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3 - Black Americans in West Africa

from Part I - Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Leigh A. Gardner
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

This chapter builds on the discussion of migration and trade from the previous chapter. It brings together for the first time a comprehensive dataset of individual-level data on the freed slaves from the United States who migrated to Liberia, and compares the migrants to other African-American communities in the nineteenth century. Options for moving out of the US south were limited even for freeborn African Americans during the decades before the Great Migration of the interwar period. Many sought locations outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States, migrating overseas to places like Haiti or Liberia or overland to what was then Indian Territory or Mexico. This chapter shows the changing composition of the migrants in terms of education and skill level over time, and illustrates how this contributed to economic inequalities and political cleavages within the Americo-Liberian community.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sovereignty without Power
Liberia in the Age of Empires, 1822–1980
, pp. 58 - 90
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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