, and the sure, practicable and infallible remedy for the evils we now endure," Delany and other leaders called for black emigration to Africa. In the first selection, we read the emigration plans and justifications proposed by Delany in 1852 and Henry Highland Garnet in 1848, followed by the equally ardent opposition to their stands on the "destiny of the colored race." (Delany never moved to Liberia. Garnet died in 1881 two months after his arrival.)
Similar and equally controversial proposals were presented for emigration to the Caribbean island of Haiti, and among the supporters was former slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown, whose narrative is excerpted in several sections of this Toolbox. The arguments presented by Brown and other black leaders, especially in the pro-emigration newspaper Pine and Palm, are excerpted in the second selection.
Emigration proposals were rejected by most African Americans, especially the "colonization" plans proposed and implemented by white abolitionist leaders. (For editorials opposing colonization in the Colored American, see Theme III: COMMUNITY, #6: The Black Press.) The third selection samples the anti-colonization response from African Americans, encapsulated by the phrase "We are Americans." (xx pages.)
Discussion questions
- What factors convinced Delany and Garnet (who had once opposed emigration) that Africa was the only home for African Americans?
- What primary rebuttals were given against their position?
- How did the Africa and Haiti emigration debates differ? How were they similar?
- If the former slaves interviewed in the 1930s had been aware of the debate of the 1840s, when most were still enslaved in the South, what responses might they have had?
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Framing Questions
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How did African Americans construct identity in antebellum America? |
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How did enslaved and free blacks differ in their exercise of power and self-determination?
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How did African Americans define themselves as members of groups?
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Printing
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Supplemental Sites
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Images:
-Henry Highland Garnet, colored engraving (?), n.d. Reproduced by permission of the New York Public Library.
-Martin Robison Delany, illustration in Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, ed. Rev. William J. Simmons, Cleveland: 1887. Reproduced by permission of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
-William Wells Brown, frontispiece of Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave, 1849. Reproduced by permission of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
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